Critical Awareness in Driving Social Change
Ideas grow from seeds — to fringe movements — to mainstream and eventually bring about social change. Critical awareness enables us to see the issues in the world around us. Only when we question the world around us do we begin to see where change is needed.
Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire speaks of three stages of critical consciousness when it comes to social change. When we are aware of these stages we can connect the dots between our lives, the oppression we might be facing, and the society around us.
Stages of Conscious Awareness in Social Change
Naïve Consciousness — when we are aware of the problems yet acting only on the symptoms of these problems.
Magical Consciousness — when we are silent and docile, accepting the injustices thrown at us — because ‘that’s the way things are’.
Critical Consciousness — when we question the world around us and examine the root and structural causes of the issues we might face, rather than accepting the issues as life’s fate.
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Oppression and Social Change
Oppression comes from the Latin word ‘opprimere’ — to force down, weight down, or suffocate people and groups in society and prevent them from thriving.
Learning to see oppression humanizes and liberates us. It keeps us aware, so we don’t step into becoming oppressors ourselves. It softens us, as we try to seek a better life for all and create long-lasting positive change.
From a system-thinking perspective there are different flavors of oppression:
Internalized oppression — when an oppressed group believes the negative stereotypes they hear about their own group and act against them by discriminating.
Interpersonal oppression — when people who are part of a dominant group discriminate against people from a minority group based on race, gender, class, age, abilities, sexual orientation, and so on.
Institutional oppression — when the policies and systems of an organization discriminate against specific groups of people.
Structural oppression — when discrimination and oppression become ingrained in a society and are part of the culture.
Oppression — Related Injustices
To understand and identify oppression it’s important to see how it manifests as injustice in society. Psychologist Morton Deutsch speaks about five types of oppression-related injustices:
- Distributive Injustice referring to the fairness of the distribution of resources, capital, benefits, and penalties.
- Procedural injustice referring to the fairness of processes. Unfortunately, unfair processes are everywhere… seeking to identify these injustices helps create healthier systems.
- Retributive injustice referring to how we are judged for our wrongdoing. Greater fairness and equality could be applied just about everywhere.
- Moral Exclusion happens when we think that people who are not part of our moral community, or people who don’t share our moral views, are not entitled to fair outcomes and treatment. Moral exclusion is ‘the justification’ behind xenophobia — it’s the root of racism, genocide, slavery, colonialism, and other horrific eras in history.
- Cultural Imperialism happens when a dominant group imposes its culture, norms, values, and beliefs on another group.
In a culture of oppression, the viewpoints of people who are oppressed are always questioned. Distrust is the tool of the oppressor. To develop trust with the oppressed is to see them, to hear their stories and to connect with them as humans. This requires another core element — Empathy!
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No social change awareness is possible unless we own every part of who we are as individuals — including our shadow side. All the things we don’t like or repress about ourselves will pop up in the world around us. We attract everything we judge until we stop judging everything we attract.
Whenever we suppress, deny, reject, or disown an aspect of ourselves — WE POLARIZE — we become a match in the outer world for all the things we rejected internally. Addressing our own unresolved personal narrative, first, is after all the path to critical awareness.
According to Paulo Freire, we can FREE ourselves as we reflect on the world and recognize that we have the power to act and transform it. While it’s critical to recognize oppression, ultimately, we have the agency to create change, and as such contribute to a freeing consciousness.
Striving for Systemic Change
To change a system is to change our own inner paradigm first! To liberate ourselves from the way we were programmed and to be in harmony with how we choose to live and honor what’s in our heart!
Peace begins with us and the choices we make to strive for inner alignment. What makes our life richer, without blaming the outer system? It’s the inner story we choose for ourselves and the skills we choose to invest ourselves in, so we can birth a new life-giving paradigm.
How to get clear about the kind of world we want, and then start living that way? Maybe by liberating ourselves from any theology or spirituality that is not in harmony with what we truly believe.
Photo by Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps on Unsplash
Our spiritual development determines the kind of world we are going to create, along with new social structures. And this has a lot to do with the quality of our connection with the world around us. No man is an island. It takes a village and a giant leap of confidence to believe we can make the world a better place.
All social problems derive from the values, norms, and beliefs we bring into our daily lives. All social problems are also very complex and systemic in nature.
Systemic Change is not about problems to be solved… it’s about dismantling and reimagining our today — with adequate amends, so we can redirect our collective tomorrow!
The most powerful visions are the visions of giving, of expressing love and respect in action. — Bill Drayton
Noel, L. (2023). Design Social Change: Take Action, Work towards Equity, and Change the Status Quo, a Stanford d.school guide
