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Note that institutions are shorter lived than one might think. If you have become 25 this year, you'll have lived for more than 10% of the US's entire lifetime.
by est31 6y ago
Note that institutions are shorter lived than one might think. If you have become 25 this year, you'll have lived for more than 10% of the US's entire lifetime. 75, and you'll have lived for a third of its existence.
Those institutions which are longer lived are usually subject to tons of change. Think of the imperial Chinese system with its many dynasties or the church with its schisms. And despite behaviourally modern humans having lived on this planet for tens of thousands of years, thousands of generations, you won't find any institution that has survived longer than a few hundred generations.
- tzs 6y ago> Note that institutions are shorter lived than one might think. If you have become 25 this year, you'll have lived for more than 10% of the US's entire lifetime. 75, and you'll have lived for a third of its existence. Note also that the US has one of the longest lived current governments in the world. There are plenty of countries that have been around longer, but most of them have forms of government that came into effect there later than when the US got its current form of government.
- beiz 6y agothere is the icelandic althing which has been around since 930. but as per your point, no matter what, growth and change is necessary for the survival of an institution - especially one determined to last.
- dandanua 6y agoInstitutions may change their form, but not their purpose. For example, in USSR the judicial system was basically a tool to justify decisions of prosecutors and party leaders. Nowadays the judicial system of the Post-Soviet countries remains the same. It's a servant of the current political elite.
- mlthoughts2018 6y agoI don’t know if that’s a great example because that just seems like all judicial systems across all of human history. The protoconcept of judicial process probably arose from subsistence farmer communities needing a way to hypocritically expel or kill people who did not conform to religious decrees, but without losing any social status, and in fact gaining social status by association with the judicial system. What we have today is a tiny, tiny, tiny modification of that, where our savanna-adapted meat brains put in accoutrements of due process and fair trials, but it’s all just for show so that political elites can say one thing (freedom, due process, fairness) but do another (court packing, systemic racism, regulatory capture, corporate shilling).
- gman83 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_institutions_in_continuous_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_institutions_in...