Vive la révolution!


What a great frame for the discussion! Evolution and revolution. I agree: much of life is slowly laying down stones, and then there are golden moments and decisions that can shape the entire castle. Both are important: if you spend your life waiting for the time of revolution, you may find it never comes and you never achieve much, as Bernie Sanders may now be learning. If you don’t seize the moments when revolution is possible, you miss out on huge opportunities for growth and impact.

The other thing your frame suggests is that moments of crisis are also moments of opportunity. They are moments to examine our lives, rethink, and if we wish start a revolution. It is too easy to get stuck in our routines, even good ones, and stagnate. Part of what makes us alive is change: slow evolution, even in the right direction, can be stultifying. 

As for me, when I face crises I lean on the Stoics. I try to remind myself that what matters is the choices I make: I cannot always control what happens, but I can always control my choices, and if I have done my best then I should not worry about what happens. The other side of that coin is that it means I also need to always try to do my best, to do the right thing: if I do less than that, then I have failed, whether it works out or not. When bad things happen, all I can do is accept that they have happened, and do my best from there. 

Like your moments, in that insight is often clarity: a simplified, stripped-down world where it is easier to focus on what is important and ignore the rest. What the worst hits, all I can do is seek to do the right thing, and that lens frequently makes it clear what I should do. Even when it doesn’t—when it isn’t clear what the right thing is—all I can do is my best. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, as I often am. 

What I like about the evolution-revolution mental model, though, is that I think it applies to a lot of systems. Sports teams, businesses, countries, civilizations; they may spend much time at best in incremental improvement, sometimes just trying to hold the status quo, and then something provokes a revolution, or perhaps reveals the need for one. War, coronavirus, the departure of a CEO, a crushing loss to the local rivals; all can spark that inflection point, that moment of reflection that leads to revolution. 

So here’s my question for you. I frequently try to change systems, as I suspect do you. If we take this insight and apply it to systems, does it mean we should wait for moments of crisis to try to start the revolution? Bide our time and wait? Or, should we try to push, to start a revolution ourselves? How can we even tell when the revolution is ripe?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pilgrim

 Your post is so rich - I'm not sure where to start. Perhaps first to say that yes, let us discuss offline a quotidian address 2.0. :) Your distinction between true progress and experienced progress is an interesting one, and one that rings true to me. If we are progressing, but lack the contextual supports to make us feel we are, is our solution in part a change in mindset? A different way of seeing our lives and world, a new way of counting those markers? I have been reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which I find esoteric in the literal sense: I can't read it intensively, rather I scatter my attention across the page and see what leaps out at me. I suspect I could read it again and notice totally different things. It is a mix of philosophy, religion, Freudian psychoanalysis, and storytelling. Still, it has led me to reflect on enlightenment - what is it? It seems to me a common thread across many conceptions is that the enlightened realize that mos...
Read more

Cultivation

 I have no definition of enlightenment. As I gestured at in my last post, I think it has something to do with realizing what matters and what doesn't matter; and that a vast amount on which we spend time in our lives doesn't matter. Realizing it not just in the sense of being able to say it, but to truly feel it. Your point about a deeper connection to the world seems important too: that is something that does matter, I think.  On the other hand, the link to physical exercise troubles me. It's certainly possible that's enlightenment, but if it is simply exhaustion making you care less about things, then to my mind it is not. Enlightenment, I think, isn't just about not caring about what doesn't matter (which, temporarily, could result from exhaustion) but also caring deeply about what does. Let me try another angle. I tend to believe that competition is fundamentally important to self-improvement. When done well, it can push us to be better, to improve, whether ...
Read more

Rara Avis

How can we know if we're ready for black swans, and change course if we're not? Great question. I like to reason about collective human systems (societies, organizations, etc) using the same set of tools I would for studying a machine learning systems. Partly, this is because when you've got a nice new hammer, everything takes on a distinctively nailish aspect. However, it also seems that despite humans being agents exercising individual autonomy, collections of humans are awfully good at climbing uphill relative to metrics you can get them to agree to care about. We are all living longer, children are dying less frequently, and we are on average more wealthy. Also like a machine learning model, we often improve these metrics to the detriment of things outside of our collectively agreed upon reward function (externalities) and we don't distribute the average across all people, but that is a discussion for another time. So, I guess my first answer to your question ab...
Read more