Humans have a tendency to get institutionalized. i.e. to get used to a way of things, e.g., prisoners sentenced for life at a young age get institutionalized to life in a prison and when offered parole at a later age, find it painfully difficult to live a life of freedom. This is also the reason old people find it very hard to migrate to a different house, city, or a country.

We not only get institutionalized about our environment, but also our way of seeing things and thinking about things.

One particular pattern of getting institutionalized is when a not-so-good system helps a person escape a terribly-worse system, but then the person gets institutionalized to the not-so-good system. Thus, later when he gets to see way better systems, he cannot wrap his head around the fact that the system that saved him from the terribly-worse system is actually not-so-good, and starts thinking that something must be wrong about these better systems, even if he can’t see anything wrong. In an extreme end, he’ll start making up wrong things about these better systems.

This pattern is very apparent in people that join rebellious groups, for instance, criminal gangs that help someone out of some serious trouble. But rebellious groups are of all sorts, e.g., we had a rogue student-organization in our university, that was a very small ineffective rebellious group¹. But then there are also, political factions, cults, etc.

But this pattern is more common in our everyday ways of looking at things or thinking about things.

For instance, one might notice that there are so many people or places that promise to help you achieve x, but later realize that all of these people or places are frauds or are ineffective, he might get skeptical not just of those fraud or ineffective people, but even of the fact that x is something achievable. In some cases, x might actually be unachievable e.g. if someone promises you to bring back the dead. But in everyday cases, x are things that are achievable, e.g. understanding about things, good friends, happiness, etc. So, for instance, if an actually happy person meets such an institutionalized-skeptic of a happy life, he cannot believe that living a happy life is even possible. Similarly, someone who could not understand things by reading textbooks would think that he is incapable of understanding things (most textbooks are extremely poorly written, or in many instances the person lack the pre-requisite knowledge for understanding a concept, where it’s better to re-start learning from first principles).

That was a common person example, but this is a pattern in overall way of institutionalized thinking. For instance, Einstein had gotten institutionalized to his relativity model which was a way better understanding than Newtonian model, but he couldn’t grasp the quantum theory when it came along which provided an even better explanation about some things.

How to de-institutionalize then? For anyone who has had experience helping old people switch to a newer technology will know how hard it is for them to grasp it, even when the newer technology is more convenient. So, before you think about de-institutionalizing, re-think if it’s really necessary. If it involves other people, you should respect their preferences on your own, because you might end up doing them more harm then good by trying to de-institutionalize them.

The only valid question then, is how to get yourself deinstitutionalized. The difficulty of getting out of a bad system is proportional to the time you have spent within. But even still, among people who have lived same time institutionalized, some get deinstitutionalized while others don’t. And it seems the pattern with them is that they interact more with people from other systems. But not just other systems, but better systems. So, they interact more often with people who look at things more perceptively, people who think about things more rigorously, or people who live their lives more fulfilled. But the important thing is that they engage in an honest dialogue and not a debate. Someone who actually has a better system has no need or desire to argue with anyone else. And so if one interacts in a debate-ish way, the people with better systems will start avoiding him, and he will find himself arguing with people who like arguing, which is people with other equally-bad or worse systems. And that is a terrible way to get locked-in in your institutionalized thinking.

1. There was a classmate of mine who was an active member of it. He was a nice boy otherwise in class, so I couldn’t understand why he joined that. I tried to avoid bringing up this topic, but as I talked more to him, he started telling about it himself, and I realized what was the thing. He was a shy and cowardly kid, but joining this thing made his cowardice go away, and so he became blind to all the morally wrong things this group was doing, even though he himself had good morals. ↩︎