To me, this idea of the personification of state power into an all-powerful driving force seems more mythological than the importance of individual decisions being made by those who carry out the work of the state. An individual officer may have a similar belief in the intentions of the state, but their actions are ultimately their own.
It seems ironic that the more we tend to be critical of state power, the more we tend to mythologize it into a kind of personification. You might not fall into this trap, but many do. But why should the intentions of the composite pseudo-entity matter more than the intentions of the real individuals who carry out the work? Isn't each police officer a person who has different goals and ideas about who they are and who they serve? Is this really so insignificant, or is it so overwhelmed by institutional goals that it becomes irellevant? Or could the real people and not their abstractions be the real bedrock of civilization?
We live in a time where people are developing institutional abstractions as their civil bedrock. How can we reasonably differentiate institutions that are fundamentally man-made from the men who are the means of the institution’s goals?
The goals of abstract institutions are abstractions of intentions. They exist in both the minds of those who write them down and those who carry them out, and a perfect translation between those two groups will never happen. If we want to get down reality, we have to talk about the intentions of the actual people involved.
It's the same thing, it doesn't really matter if the process is clean or tumultuous, it's a reasonable heuristic to understand the status quo.
This was usually based on the further misunderstanding that evolution represents a progression from lower to higher life forms. For example, Engels was especially influenced by the idea that political processes followed Darwinian principles and that societies inevitably move from lower to higher forms, leading toward perfection in communism. In the U.S.S.R., science fiction assumed that aliens would all be Marxists because it was a fundamental law of the universe.
Even in the case of evolution, there are minds with intentions. Our ancestors wanted certain things, and the ones who were able to get them passed on their programming to the next generations.
Your unease is more warranted for things like evolution, which does not depend on a shared imaginary space.
Where did you get that from GP's post? They're simplying saying not to anthropomorphise societal systems.
Maybe you wouldn’t consider it a real society if they depended on machine translation, but we’re partially there already. It would still be a collection of minds with their own identities and intentions coordinating through an abstraction.
"X does Y" implies nothing of the sort.
If I say "The River Flows" am I arguing that the river is intelligent?
No, absolutely not, you've setup a strawman from the very beginning.
"The police are only there for ... " does not imply there's some overlord with a power point document with a bullet point outlining what the police are there for.
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.