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Individual Liberty is No Longer the Goal
Re-Socializing (the) People
This is the fourth in a series of pieces on instigating social change by focusing less on changing or manipulating people than changing the “register.” I got the word “register” from business ethicist Jerry Davis, with whom I’m working on an initiative called Equitable Enterprise at Institute for the Future. He doesn’t mean changing the cash register, or moving to a blockchain ledger. Rather, he means moving from industrial, growth-based values to ones of mutuality and collaborative commerce.
We have the math and economics to show how a circular economy distributes greater prosperity to more people, more sustainably than extractive competitive one. But shifting from one to the other would require a substantial shift in values. We’re talking about a change of mindset, paradigm, social norms, collective narrative, or “register” from personal profit (and individual survival) to one of mutual prosperity (and collective flourishing).
This, then got me thinking about any effort at social change, and how we may be able to shift from an industrial age model of initiating change by manipulating people, to a model where we work on changing the environment in order to make new attitudes and approaches easier to adopt. Rather than changing people or “getting people” to do x or y, we create the conditions that engender the attitudes and behaviors more conducive to the kind of society we want to live in.
And yes, these are actually also the same sorts of conditions we need in order to train our emerging AIs to serve the long-term interests of humans and other life. If AI’s continue to train on our current social norms, they’re only going to exacerbate our penchant for growth and individualism at the expense of everything else. So the four interventions I’m proposing are as much a way of offering them some alternative pathways as it is for us.
The first two were to denaturalize power (which means helping people recognize the underlying assumptions embedded in our world are inventions and social constructions that we mistake for the conditions of nature) and to trigger agency (giving people the confidence to remake those social constructions in ways that better serve us).
