You Can’t Change Society

So I was having a conversation with a friend earlier, and I made the statement that you can’t change society, you have to change the individuals within that society. We ended up not agreeing, and moved on to another topic. Usually I would leave it there because it’s really just a technical point with no real merit. Sometimes, however, an idea is like a bobcat. Once you let it out of the box, it will claw at you until you set it free. For me, the easiest way to set an idea free is to just write it out in full, so that’s what I’m doing.

You often hear people talk about changing society for the better. It’s a noble concept (so long as you both agree on what “better” is), but can it be done? Society is arguably better today than it was 50 years ago, so it would appear that the answer is a definite “yes”. I would disagree, though. I mean, obviously I would because I’m wasting time writing this, but some things just need to be said outright. The reason that I disagree is because society wasn’t changed. Individual people were changed, and the sum total of those changes were reflected in what we think of as society. I told you it was a technicality, but I can prove it.

I work as a software developer, so if there’s one thing that I feel confident in talking about, it’s systems. A system, at its most basic form, is an input that gets processed and creates an output. Society isn’t a system. Society is the report that you show to the manager at the end of the month to show what the system has done, and why they should keep paying you to build it. Society is basically a graph. More accurately, it is a collection of very advanced, interconnected, graphs, which can tell you everything and nothing about the individual people in the city / county / country / world / whatever area you’re looking at. But it’s still a graph. If I hand a graph showing sales data to a manager, they’re not going to turn around and tell me to make the figures on that graph twice the value. I mean I could, because it’s my graph, but that won’t mean that the company made twice as much profit this month. Changing a graph has no effect on the initial data, on the process that the data goes through, or on the output. If you want to make a meaningful change to the graph, you have to change the system. To change society, you have to change the input (what a person thinks) or the process (education, news, entertainment, etc.), which changes the output (how a person acts). If you take that, and aggregate it over the entire population, then you get society.

There’s another, more basic, reason why you can’t change society. It isn’t a thing that you can interact with. You can’t meet a society down the pub for a drink, talk about differing philosophies, and both come away with a slightly different outlook on life. You can’t touch society and you can’t communicate with it, so how do you change it? You don’t, you meet with people, and change their outlook, and allow them to change your outlook. Repeat that thousands of times over the course of a decade, and eventually you’ll find that your graph called society has changed too.

So that’s my take on it. I would be really interested to know if anybody wants to let me know how I’m wrong, so comment if you have an example of changing society without first changing people.