So, as they become larger and larger, our institutions(churches, schools, universities, media conglomerates, corporations etc...) become absolutely faceless. Soulless.- M Scott Peck.

So, as they become larger and larger, our institutions(churches, schools, universities, media conglomerates, corporations etc...) become absolutely faceless.  Soulless.  What happens when there is no soul? Is there just a vacuum?  Or is there Satan where once, long ago, a soul resided?  I do not know.  But I think the antiwar activists, the Berrigan brothers, are correct when they say that the task before us is nothing less than to metaphorically exorcise our institutions. There is no word adequate to describe the urgency of this task....If we cannot somehow engineer this submission and 'Christianize" our capitalism, we are doomed as a capitalist society.  The total failure of submission is always evil- for a group, for an institution, for a society as for an individual. Unless we can heal ourselves by submission, the forces of death will win the day, and we will consume ourselves in our own evil.....the task of preventing group evil-including war itself-is clearly the task of eradicating or, at least, significantly diminishing laziness and narcissism.  But, how is this to be accomplished? although there are such phenomena as group identity, group narcissism, and group spirit, there is no way to influence such phenomena except through influencing individual members of the group. Customarily, when we wish to influence group behavior, we first attempt to do so by the most efficient means possible: influencing the individual group leaders.  Either way, it is to the individual that we turn.  For the "group mind" is ultimately determined by the minds of the individuals who make up the group.  As a single vote may be crucial in an election, so the whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual.  This is known to the genuinely religious.  It is for this reason that no possible activity is considered to be more important than the salvation of a single human soul. This is why the individual is sacred. For it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.

The effort to prevent group evil-including war-must therefore be directed toward the individual.  It is, of course, a process of education. And that education can be conducted most easily within the traditional existing framework of our schools.  This book is written in the hope that someday in our secular as well as religious schools all children will be carefully taught the nature of evil and the principles of its prevention.  Children will, in my dream, be taught that laziness and narcissism are at the very root of all human evil, and why this is so.  They will learn that each individual is of sacred importance.  They will come to know that the natural tendency of the individual in a group is to forfeit his or her ethical judgment to the leader, and that this tendency should be resisted. And they will finally see it as each individual's responsibility to continually examine himself or herself  for laziness and narcissism and then to purify themselves accordingly.  They will do this in the knowledge that such personal purification is required not only for the salvation of their individual souls but also for the salvation of their world.

M. Scott Peck, 1998.