Individual Change vs System Change

Who is responsible? Individuals? The System? Both? How much for each?

Humanity has some big challenges to overcome.

In this regard, which is more effective - fostering individual change, or tackling the source of our problems, the system itself? And who is really responsible for the state of the planet we see today?

Alex, a long time NBA reader, sent me a link to an article that has me thinking about how we got here, and the most effective way forward. The article is called "People Aren't The Worst - They Are The Only Hope For The Planet", and can be found here.

In it, the author argues that focusing on or blaming individuals as the problem, is not only wrong headed, but more importantly, lets the real culprits off the hook.

Wet wipes, for example. Some pampered people use them to wipe their bottoms with after a bowel movement (using only water is just as effective, and does no damage). Then they flush them, because the wipes are labeled as "flushable". 

The problem is, they are most definitely NOT flushable, and each year such wipes cause millions of dollars of damages to sewer systems the world over. 

Wet wipe manufacturers are fighting any attempts to change labeling so consumers would be more informed. Companies know that if people can't flush them, they won't use them. So they continue to lie and mislead.

Can we blame people for driving when the fossil fuel industry has been spending billions to promote lies and denial concerning the dangers of their product? Their own scientists have known about human driven climate change for 40 years, but spent billions of dollars spreading misinformation and denial.

Kind of like the tobacco industry, which perfected the denial industry playbook. First cigarettes were good for you. Then they might not be good for you, but they most certainly weren't bad for you. Now, after decades of denial, we know that cigarettes will slowly kill you if you persist in smoking them.

Given the enormity of  institutional  denial and misdirection, how much choice do we as individuals really have? And it is not only that, the system is a juggernaut geared toward pushing us in the direction of maintaining private profit over protecting the welfare of the general public and environment. 

Richard Heede, carbon counter extraordinaire, says, "I as a consumer bear some responsibility for my own car, etcetera. But we're living an illusion if we think we're making choices, because the infrastructure pretty much makes those choices for us."

And yet blaming individuals for all the world's problems is rampant. I suppose I have been guilty myself from time to time. Indeed, it is perhaps easiest and satisfyingly simple to target individuals for all our woes. 

Take author Brian Czech, for example. In his book, "Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train: Errant Economists, Shameful Spenders, and a Plan to Stop Them All", he asks readers to recognize conspicuous consumers as "bad citizens who are liquidating our grandkids’ future". 

I am tempted to see it in just this way, but have to wonder if it is "bad people" that we should concentrate on, or "bad ideas", like predatory capitalism. 

Perhaps it is "human nature" to flaunt one's wealth. To waste excessively. To want to "buy nice things" ad infinitum. To be ultimately selfish. Some people think just that. 

If so, what hope for change is there? If it is human nature, aren't we doomed?

I don't think these are innate desires - I believe we have been trained to be this way from birth, because it maximizes profit for the privileged few. Everything in a consumer culture promotes a way of life based on private consumption, rather than social, or public achievement.

Can we be therefore be blamed, and be held responsible? Are we not victims of the real perpetrators of the destruction of our planet? Doesn't focusing on what "we" can do let the real culprits off easy? What about what "they" can do? Or should do?

Just how much environmental damage do we create compared to the 90 companies and government-run industries, according to Heede, that have contributed more than half of the greenhouse gases emitted globally between 1751 and 2010? 

Individuals, however, can not be totally let off the hook. All users of damaging things bear some responsibility. And as Ram Das says, "As one individual changes, the system changes", so what we each do has cumulative, and often large, effects. 

Each of our decisions matter. The good ones, and the not so good.

Fixing what is wrong with this planet is a shared responsibility. Individuals will have to change. And so will the system. So far people have been changing, and government and economics have not. The source of the problem continues relatively unchallenged.

In "Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?", author Mark Fisher optimistically points out that "the very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.” 

New disruptive technologies, such as those that enable the sharing economy, or old, like voluntary simplicity, could be what "tears a hole in the grey curtain" of our harmful system that is so bent on violence and destruction for fun and profit.

Right now the system is ripe for change, and it will be changed by events and decisions from the tiniest to the largest. Change will be ushered in by individuals, and by widespread, massive, and timely system change.

It is time to think big and challenge the establishment's "facts" which conclude that "there are no alternatives". Of course there are alternatives - anything is possible, like concluding that the system is the biggest problem, not whether I, personally, drive or take the bus.

Maybe it is time to be more lenient with the victims, and harsher on the perpetrators. And the biggest perp of all, is the system itself. 

“If you believed in capitalism, you had to attack science, because science had revealed the hazards that capitalism had brought in its wake. The biggest hazard of them all—one that could truly affect the entire planet—was just at that moment coming to public attention: global warming. 

Global warming would become the mother of all environmental issues, because it struck at the very root of economic activity: the use of energy. So perhaps not surprisingly, the same people who had questioned acid rain, doubted the ozone hole, and defended tobacco now attacked the scientific evidence of global warming.”  

― Naomi Oreskes