In which I unfortunately never answer the question: shall we fuckin' smash the institutions?

I spend a lot of time wondering what we should do given all the shit that's happening/that's been happening/that is going to keep happening. (Spoiler alert: this post does not offer an answer to this question sry, but I think the conclusion I come to is important anyway).

It's hard not to feel helpless with everything that stops us from doing something: the unrepresentative Senate, the Biden administration in particular, Democrat politicians generally, Republicans generally, the Council of Prophets/Supreme Court, &c.--that is, all of the institutions that mediate between the people and the government.

It's depressing trying to figure out what to do with all of that! It's too much. I don't even really know how to get the answer.

So instead I'm wondering what it is we should think about institutions from a more philosophical standpoint. Why do we have them? Prudence aside, can we just, like, smash them if we want to?

Put another way: what duty do we have to the State as it's currently constituted? Am I morally obligated to preserve the State, either generally or specifically?

And like, the next question that occurs to me is: is there even something that exists to which we can even have duties? Does the State even exist???

First, I guess it depends on what's meant by "existence" here. If existence just means: are there a bunch of things, people, concepts, &c. which, taken together, we call "the State"? Then, yeah okay. But, that seems flimsy metaphysical ground for something that's owed a moral duty.

(Maybe I should defend the existence of moral duties? But I don't feel like it. I believe they exist, so that's just where I'm going to leave that for now.)

Okay. But, like, does the State exist exist? 

Here are the two reasons I can think of that you might say it does:

Existence is some kind of mysterious emergent property that instantiates on top of all of the things that we call the State. Maybe: The United States of America exists because we believe it does. Or something like that.

God, for our benefit, ordained that there be States.

I have a degree of sympathy for (1), weird and mystical though it may be. I kinda like this sort of Spooky Nominalism. (I'm sure there's a real philosophical term for this, and that there are all kinds of better explanations for what it is and how it works and all that, but whatever: Spooky Nominalism.) But it seems unlikely. Unfortunately.

There are lots of arguments for (2), and it's basically the Traditional Position (though, again, there are all kinds of much more rigorous, technical, and boring ways of talking about it). If you had asked me ten years ago what I thought, I probably would have said something like this.

But I don't really buy it any more, even though I'm still a theist. (I could explain why I don't think a rejection of (2) is inconsistent with theism, but that's a different and more boring blog post.) And anyway, accepting (2) means having a different set of foundational beliefs about the building blocks of politics than most of the rest of the people I want to be doing politics these days, which feels like a non-starter for me at this point.

Okay! Therefore, no: the State does not exist.

And therefore, there is no State that exists such that we can have moral duties to it.

(I guess we should pause to consider whether we can have moral duties to something that doesn't exist, but I can't really think of how that would work.)

Right, so, I don't owe any duty of obedience to the State. I don't owe the State any duty to preserve it or its constitution. So, then: can we fuckin' smash the institutions???

Maybe! But I think my next question is actually: perhaps there are no duties owed to the State, but does that mean there are no political duties at all?

And I think the answer is actually that there still are: There are duties that we owe each other.

So yeah, maybe we smash the institutions! And in fact, maybe our duties to each other demand that we smash the institutions! But also maybe our duties to each other demand that we preserve them. I think it's at least plausible that maintenance of the existing political system is the best way to fulfill those duties.

This doesn't really help me answer any of the questions I set out with, but I feel like there's something important in the conclusion anyway: Politics have to be fundamentally grounded in the duties that we owe each other. That still feels powerful to me! That feels like it's at least a starting point.