The sparks of revolution

The sparks of revolution
November 20, 2001
By Peter Stair

There is a truth lurking within our minds. We know it, but we don’t yet realize it. We’re afraid to believe it, but when we do, we are more joyful. If most humans realized it, there would be a revolution. We regularly tell each other its opposite.

It is this: we can have enormous influence on each other.

Consider standing ovations. They start when one, two, maybe five people stand after an applause begins. As others decide whether they agree with this assessment of the performance, a few more stand. Then a few more. All of a sudden, everyone’s on their feet.

Since there’s usually a pause before the whole crowd stands, we know the ovation could have just fizzled. This makes it particularly exciting if we stood at just the right moment — the critical point — so it feels as if we pulled the hesitant members of the audience from their seats. We probably did.

Because we fail to see, truly, that the world works like standing ovations — with critical points and sudden changes — we miss the critical opportunities we have to influence the world around us.

It’s not that we don’t have lots of evidence from the natural world. It is replete with examples of negative feedback loops (equilibrium) apparently tipping into positive feedback loops (self-perpetuating change). A neuron doesn’t fire until it receives just enough stimuli to push it over the edge. The chain reaction of an atomic explosion requires a critical mass of uranium. The ketchup sticks in the bottle until a single tap pushes it all out. The world’s population suddenly shot up from one to six billion. Colloquially, we even say that one straw of hay breaks the camel’s back.

The problem is that we prefer to view ourselves as powerless non-participants in a story of life. We attribute real power to characters like “inflation,” “Israel” and “General Electric,” forgetting that these are abstract names for the actions of millions of people. And we like to pit these characters against each other: The “Federal Reserve” fights “inflation” and tries to influence “the invisible hand.” “China” faces off against “Taiwan.” When we tell the story this way, it’s simple and exciting.

The few human beings that we consider characters in our story, we make into heroes — unrealistically glorified individuals. We like to say that Abraham Lincoln “freed” the slaves, that Charles Darwin “discovered” evolution and that Rosa Parks was “responsible” for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. How ridiculous! In saying such things we give these people credit for the actions of thousands of other people.

Take Darwin and evolution. His father and others had discussed the same idea around the dinner table, in the context of seminal thinkers like Malthus, Hutton and Lamarck. Indeed, the concept was ripe, as Alfred Wallace proved by independently writing of it a few years after Darwin. Did Darwin “discover” evolution or did he brush off the final traces of dust, the lucky man to have collected a critical mass of others’ ideas?

Or better yet, consider one of our favorite heroes, Rosa Parks, the black woman who famously refused to sit in the back of the bus. We so often play up the spontaneity and romance of her refusal that we ignore the real context. This was neither her first act of protest nor the first time a black person refused to sit in the back of a bus in Montgomery. Did she cause the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or was that the work of thousands of people? Isn’t it more accurate to say that she was the woman who refused to cooperate with an unpopular policy at the right time — the critical point?

Of course, these critical moments are noteworthy: they signal an important shift. But which is more important, that there was a standing ovation, or that John Doe participated?

When we talk about someone single-handedly causing the standing ovation, we concede our power to them. To say that “Rosa Parks caused the Montgomery Bus Boycott” is to suggest that others, including ourselves, didn’t have a role, that we were merely spectators. In the same way, we speak of “markets” as if they existed independent of people like us, or “the government” as if it weren’t a creation of citizens like us. So we feel small, to our own detriment. We complain about politics, but we don’t vote. We complain about single-minded pursuit of profit, but eagerly work for and own companies doing just that.

Advertisers — people whose livelihood depends on creating mini social trends — are not fools. They understand how powerful we can be as billboards. So, at every opportunity, they plaster messages on our chests, backs, butts, ankles, arms, foreheads, shoulders and legs. People who like our clothing, for example, buy their own and then advertise to the next customer.

But this advertising strategy only works when we don’t see what we signify to others. We’re not wearing five-inch letters spelling “Tommy Hilfiger” because we want to recommend the product to our friends; we’re wearing it because we feel powerless and want to associate ourselves with something we do consider powerful. We’re even willing to pay a premium for the association.

Why are we so willing to deny responsibility for our actions? Perhaps because advertisers try to convince us otherwise. Perhaps because we’d be ashamed to look at what we’re endorsing. Perhaps we’re scared, lazy or complacent. Ultimately we deny responsibility because we don’t want it.

But we are influential, and that means we’re responsible. Let’s recognize that we’re turning our planet into a sauna, depleting our water tables, fraying our social fabric and seeing thousands of symbolic “canary species” die in the mineshaft that we’ve made of our habitat. And the reason we live in a world like this is that we’ve diffused responsibility onto others, or onto “inflation,” “China” and “General Electric.”

Let’s also recognize that we each have the power to turn this situation around. Standing ovations don’t happen unless enough people stand at the right time, and now is the right time. We can take the Caltrain instead of driving. We can be friendly to strangers, eat less meat and sell our stock in Nike. And we can know that we’re having more than a microscopic impact, because others are watching.

We don’t even have to wait until we can agree on a policy or articulate a step-by-step vision. This will come — after we change ourselves. “Political infeasibility” is too often a euphemism for procrastination.

To paraphrase Mohandas Gandhi, we can BE the change we want to see in the world, starting today.

And once we take a stand, there’s a chance others will join us in ovation.

Peter Stair is a junior studying human ecology. He hopes the difference he makes is positive. He likes your e-mails at pstair@stanford.edu.