I’m talking about how the framing makes people think and how we can drift toward abstraction over reality. When we talk about the police or the state being created to do something, we’re implying that the intention involved in its creation might be the most important thing about it. At least it still expresses the will of it’s creator. For something involving as many people as police or states, I think this undervalues the importance of individual intentions over abstract insitutional goals.

For specific examples here like, “the police are not there to help you, only the rich,” you can easily find counterexamples, but let’s be a little more generous and imagine it means that the individual intentions of officers are negated by something else. That something else is more likely to be the interests of real living people and not abstract institutional purposes for which the police were created. The institution might provide them an opportunity to pursue their goals because of the power it presents, but any misalignment of goals with public interest is because of the intentions of people in the system, not the will of the system itself.

Maybe that seems too obvious, but I think it’s established that people tend to anthropomorphize things, and when we talk about the will of the police or the state or a corporation, it’s easy to slip into thinking of an abstract entity as a person with thoughts and desires, which only hides the problem.