DMB Digest: The Status Quo of Change
or Slamming Brewskis on the Perpetual Yard-Couch of the Mind.
Change. Growth. Progress. In general, we regard these things positively, right? I mean, who writes stunning rock ballads and epic poetry about the status quo and stagnation? We want change. And we’re so down with growth and learning that we welcome new thoughts and relish the idea of admitting we were wrong…oh, wait.
Hmmm. So, scratch that. We hate change and resist it at all costs, instead doubling down on what we know to be true. Because, after all, I’m right and you’re wrong.
Okay, I’m confused. How can we insist on both change and status quo at the same time? It’s as if we want life outside of ourselves to continually get better and better while life inside of ourselves is allowed to simply sit back and chug brewskis on the perpetual yard-couch of our minds. (Nothing beats sitting on a yard couch on a crisp, autumn afternoon, am I right?)
While we advocate for growth, progress, and betterment, I feel like we are suspicious of it at the same time. Try this little experiment in your home. Select a topic for which you have maintained an expressed opinion, and then thoughtfully announce to a loved one that you now think the opposite. e.g. “You know what, honey, I’m gonna eat less bacon because of what modern health sciences have to say about the negative effects of high levels of nitrates in the human diet.” or “I think we should replace our gas stove due to the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning.”
Odds are the response you receive will be something along the lines of: “They’ve gotten to you, haven’t they! No more 4chan for you!”
Perhaps that’s being a tad dramatic, but you get the point. Changing one’s mind on things these days has the tendency to make one look impressionable, or wishy washy. It’s an admittance of wrongness. And if you were wrong once, who’s to say you won’t be wrong again? Repeatedly. (Personally, I’ve not experienced this, but I’ve heard it’s a thing.)
Alternatively, you have to make up your mind about everything, immediately, and then never change it. This is why partisan camps and tribes are so important these days. Group think can save us from having to figure out what we think about so many things that we’ve never had time to consider. If I identify as an urban hipster, and I’m caught off-guard by a question about the ethics of tariffs on Columbia and its effects on my favorite coffee shop, I can simply refer to the urban hipster playbook: “I only come here for the ambiance. I get my beans directly from a cooperative of native Mayan farmers living in the highlands of Chiapas who have been smuggling their product across the Mexico-Texas border on the same three mules for over a decade.”
Problem solved, and I didn’t even have to think about it, much less understand anything about the question or its underlying principles. Trouble is, if we actually want to learn and grow and better ourselves, this kind of blind, partisan allegiance is crippling. Not only that, it’s antithetical.
The same thing goes for our society. If we want it to improve, we have to value and promote the ability for our leaders to change their minds. We have to advocate for the ability to be wrong. We have to uphold the value of making mistakes and learning from them. We have to learn to argue a point while conceding the possibility we could be wrong—even completely wrong.
For you see, accomplishing change simply by expelling all the idiots and installing all the righteous, isn’t actually change at all. Quite the opposite. It’s a doubling down on what we know is right, because everyone else is wrong. Turns out, this kind of behavior is exactly the status quo. And we accomplish it all the time…in the name of change.
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