Thank you. Well expressed. I very much agree with this and have been saying so to friends for years.
The way I look at it is that it's analogous to the way we ourselves function: we're made up of billions of cells which individually just follow simple programs mediated by local interactions with their neighbours as well as some global state mediated by hormones and signals from the nervous system. However collectively they produce what we call intelligence (and even consciousness) which we wouldn't ascribe to any of the component cells and those components aren't aware of the collective organisms goal. Moreover the overall organism can achieve goals and solve problems beyond the scale of the components.
Similarly our institutions, be they corporations, governments, etc... are collective intelligences with us as the parts. These institutions have goals and problems solving capabilities that far surpass our own - no individual could keep all Walmart stores perfectly stocked every day, or design a modern microchip or end-to-end AI platform, etc... . These really are the goals of the organisations, and not the individuals. Take for example the US government, every four years you swap out the individuals in the executive branch yet overall US policy remains largely unchained. Sure, sometimes there is a major shift in direction, but it takes time for that to be translated into shifts in policy and actions as different parts of the system react at different speeds. The bigger point is that the individuals executing the actions get swapped out over time (at different speeds for different parts like cells being replaced at different speeds in our bodies) but the organisation continues to pursue its own goal which only changes slowly over time. Political and financial analysts implicitly acknowledge this when they talk about US or Chinese policy but this often gets personified into the leader.
I think we really need to acknowledge more the existence and reality of organisational goals as independent of the goals of the individuals in those organisations. I was struck by how in the movie The Corporation they point out that corporations often take actions that are contrary to the beliefs of the individuals in them, including the CEO because the CEO is bound by his fiduciary duty to the shareholders. Corporations are legal persons and if you analyse them as persons they are psychopaths, without any human feelings or regard for human cost or externalities unless those are enforced through some legal or pricing mechanism. Yet when corporations or organisations transgress we often hold the individuals accountable. Sometimes the individuals are to blame but often its how the game has been set up that is at fault. For example, in a globally heterogenous tax regime, a multinational corporation will naturally minimise its tax burden, it can't really do otherwise and the executives of the company have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to carry that out.
Therefore we have revise and keep evolving the rules of the game in order to stay compatible with human values and survival.