Why do people still have faith in inverted institutions?
Why, that is, do people still assume - and live on the basis that - institutions/ organizations/ corporations/ nations of 2026; retain the same basic motivations and nature as they did 100 - or even fifty - years ago?
Why don't people realize (and operate on the basis that) these institutions are (in almost all cases) long since subverted, corrupted, and substantially inverted in their basic quality?
My own experience of this reluctance to recognize fundamental change was that - due both to upbringing and ideals - I had a faith and hope in universities and science (among other types of institution I "believed-in" - but these were perhaps the main ones).
It took a long time before I recognized that these had changed their nature, ceased to strive for what they used-to strive-for; and were not going to reform - because the large majority people in them - and virtually all the leadership - did not want to reform. The large majority preferred the institutions to be corrupt; that is - to be subsidiaries of the single, generic totalitarian-left bureaucracy that controls the UK (and all other "Western" ex-nations).
The original functionally-motivated people who pursued scientific truth and scholarship had been replaced by bureaucrats and careerists - and the politically-motivated.
But for quite a while I carried on "believing" in the institutions; even though I realized that it was only me (and, at most, a handful of others - a tiny minority) who were carrying what I regarded as the spirit of the "true" institutions: the spirit of science, the spirit of universities.
At first I had a quasi-magical belief, and hope, that my own faithfulness to the older nature and motives was keeping-alive the - otherwise lost, otherwise actually opposed - spirit of the ancient and original institutions of science and universities.
Here, I don't intend "quasi-magical" to be utterly dismissive, but to recognize that mine was a covert recognition that in the material realm the institutions was lost, was gone - and that the "spirit" of the institution was now something that lived only in the mind; and only in the minds of a relatively very-few persons...
And then I realized that - this being the case - the actual material institutions of science and universities - the professional career and educational structures, building, money, writings, conferences... the bureaucratic systems - all of these had become obsolete, unnecessary - in fact hostile to the ideal.
In sum; the act of recognising a distinction between the spiritual and physical institutions - which was necessary in order to believe-in them - implied the irrelevance and counter-productive nature of the actually-existing 2026 institutions.
To be true to "the spirit" and to resist short-termism, materialism, subordination to alien and hostile agendas; I needed to rely on my own discernment in choosing goals, selecting evidence and proof, in evaluating quality.
I needed to rely on myself (and the sources I had chosen) in determining what and who was true to the spirit - and what or who was indifferent or hostile.
Yet; if I, as an individual, could locate and sustain the spirit of science or academia - and if, indeed, it needed me as an individual to do so in the face of at first institutional indifference, then active institutional hostility...
Then the institution itself - actual universities, the actual structures of science - had become first obsolete, then irrelevant, then an enemy of the ideals they had once (albeit imperfectly) incorporated.
Because of corruption and inversion, a wedge needed to be driven between myself and the institution; and that wedge drove the person and the institution ever-further apart.
What applied to universities and science applies also, and more importantly, to Christian churches.
Insofar as we depend upon our-selves to sustain the true spirit of Christianity against the indifference/ hostility of an actual church; insofar as we must divide the actual church into a material-organizational corrupt part on one side, and a spiritual-mystical "true" part on the other side.
Then exactly this activity and necessity implies - indeed entails - that we as individuals (and not any actual church) have become discerners, discoverers, and carriers of Christian truth.
Churches have become first feeble, then irrelevant, now mostly hostile to the reality of Christianity.
So it is up to us - each of us - as individuals; or many small handfuls of the like-minded.
The age of "good" institutions is dead and gone - and this inversion has been (by the majority) unlamented and indeed even celebrated.
It's about time, overdue, that Christians ceased evasive optimism and recognized the actuality.