Perfect institutions. Imperfect people.

If you're a Netflix binger, you'll find a few similarities in most of the highly watched shows, one being imperfect people. One character goes all out for another character despite their clear and apparent flaws and screwups (some whom they don't ever give up on). Entire shows are based on them forgiving someone for what are clearly gross excesses, repeatedly. Arguably, this shows the simpler fragile human sides in us that so need patience, compassion, and kindness to become our best selves - so much that the world (and the other people in it) can burn till the random individual we happen to love and care about gets there. 

We also see the opposite, punishing those who don't stay in line so that chaos is avoided - trying to make people perfect to the collective design: perfect institutions. They keep order so that things don't fall apart (which is necessary to some extent). These are permanent, static cornerstones of society that hold us together - law, parenthood, education etc. The difference between the two is a beating heart - that which separates man and machine. It allows for feelings, compassion, connection, desires, and the like, without it being a static series of instructions that are lived out in a defining lifeless, soulless vaccum. Where this is, there is also weakness, struggle, pain, and the like, as people evolve - from where imperfections stem. 

People with these imperfections will eventually become your Governor, Prime Minister, Teacher, Principal, Policeman or Parent, and plays many other such roles. To carry these institutions, they need to suddenly cater to more perfect standards, all of a sudden causing a glitch in the matrix. They are expected to exemplify a specific perfect version of them and are accountable for that role. If they fail, a whole system (and many people) are at stake. It's essential that they stay in line - the definition of this perfection. 

Being imperfect, they risk bringing down the standards of perfect institutions. An example is that politics itself is a good thing (and necessary) but politicians have historically made it into a bad thing. To avoid this from happening, the perfect statutes of these institutions end up defining and putting them in a box that stops them from evolving and growing - according to their beating heart which is the reason they even live and breathe. We fall in line, despite the fact that this stunts our natural growth, hopefully into someone better. Yet, we ironically seek to keep perfect institutions and run them with imperfect people, even if both expectations continue to neutralize the other. 

It's like a western cowboy duel when they say, "this town isn't big enough for the two of us". You can't have both. As long you do, imperfect politicians will be messing with the possibility of perfect political integrity. The goal of perfect parenting will put an impossible standard on imperfect people when they have children and screw up since no one's published that manual yet. In this clash,  we've got to decide on what we want - the institution or the person. 

When it comes down to what we need, the institutions exist to serve the people, who are imperfect. A cold-hearted, hard-wired perfect institution that doesn't take into account an evolving, growing person that does not do this. One that's warmer and more perceptive to the evolving journey of people is a better fit. But these kinds of institutions aren't reliable. We'd lose the nice, cozy, predictable bedrock that we're on. 

In an alternative world where this balance fits, parenting will be done any which way, resulting in children of all kinds - not the box fit we'd like them to be. Educational standards will become anyone's best guess with teachers not knowing how to mark students and let them on to the next level of learning. Governance will become more complicated and become something we have to devise new paradigms for. It will be a massive change, but a good change without people, who evolve towards better potential, being boxed into fitting the mould. 

The present world requires that people easily slip into pre-cut roles, like they are products, and the institutions we follow are built on these products. However, perfect people don't exist and perfect institutions just punish us for that. If we all were allowed admit our biggest flaws and get help back up to become better people constantly, we would need less punishment for them, onward to remaining people and not becoming products.