How to change a society? A trick question with many correct answers: by voting, through a revolution, through investing in civil society, through the actions of a benevolent dictator, etc. Every social event, has an impact on the future of a society in a butterfly effect-kind of way. You have to be more specific.
Let’s try again, then: how to create a critical mass of people in a society so as to adopt a new dominant cultural mindset? For example, how to get a society to decide to protect the climate by going carbon neutral by a certain date?
To simplify a lot, this happens when enough people know about the problem and want to do something about it. With enough persistence, the effect compounds over time. That’s how many a social battle has been won.
Activists tend to focus on two key words in the leading sentence in the above paragraph: information and action. They focus less on the notion of a critical mass, assuming that it naturally arises over time. It does not!
In fact, the downfall of many promising social movements has been, and will continue to be, inability to build a broad enough alliance for change. They often misunderstand not only how change happens but also why people come to want it.
Contemporary grassroots movements are using change theory to inform their action and tactics. This is excellent. It is less good that they apply it uncritically and without understanding the context that gave rise to it.
To quote a very prominent example. The idea that we need 3.5% of the population to actively support a cause in order to create change in a society has become e meme among the activists over the past few years.
The theory was originally put forward by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan in their book Why Civil Resistance Works. It has since informed the theory of many prominent organization, most notably Extinction Rebellion (XR); the book has become something of a reference text in the community.
The book is indeed essential for understanding the social dynamics of nonviolent protest, but it has one major limitation: most of the success cases examined were in non-democratic regimes which the activists tried to change or overthrow. There was not one example of changing a Western, liberal democracy.
Is overthrowing a genocidal dictatorship essentially the same as campaigning for gay rights in a democracy? There are superficial similarities between the two contexts but most people would agree that there is a distinction of type there.
Tactics that include getting yourself arrested make sense when exposing a totalitarian regime and creating fissures in its support among the population and in the repressive apparatus itself. In other contexts it may be a good publicity stunt that raises awareness about the cause. Then again, it might come to turn people off. Capturing the spotlight isn’t enough for changing minds.
The Altruist League mainly invests in organizations that embody diversity and can bring people from different political, social and racial backgrounds together. Many social movements, including some prominent ones, are struggling to do this.
This is more than just some formula for optimum political correctness.
To illustrate, XR is again a good example. It was conceived by a group of mostly White people for whom diversity was not a priority. As a consequence, there was nobody in the room who could warn about the adverse impact of some of the tactics on the ability to lead and build alliances.
To anyone observing the world in our time, it is clear that, for a White person, getting arrested is a much more innocuous experience than for someone whom the cops identify as Black or Arab. Blindness to this fact has made critics to point out, correctly, that XR has a race problem. This weakness has devalued the organization in the eyes of many who perceived it as a change-making juggernaut only three years ago.
Sometimes having uniform but radical supporters is enough for change. Think of the Capitol rioters a few weeks back. For progressive change, alliances are essential.
This doesn’t mean that we are condemned to wait for decades before we see the changes we want to in our world. Maybe the time is right now for whatever we are trying to do. But in order to do so we must be aware of those who came before us, those currently working in the same direction with us, those on the margins whom we can empower include in our cause. Again, coalitions.
There are few texts which, in my opinion:
One of them is Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless, written in 1978 during the communist rule in Czechoslovakia and his struggle as a dissident.
Havel masterfully deconstructs the regime, its iconography and the way each individual participates in its perpetuation. This criticism has been repeated ad nauseam and I won’t linger on it. What I’m more interested in is what he proposes as a course of action. A passage from the text deserves a full quotation:
“Various thinkers and movements feel that this as yet unknown way out might be most generally characterized as a broad ‘existential revolution’. I share this view, and I also share the opinion that a solution cannot be sought in some technological sleight of hand, that is, in some external proposal for change, or in a revolution that is merely philosophical, merely social, merely technological or even merely political. These are all areas where the consequences of an ‘existential revolution’ can and must be felt; but their most intrinsic locus can only be human existence in the profoundest sense of the word. It is only from that basis that it can become a generally ethical – and, of course, ultimately a political – reconstitution of society.”
Havel understood two crucial things. One: true social change is a shift of identity. It is a shift in how people think of themselves, their relations, and their society. Two: deep inside, many people understand what the truth about the system is, even when they’re shouting slogans in support of it.
Example: philanthropy publications have, for the past few decades, urged wealthy people’s foundations to make the society fairer, pretending that some new concept or methodology will do the trick. The opposite has happened. But the journalists didn’t just go and confront the philanthropists: they would have needed to look for another job. Instead, they came up with a new set of methodologies to pitch. Nonprofits, smaller foundations and everyone else dependent on rich people’s capital also chose to play along. Then along came a book like Winners Take All, told the truth, and had the effect of a wildfire.
Havel calls this condition, “Living within the lie.” It is incompatible with human existential needs, with freedom and authenticity, with dignity. The more absurd the system becomes, the more its opposite, “living within the truth” becomes enticing. At some point, it becomes the only thing worth doing, the only possible thing to do. It is the dissidents’ job to be brave enough to show what living within the truth could look like, by being honest and speaking out. This is one of the roles to be played by social activists of today.
There is a third, even deeper point that Havel makes. He uses the example of the Revolution of 1917, and others, to show that even a political shock is not enough to change the fundamental nature of a society and prevent it from simply shifting from one lie-driven model to another. Only how people think of themselves, what they care about and what they agree to, can lead to fundamental change.
The existential shifts we need in our society are manifold. The dismantling of the cult of money and celebrity. Commitment to ending centuries-long discrimination towards women and people of color. The solving of systemic, existential risks to civilization, chief of them being global discontent that living within the lie has produced. Giving the wealthy something meaningful to do.
Maybe enough people already want these things, but the dissidents, the social movements of today, are not able to reach them, organize them, empower them. So it might be the time to go back to history books and understand that not all thinking about changing the world was produced in the last five years.
The Velvet revolution ended one-party rule in Czechoslovakia after 41 years in 1989, bloodlessly. Havel became its first president. While other Eastern European countries have flirted with despotism since then, the Czech democracy never looked back.
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