Yesterday's Hold on Humanity

by Hugh M. Lewis

By far we ourselves, the human species, are the greatest obstacle impeding alternative development and positive, constructive changes in the world. We are, in the long run, our own worst enemies, and we might even say that resistance to change is somehow rooted in our common human nature. This resistance occurs upon all levels of our identity and relation, collectively, inter-subjectively in face-to-face interactions, consciously and even unconsciously. I would want to equate such resistance to change to having very strong attachments to appetites and aversions, either acquired in early childhood and subsequently reinforced and embedded in our characteriological predispositions. Others might call it cognitive inertia, or others yet refer to genetic predispositions of personality or other complex inherited traits that affect how we think, feel and relate to the world. 

Of course, all of this, whatever it really is, is socially and culturally reinforced in many different ways, almost on a daily basis. The point is, we live in social worlds that are largely coercive upon our lives, our choices and our preferences. We have really no choice but to conform, at least to some minimal extent, if we are to achieve some sense of success, security and satisfaction from our lives, and with such conformity comes a built in cost.  And so we are to some unknown degree constrained by our contexts to maintain a certain behavioral constancy and conformity to implicit value orientations without necessarily exhibiting a great deal of real choice in the matter. Freedom may really be the grand illusion of our brave new world. 

Human resistance to change in general, and especially certain forms of change that may prove in fact beneficial, comes from many sources and seems to have many reasons. In other words, such resistance seems complex and multi-factorial, and therefore to be lack  in any simple or straightforward kinds of solutions. Inaugurating or promoting positive life-style changes in some contexts for instance, can prove relatively self-destructive or even suicidal in the end if it is done in a context of near complete social resistance to such change.

If I had to equate a central set of factors to account for this kind of phenomenon, more than any other, I would probably attribute it mostly to established inertia, or momentum of development, of conventional symbolic systems, with all their behavioral consequences and psychological associations and attitudes. There are in other words both cultural and subjective psychological and behavioral consequences of this kind of developmental inertia of conventional systems that are in a sense self-reinforcing and are sanctioned by both direct and indirect forms of constraints that operate upon multiple levels of articulation. Many of the structural constraints that are embedded in ritual and other formalisms, serve to reinforce an implicit symbolic universe that expressed in terms of our values, or pattern of reinforcement of behavior, in terms of our interests, our taboos, etc.

Other aspects of this resistance, such as prejudice and ethnocentrism, in-group/out-group consciousness, etc., all stem from and refer back to this central underlying symbolic framework, and derive ultimately their force from the substantive basis of this framework in everyday life.

Symbol systems and the cultural patterns that they attach to are known to be quite susceptible to acculturative influence, and under adverse conditions, to be subject to strong external influences of alternative symbolic realities, which may be most implicit to the patterning of alternative systems rather than being spelled out in any concrete form. Symbolic alternation is a form of symbolic transformation, and is the primary cause for most determinative social change in the world.

It follows therefore that the place to start in altering the received profile of the future skyline is in terms of our own symbolic coordinate-reference points, in terms of a reevaluation of the relationships that this implies both in our lives and in the wider world. But it also follows that building an alternative symbolic framework that is suitable for a systems-based future will not come overnight, or even in a fortnight. Providing people with alternatives, especially in a real behavioral way, with all the resources and opportunities as well as risks and costs that come with alternatives, is a way of challenging the status quo of the received predominant system, and a way of relativizing this system such that it at least lacks the reified sense of being the only way we can proceed in building the world, such that we can then make room for a multitude of alternative ways of reshaping our vision of the world and then the world itself.

General Systems Essays, Vol. I