Specifically, institutions help us in two different ways. Institutions (1) aid us in survival and (2) they help us achieve a sense of significance and purpose.
For example, your workplace provides you with (1) a paycheck and (2) a way to achieve self-esteem by becoming "successful."
Driven by these fears--survival and self-esteem--we become beholden to these institutions and organizations. We come to idolatrously serve the principalities and powers because they address and reduce our deepest anxieties about material survival and our quest for success, significance and self-esteem. Thus service to the principalities and powers makes us feel that we can escape death.
And yet, as William Stringfellow notes, the principalities and powers are also enslaved by the power of death. We can't escape the power of death in idolatrously serving institutions as institutions are also driven by death anxiety. At root the motive force behind all nations, organizations and institutions is survival. The principality and power will do what it has to do to survive. Which means that nations, organizations and institutions are driven by death anxiety as much as any person.
So what happens when we are a part of an institution or organization is that our personal fears of death become entangled with institutional and organizational fears of death. In fact, as I describe it in The Slavery of Death, our personal fears of death--worries over material well-being and self-esteem--are exploited by institutions and organizations to secure and ensure their own survival.
What happens when your material well-being and self-esteem get tangled up with the survival of an institution?
What happens is that you are tempted, in quite powerful and profound ways, to sacrifice your personal moral integrity to protect and save the institution.
And for good reason, as both material livelihood and a legacy of success are at stake.
The associated and very legitimate fears here sit at the heart of idolatry.
--from an unpublished post trying to explain why Christians in institutions--even in Christian institutions--become morally paralyzed by their service to the institution
