What do activists do? Well, they try to motivate others to “wake up” and change things that need changing.
“And what’s ironic about that?”, you ask.
What’s ironic about that is that a great many activists are attempting to bring about changes in ways that are themselves short-sighted and destined to be ultimately ineffective. In short, most activists also need to “wake up” in some way!
But there’s really no surprise here. Cognitive scientists have observed again and again that humans tend to be “cognitive misers”, spending only as much effort on their thinking as they feel forced to expend. That doesn’t mean that we have to be cognitive misers, mind you, but only that most choose not to rise above it very often.
So while an activist may well identify something that truly needs to change, we should not be at all surprised to discover that the activist has not thought through the possible solutions well enough to identity one that is bound to succeed. Indeed, many tend only to scratch the surface with their proposed solutions. Here are some quick examples to point out what I’m getting at.
- “Get back to the Constitution”. This is a popular ideal, and yet hardly anyone espousing it notices that America does not truly understand the Rule of Law. Nor do Americans truly think that it is their duty to reform their own country. So “getting back to the Constitution” is hardly a viable plan of action if it does not address the inescapable need to reform the way Americans think about government and their role in it.
- “Pride in the Church”. Just yesterday I read an article by a preacher wondering what’s gone wrong with his denomination. He put “pride” on the list of his top three suspects. Pride is an unrealistic view of one’s own abilities, merits, or value. While the preacher may well be correct that pride is a problem in his group, he has chosen to focus on just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. What I mean is that pride is simply the result of one of many different kinds of irrational thinking—that is, thinking that is irresponsible to reality. So why shun just this one outcropping of irrationality while ignoring so very many other bad cognitive habits in the congregants?
- “Vote for _____________”. Many activists seek to seat their favored candidates atop our pyramid of government, in the hope that the miracle worker can transform the rest once he or she is in office. Little thought is given, however, to what it would really take to reform America to any appreciable extent. In actuality, any candidate wanting widespread reform would be compromised or run out of office quickly without the strong support of a great many citizens—-far more than currently support such reform. But where is the activist’s plan for transforming the way people think, such that ample support will exist for such changes?
For whatever the reasons, it’s fairly easy to be an activist, urging others to “wake up”, but even for the thousands and thousands of activists we have in America, we don’t seem to be getting anywhere on any front. Politics, religion, education, health, etc.—-things seem to continue to decline somewhat with each passing generation. In fact, very, very few generations seem to leave the society better than it was when they found it. And most, it seems, are quite content with that way of life.
As for me, though, our lives are short, and I believe we ought to do something extraordinary while we are here. Having failed so far as an activist—for chosing solutions that weren’t foundational enough to fix anything—it’s worth it to me to dig deeper in search of a way to help people to succeed in society. After years of study on this question, I have finally nailed down reality as the key to it all. Just as I think that activists would be wise to give up approaches that do not work, I think we would all benefit significantly from adopting a paradigm of being responsible to reality as much as possible.
Indeed, what culture ever crumbled because it was too rational? What country ever fell because it was too diligent in formulating its beliefs and decisions? What person ever suffered from discovering the real nature of some topic of interest? Only those who are in the habit of deceiving themselves wish they did not know the truth. Indeed, even liars hate to be lied to!
But for now, the activists continue attempting to activate. And those they seek to activate continue to frustrate the activists. And at the end of the day, what do we have to show for any of this?
I will be interested to discover whether activists can be interested in facing the failures of activism squarely and discovering a better way.
