Society in Motion

I think of it this way
Society is a wave.
It is a wave that started millions of years ago when the first tribal humanoids got together and decided to form a cooperative community.
It progressed from there, throughout all of the ages of time, into this modern culture that we know today. The wave is great and gains strength with longevity, so think about that for a minute.

In nature you have tsunamis. Tsunamis never stop, like an action potential traveling through the axons of your nervous system, in certain cases, like a reflex, once it starts it doesn't stop until it hits its destination. In the body, the destination of an action potential are your muscle neurons, with a tsunami that destination is land, in the wave of society, land is extinction.

So enter counter culture.
Splinter Cells from the wider culture, rebellion against conformity, dissent against the accepted "social norms". The unique aspect of a counter culture, if its goal is to change society as a whole, is that instead of branching off and doing its own thing, a smaller "counter wave" with the intention of changing the greater wave of society, must go against the great tsunami of evolution. This is no easy task.

Nothing in human society can be changed by one man. One man may gain more recognition, but no social revolution has ever been accomplished by a single individual. It takes all of those nameless faces that work day in and day out for a goal that they believe in. It takes sacrifice, dedication, and endurance to challenge the wave of society. Take the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr was a great man, an influential man, but he was only one man amongst many that worked relentlessly toward a common goal.

In an abstract sense, the smaller counter culture wave must obtain some kind of motion to challenge and effect the wave of society. We are not subject to our society, society is subject to us. We create it through our participation in it, and this is done on a communal level. In other words, if enough people accept an idea, then the idea becomes an institution and integrated into the greater wave of society. Majority rules.....always.

So how does a little scrappy group like evolver make a difference in the world? Well, coming together as a community is a great way to start, hence this website.
In the modern world the old phrase "change must come throught the barrel of a gun" is an outdated concept. We live in an age of mass communication that has never been seen in the history of the human race. These days change will be more effectively stimulated through the glow of a computer screen. The internet has become the main source of information for most of the modern global population. Evidence of this can be seen in statistical data concerning the sales of newspapers and a substantial decline in the usage of older information providing institutions. So education and information are the greatest tools for the modern "revolutionary".

While one man cannot by himself change the wave of society, one man can initiate the process. That is where it starts. It takes one man, or woman of course, who has taken enough oppression, heard enough dilution, or has discovered a better more humane way of being, thinking, or doing, to decide to step away from the conformation of society and speak out as an individual. While society is in fact a collective wave, the gateway from one mind to the next lies in an individual.

So if you strongly believe in something, speak up. Inform people, educate. Use these tools we have available to us. Ignorance is the greatest adversary to change. Just remember the nature of a great wave, and the wave of society is ancient. It is hard to completely change it in the snap your fingers right now kinda way that our consumer culture has made us accustomed to. It is much easier to move it, shift it if you will, as those that have fought before us have done so in the past, and sometimes this takes a lifetime. You can't expect something as "real" and all encompasing as a societal shift, to happen instantaneously. On that note, any work that is done toward a just and moral shift, regardless of whether or not that change will be seen in a few years, decades, or even generations down the road, are never done in vain. Simply educating and enlightening one mind is a victory. With modern communication tools, however, information spreads much faster than it used to, so the ability for a movement to pick up speed is substantially greater than it was even ten years ago.

So just remember this, humans are communal creatures. Get together with like minded individuals and work together to achieve the change you would like to see implemented in society. Half of that process has already been provided for you if you are reading this blog.

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” -Ancient Greek Proverb

“A nation is only an individual multiplied”
-Mark Twain