The Organizing Instinct

When I was in the U.S., first at Michigan, then in New York, I kept running into something I’d never really encountered in Turkey: the sheer density of organized groups.

Fraternities, clubs, societies, think tanks, heritage foundations, policy organizations, alumni networks. In New York you have places like the Union Club. On campuses you have Greek life, student government, a club for literally everything. And then beyond the university, there’s this entire ecosystem of organizations: conservative ones, progressive ones, industry-specific ones, neighborhood ones. People just… form groups. Constantly.

At first I thought this was an elite thing. Country clubs, old-money institutions, invitation-only circles. And sure, that exists. But what impressed me was how far down it goes. This isn’t just for the upper class. Average people in America join things. They organize. A high school kid runs a club. A neighborhood has an association. Veterans have their lodge. Parents have their PTA. It’s everywhere.

I never saw this in Turkey. Maybe it exists in some form (there are professional chambers, some social clubs), but nothing close to the same scale or culture. And I suspect most of the East is the same. People gather informally, of course. Family networks are strong. But this specific thing, the instinct to formalize a group, give it a name, elect officers, set a mission. That feels distinctly American. Maybe parts of Europe have it too, but not at the same intensity.

What struck me is what this actually teaches people. If you’re a teenager and you have to run a club (recruit members, organize events, manage a budget, deal with disagreements), you’re learning to organize. You’re learning leadership not from a textbook but from doing it badly at seventeen and then doing it slightly less badly at nineteen.

Multiply that across an entire country and you get a population that knows, almost instinctively, how to bring people together around a shared purpose. That’s a real skill. And I wonder how much of America’s effectiveness in business, in politics, in civil society comes from this one cultural habit: the habit of organizing.

Most countries don’t train this. They teach people to study, to work, to compete individually. But the ability to say “let’s form a group and go do something,” that might be one of the most underrated advantages a society can have.