Steinbeck and the powers that be?

Confession time: I've never read the Grapes of Wrath. I know lots of people will think I'm the kind of person who would have, but I've not; where other people were reading Steinbeck I was reading Sartre, Camus, Lorca, Cervantes ... So it's that my education developed a bit differently to many other 'cultured' people. One effect of this is that I'd never, therefore, come across this passage which is a really helpful reflection on the nature of principalities and powers, imho. The article discusses that a bit: the Jesus Manifesto � Are we the people? and perhaps the salient bit is: "What is this great beast? What is the monster that Steinbeck describes? An institution, a social structure created by human beings. With no actual reality, except in the minds of the people who believe in it. Yet, as more and more people gather, believing in and submitting themselves to its order and purposes, it gains power in men�s minds, great power, seeming to become something much greater than ourselves. Those who believe and serve it become dependent on it, dependent for their very lives. And it grows in complexity and influence until it eventually reaches the point where no human leadership seems to be in control of it; it seems to have taken on a life of its own."
Where I think I disagree somewhat is the idea that the principalities and powers are different from human-created institutions: I don't think we can make that distinction or that the Bible does. What I think we can do now, though, is analyse them more fully with the tools of science (including social science) and see that we are dealing with emergent properties from complex dynamical systems. Steinbeck's passage, without that language, identifies that very nicely.