There are many contenders for the award of humanity’s greatest achievement. Some say its writing. Others say its agriculture. Electricity, space travel, and human rights are also possibilities. I disagree with them all.
It’s not that I don’t like writing, agriculture, human rights, and all the rest. They’re fab. It’s just that I think the greatest thing we humans ever did was figure out how to form ourselves into organizations. My vote goes to the weird and wonderful social structures we humans build to get more or less complicated stuff done, from launching spaceships to brewing craft beer.
Nothing really happens in the world without organizations. We enter the world in an organized way, with the help of hospitals and maternity wards. We also leave the world in an organized way, with the help of funeral homes and religious ceremonies. Everything in between is stuffed full of organizations of every kind imaginable—schools, universities, social clubs, gossip groups, government agencies, banks, tech companies, and so on. Even the time I set my alarm in the morning involves an organization. I don’t want to be up at seven, but the organization I work for starts early, so I fit in with that. It seems only fair.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that many of the things touted as our greatest achievements are intimately linked to organizations—even writing. In fact, especially writing, which was developed out of arithmetical techniques used in record keeping. The point here is that we figured out how to write, not to record the intricate beauty of human life, but to better process, store, and manage information. It is precisely because of organizations that our oldest written document is a list of ‘goods received’ at a brewery, not a love letter from some long-lost beau.
This might feel a touch tragic, but it says something very profound about what it is to be human. Most obviously, that we’ve always had a predilection for booze—but more importantly, that fundamentally we’re an organized species. It’s who we are. Humans build organizations, of all sorts of different shapes and sizes, and for all sorts of different reasons.
At some points in our history our capacity to build organizations has been really quite impressive. At other times, less so—the demise of the Roman Empire was a particularly dark period. The organizations we have today are arguably the most impressive that have ever existed—they’re incredibly complex and productive. The very biggest, like the UK’s National Health Service, have upwards of a million people in them. Some, like the US Department of Defense, have more than twice that, and they’re literally reshaping the world we live in right before our very eyes.
Yet, most of the organizations we have today have distinctly ancient origins. They’re not old, as such, but they’re based on some pretty ancient innovations. For example, bureaucracy can be tracked back to the invention of writing, while the concept of organizing for the ‘public good’ similarly dates back millennia. At the very least to a 5,000-year-old chain of left-luggage offices in Syria’s Balikh River valley.
State-run bureaucracies like the ones governments use to collect taxes today are basically a Chinese invention. The Qin Empire (c.220 BCE) gave us large large-scale public administration, as well as the concept of an HR department and entrance exams.
The corporation was invented by the Romans, where it was at least partly responsible for the meteoric rise and fall of their empire. Did you know that pretty much all the ancient Roman monuments we goggle over today (and indeed many of Europe’s major roads) were built by corporations under contracts from the Roman state?
Even the founding principles of the industrial revolution are not that new. Modern factories and the idea of mass-produced, standardized products can trace their linage back at least 4,000 years to the Harappans of the Indus River valley.
Of course, another part of the story of human organization is that most people in the world do not actually work in mainstream, ‘formal’ organizations. The truth is that most people on this planet will never hold a contract of employment in organization of any kind—they’ll work informally, in shadow factories and on pop-up market stalls. Indeed, a significant number will work in organizations that are explicitly banned in the countries they live in—they’ll work in criminal organizations, like the Japanese Yakuza or the Italian ‘Ndrangheta.
The point is that there are an infinite variety of different organizations out there, all doing different things in different ways. Sure, some of them aren’t that great, but the rest have done some pretty awesome things—like codify and disseminate the concept of human rights, put people into space, and build computers capable of outthinking us. Organizations define the world we live in, and they reflect the best and worst of what humanity is capable of.
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