A Roadmap for Social Transformation

Overview

The foundation of our society derives from our beliefs and values. These guide our interaction with ourselves and other people, which becomes formalised in our social structures. Once erected, structures from different segments of society interlock and become mutually reinforcing with the beliefs and values upon which they were founded. As a result, we cannot fundamentally revise any one of them without unsettling the structure as a whole. We need to tackle all of them simultaneously.

What I’m suggesting is a grassroots movement for social change. It needs to be global in its sweep so that it cannot be eliminated by the present power structures. It needs to be all-inclusive so that there is no need to fear it beyond uncertainty inherent in change itself. And its success needs to arise from tangible benefits that it has to offer rather than from our ability to enforce it or the inability of the present system to sustain itself.

To this end, I suggest an approach that has three complementary facets, the responsibility for which lies with those of us who wish to transform society:

• Personal growth, so that we can identify a better way to live, and persevere with our efforts to create it.
• Raising of social consciousness, so that the benefits of this way of life become widely recognised, and the drive to create it widely adopted.
• Overhauling of our existing social structures by creating new ones that work better and render the current ones obsolete.

Personal growth can be accomplished by actively seeking insights on how to live – mostly from literature on the subject, observation and personal experience – and putting them into practice. The process is by no means easy and requires a great deal of time and effort, but at least it is under our control.

The growth of other people is not under our control and may be the most difficult aspect of the transformation. The difficulty lies in the conformist mentality of the majority of the population, which leads to unconscious internalisation and irrational defence of existing social norms. The mentality can be challenged directly, by undermining their tendency to conform to social norms, as well as indirectly, by undermining those norms.

Overhauling of the present social structures is a collective effort. A considerable number of initiatives with this objective have already been started. The challenge lies in understanding how each one contributes to the overall undertaking and leveraging its strengths to complement the other initiatives. I have tried to do this by listing the initiatives that I find the most promising and describing the role that they can play in transforming the aspect of society that they deal with – mythology, lifestyle, child rearing, education, economy, judiciary and media.

The most important message to take away from my proposal is that social transformation is not something that is beyond our reach or that we leave to other people to worry about, but something that unfolds in our midst and that our actions contribute towards.