The Potential for Progress: Can We Truly Alter Society’s Course?

---

Introduction

Many millions more people would get involved in activism and social justice work if they knew we really could make a difference. They’re paying attention. They’re frustrated by the slow pace of progress. But they choose not to act, because they worry they’ll never be able to channel their concerns and frustrations into real, actual, meaningful social change.

On the one hand, there’s an inherent amount of uncertainty in pursuing any great cause. I’d love to be able to eliminate the doubts and fears completely. But no one can ever totally assure you that the blood, sweat, and tears you invest into making the world a better place will be worth it in the end. Only you will be able to determine that—and you will only know if you try. Those who never try will never know what great agents for change they might have been.

But on the other hand, we can eliminate a fair amount of that uncertainty. Whether great social change is possible is an empirical question. And we know for certain that, yes, it has been done before! So the question then becomes: under what circumstances do great social changes occur? To what extent are those circumstances present now, and are there things we can do to encourage the remaining circumstances to materialize?

I’ve spent over a decade studying processes of social change, and it’s a shame so many millions never become the agents of change they could be. It really doesn’t take much effort to dispel many of the doubts about whether it’s worthwhile to get involved. It just takes busting some maddeningly common, misleading myths about how social change works.

Yep, you sure are! And if you place the burden of social change on your shoulders alone, you’re right to suspect you’re going to fail.

Because, in the end, there are only two ways to create major social change:

1. Be extremely wealthy, powerful, and/or unethical.
2. Be an ordinary person who works together with other ordinary people to create change.

Option 1 is impossible and too distasteful for most. That leaves Option 2 as the way to go.

Ordinary folks like us must understand that we are only powerful when we act collectively in large numbers. That is the source of our strength. That is how anything positive will be accomplished.

It’s not so easy to get millions of people to act collectively. The best social movements are like Sun Tzu’s famous description of what the best armies are like: fast as the wind, silent as a forest, ferocious as fire, and immovable as a mountain. A great leader can help inspire great numbers of ordinary people to come together and act in such a disciplined, driven manner. But, as you’ll see in the next section, this isn’t necessary.

You don’t need to be! And you probably don’t want to be, anyway!

After all, two of the three were assassinated, and the third was in jail for decades. The autopsy of 39-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. revealed that he had the heart of a 60-year-old, due to the stress of running so many civil rights campaigns.

But great leaders are not the only ingredient in a successful social movement. They certainly help. But oftentimes, they’re not even necessary. Many of the most recent social movements, from the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to the Tea Party and Black Lives Matter, have shunned the traditional hierarchical models, plotting actions through collaboration and consensus rather than top-down decrees. (See: “Unraveling the GameStop ‘Frenzy:’ The Power and Limitations of Reddit.”)

History books focus primarily on great leaders, and they deserve many of their plaudits. But hero worship can obscure the fact that, behind each of these great leaders, was a mass of thousands or millions of ordinary folks, each doing their part to move things forward. These folks are no less heroic and essential to a movement’s success than the great moral leaders they followed.

We’re getting into pretty complex topics now. Whole books can (and have) been written on whether, how, and why Americans have become so apathetic, cynical, and/or individualistic over recent decades. Common causes scholars have focused on include:

• The rise of suburbanization and car culture, with its tendency to isolate households on their own private, far-flung properties.
• Increasing pressures of time, money, and competition.
• The effects of electronic entertainment–specifically, television, video games, and the internet.
• The loss of the World War II generation, an unusually social and civic-minded generation, with a similarly engaged generation yet to take its place.
• Mass political dysfunction and the rise of entire industries devoted to mocking its dysfunctions.
• Constant disappointment in politics leading many Americans to be suspicious of promises of hope and change.

In my opinion, it is the last two factors that are most impactful. For those of us who lived through it, it’s hard to forget how Barack Obama exploded into the national spotlight in 2004 by criticizing partisan politics, won election in 2008 in a landslide by appealing to hope and change … and then American politics degenerated into the greater partisan shitshow it is today. No one has touched the “hope and change” platform since.

All this is to say: we have good reasons to be skeptical that substantive change will come through our current political system. We are also dealing with some unprecedented socioeconomic and cultural forces pulling us apart. But recall the argument I made in the introduction: there are many people not participating currently who nevertheless are paying attention, are rightly frustrated by our lack of progress, and who would join a movement that successfully convinces them their efforts will be worthwhile in the end.

In short, apathy, cynicism, and individualism are real problems. But they are not dealbreakers. The challenge is not to get millions of people to care–they already do, and those who don’t yet probably never will. The challenge is logistical: getting more folks with good intentions into the fray, in spite of their doubts. It will not be easy. But it certainly can be done.

Okay, yes. There is a small minority of hateful, willfully ignorant citizens who will never stop sowing discord and spouting falsehoods.

This is not the majority. Most people, liberal or conservative, want to be one of the good guys. Most people, liberal or conservative, are forming their political opinions by appealing to their highest values. Most Americans are not sociopaths.

