Hierarchies should be fluid and temporary
Last week, I shared a post from this same website, an ‘advent calendar’ of blogging where people reflect what they’ve thought a lot about over the last year.
This entry is about comfort zones and systems change. The author makes their living in ‘systems change’ and points out that it’s natural for things to evolve and change over time. Not to allow this to happen privileges the few over the many. It’s a good way of thinking about it.
I’ve included an image that Bryan Mathers made for our co-op last year to illustrate my anti-establishment tendencies. I’m almost embarrassed for other people when they use the phrase “My boss said…” as if it’s a normal thing. Any hierarchies should be fluid and temporary.
On the surface, it can seem like people’s resistance to making things better is down to their fear of the unknown, and they lean into the idea of ‘better the devil you know’. However, I’m eight years into this gig, and actually, what I’ve observed is that it’s the complexity that comes with imagining the world anew that people don’t like.
[…]
They find it destabilising when new ways of being emerge because – in order to adopt them – it would mean straying from a well-trodden route. New ideas threaten to force people to create new pathways, adapting to unfamiliar scenarios as they go.
The reality, though, is that this is how life works. We can manufacture fixed systems that seek to impose rigid structures – for example, hierarchies, competition and individualism have all been created. But, at its core, the world shifts and alters and adapts. You only have to look at the natural world to see how life constantly evolves, or the universe to recognise we’re constantly expanding.
By resisting change, we are upholding the manufactured systems that we are forced to live within. The same systems that are rigged against us.
Because those systems are familiar. They are societal norms. They are known.
As long as we are resistant to change, we allow power to be consolidated in the hands of a dominant few who get to shape the media, government and organisations which prescribe how we live our lives.
Source: I thought about that a lot
Image: CC BY-NC Visual Thinkery for WAO