Change the World?

08:33 Monday, 18 May 2026
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Words: 659

At yesterday's Tinderbox meetup, something came up about the nature of our present circumstances, and the necessity to "change the world."

In recent years, I've had little cause to reflect much here on "the world" and our role in it. That may seem incongruous, given the number of posts I've written about "the world." But few of those, that I can recall anyway, had anything to do with "our role" in particular.

And we do have a role. It's just not what most people probably think of when they think about it, which is why most people think about "changing the world."

The epiphany that came to me many years ago, grappling with my own "existential crisis," is this:

We are not here to change the world. The world is here that we may learn to change ourselves.

This realization came as a consequence of shedding the illusions of "magical thinking." That external factors were responsible for my suffering or happiness. For much of my first marriage, I was profoundly unhappy. But I would cling to the idea that "it'll get better when..." (Some change of circumstances.)

I learned that "it" never "gets better" until you get better.

We have responsibilities to "the world," but our main responsibility is to ourselves. It's hard to live up to that responsibility if you focus all of your attention outward. This is why I say that Marc Andreeson is a fool when he says that he doesn't "believe" in introspection. Or he's simply declaring his abdication of any responsibility for his own actions. Possibly both.

Much of how we regard technology is also a form of magical thinking. The internet triumphalists, "small pieces, loosely joined," the Cluetrain™ crowd, and all of the folks that have come after them, who believed and believe that "this changes everything" promoted magical thinking for the attention rewards. The prophets of a new "golden age."

Bullshit.

Technology changes how we do things. In general, it compresses them in time and expands them in space. It does not change what we do. Our problems lie in the areas of human behavior. Human nature. What we do. Technology does not alter that.

We recently witnessed the Supreme Court of the United States dismantle the Voting Rights Act. Nullify it. They have legitimized racial gerrymandering to disenfranchise minority voters and to secure the power of white supremacists.

Why? Because laws (a form of technology) can't change the human heart. They can mitigate some of its worst defects, but they can't change it. And when you have a majority of members on the highest court in the land harboring those defects, then the law is meaningless.

Bigotry, hatred and ignorance persist in the world, because the people harboring those toxic, misguided notions have little reason to interrogate them. Our culture hasn't found a way to instill the values of tolerance and understanding that isn't perceived as some form of scolding, or self-righteousness.

Anyway, you may have heard the aphorism, "Become the change you wish to see in the world." It's often attributed to Mohandas Gandhi. Because we have the Internet and we're a cynical, skeptical lot, we have a web site devoted to investigating the origin of quotations.

There you will find this quotation from Gandhi, which captures everything if not as succinctly:

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.

You're not responsible for "the world." You're responsible for yourself. If everyone lived up to their own responsibilities, the world would likely be a much better place.

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