We are, however, under the spell of the two greatest propaganda campaigns in the history of humanity. The Democratic and Republican parties spend billions of dollars, collect terabytes of data, and formulate carefully crafted talking points designed to appeal to the voters they know so well. Politics is now a science, and these two parties are very, very good at it.

This is why they have carved up the map into red and blue territories, like rival gangs respecting each other’s turf. There’s no reason for Republican voters to ever Democratic, because the Republican party caters to them while the Democratic party castigates them. The same is true of Democratic voters: the Democratic party knows how to appeal to them, while the Republican party uses them as bogeymen to scare their voters.

We have not fallen under the spell of these two parties because we’re stupid or cruel. We’ve fallen under their spell because we’re human. The techniques they are using today would make George Orwell soil himself in his grave. We have been so thoroughly manipulated and pitted against each other by these two parties that we can’t yet figure out how to escape this conundrum.

You can check out my book, Torch the Two-Party System, if you’re interested to learn more about my proposal to disrupt the two-party duopoly’s stranglehold on our politics. For now, just know that the American people are not as stupid and cruel as they seem. They are just utterly under the spell of these two parties, and will go along with whatever stupid claims or cruel actions they find politically expedient.

Take a moment to admire what a cunning system our two political parties have orchestrated:

• They each have rabid bases of supporters, roughly equal in size, advocating for opposite policies. No matter how many millions you have working to achieve your goals, there are just as many millions working just as furiously to thwart or undo them. As a result, the vast majority of the American people’s efforts in politics cancel out.
• Most offices are “safe seats” for one party or the other, leading to easy reelections. Even though incumbents have rarely accomplished anything, all they have to do is blame the other party for those failings, and their voters will send them right back to Washington.
• Meanwhile, the few battlegrounds with contested races get the most money and attention. The results of these races which party will have a slim majority and which will have a large, obstructionist minority. No matter how poorly any of these parties govern, they can still count on at least 40 to 49 percent of the power in Washington.
• While the American people rant and rave over abortion, guns, immigration, and race relations, they are too divided to prevent politicians, corporations, and special interests from shaping the system to suit their ends. The big interests win. The little people lose.

Make no mistake: political reform in the United States is going to be one of the most important and challenging objectives of the next decade. You may consider yourself a Democrat or Republican within this two-party system. But is this two-party system what you really want? Shouldn’t the American people take a good hard look at whether there are other options?

You’ll have to look at the book to get the full scoop, but yes–we do have options, and we can disrupt the stranglehold of this two-party duopoly on our politics.

Suppose there was no federal government in the United States. As a result, in order to make military decisions, each of the 50 states had to agree on the course of action.

Doesn’t seem like a very smart way to run a military, does it? Yet this is very much like what we’re currently doing with several of our most threatening problems.

Global warming, nuclear weapons, unregulated capitalism–these are all global in scope. That means, in order to deal with them adequately, we must deal with them on a global level. But because there’s no international authority empowered to do so, that means all 200 nations must agree before anything can be done. In effect, the Republican party in the United States has been able to singlehandedly derail global progress on climate change.

It’s a maddening and stupid system–which is why I’m so confident that, as the 21st century develops, there will be a greater push for international cooperation and global institutions empowered to act upon global problems. I’m not saying these will materialize overnight. But they will certainly come. It’s just too stupid to continue trying to solve international problems on a national level.

If this prospect awakens dystopian fears of a global dictatorship or enormous global bureaucracies, I can sympathize. It’s hard enough to do governance at the local, state, and national level–and it will be exponentially harder at the international level. But here’s the thing. If the ordinary people of the world don’t take the lead in pushing for these transnational institutions, the elites of the world will. And then we are certain to end up with a dystopian system that favors politicians, corporations, and special interests at the expense of ordinary people!

We are a global society now, even if most people don’t realize it. Our institutions will have to catch up to this reality. It may not seem possible now, but I feel supremely confident that the 21st century will witness international collaboration on a level we’ve not yet seen in human history.

Once upon a time, there was a riverside town called Downstream. One day, a resident of Downstream spied a body floating in the river. So the townspeople banded together and fished the body out of the water. The next day, another body came. Then another. And another. The people of Downstream developed a whole industry devoted to fishing floating bodies out of the river. They became so busy that no one thought to ask, “Maybe we ought to pay a visit Upstream and figure out how all these bodies are ending up in the river in the first place!”

This is the issue with “acting locally.” There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s something everyone with the time and energy should do. But it cannot be the only thing we do. Because when local communities flounder, we need to ask what’s happening Upstream, and advocate for policies to fix the problems that are flowing Downstream.

---

What are your thoughts regarding our prospects for major social change? Are we doomed? Can we get our act together in time? If so, how? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Stay informed and inspired! Subscribe to our newsletter, “Society This Week,” and get a free copy of our exclusive report, “Peaceful, Powerful: 225 Nonviolent Tactics for Impactful Activism!”