Loyalty or gratitude to an institution makes little sense to me (I'm probably in the minority on this in the general population), simply because an institution is incapable of loyalty or gratitude towards me.

I'm loyal or grateful to people, but rarely to abstract concepts.

So setting aside questions of what occurs "naturally", who should I be loyal/grateful to? The few enlightened bureaucrats who make a system better than average? The taxpayers who fund it, willingly or not? The bureaucrats who, at best, are ineffective at ruining everything? The rebels who make things happen by bending or ignoring the rules?

If you can't be loyal to the institution, be loyal to the "favourable conditions" of the institution. Support those conditions.

Because those conditions DO give back to you.

I wonder if the parent is objecting to the word "loyalty" - Loyalty implies a certain degree of unconditional support; while I think that when talking about countries, we're better off with conditional support.

That said, if by loyalty you mean conditional support, I agree completely. Governments don't exist in a vacuum, and there is constant pressure from the those who directly benefit from a less-efficient government.

I am - and to be fair I don't think anyone else used the word "loyalty", so I could be swinging at strawmen, but that's what some of the discussion sounded like to me.