Can Thinking Systematically Improve Our Lot in Life?

(Editor's note: The following article concurrently appears on: LAP Progressive, and is used with permission.)

My entire career as a political scientist and journalist has been based on the assumption that if more people would think systematically about political matters, they would act more rationally to promote their own welfare and general well-being.

But this assumption was based on a more fundamental one: that what is going on in the world could be changed by the intentional actions of the human individuals living in it.

But what if this underlying assumption is incorrect?

What if large-scale world events are not like that?

What if they are like the weather, which at least in the past it was said that everyone talked about but no one could do anything about?

(More recently, of course, a number of us have acted on the hope that if we can get enough people to replace hydrocarbon fuels with solar energy we can prevent the world from catastrophic warming. So now we are not just talking about the weather.)

Now obviously it is possible for people to make some changes in the world around us.

The question is whether the small changes that individuals can make will add up to make a difference at the world level, or whether these small changes will cancel out in the wash, leaving world events to proceed in their own merry way.

It's difficult to turn a large ocean liner around, because it has a lot of inertia.

Likewise, social and political institutions have immense inertia, making them highly resistant to change except in exceptional circumstances.

But are there ever exceptional circumstances?

An old political question was whether "great men" could change history.

By "great," I suppose people were thinking of people like Napoleon, Karl Marx, George Washington, or maybe even Albert Einstein.

My answer used to be that such people could indeed change history, but that usually the changes they caused were not what they intended.

Maybe history is like a gyroscope: push it in one direction, and it moves off at right angles in a totally different direction.

So I suppose it is possible that I, and my idealistic friends and acquaintances who also were out to reform the world through our work, have been guilty of hubris — "a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence, accomplishments, or capabilities."

I would prefer to think that the situation is not quite that bad, and that it is possible for individuals to help make the world a better place even if we can't make it a utopia.

Just in my own lifetime, for example, there has been visible progress in tackling the continuing problems bequeathed to us by the age of slavery — "America's original sin."

And so far we have avoided setting off an atomic war that could make the planet uninhabitable or nearly so.

But the large-scale wars in Ukraine and Israel, continuing degradation of the climate, and rise of demagogic regimes clearly indicate that the human race does not yet have large scale social events under decent control.

Maybe we never will.

Clearly there are things we do that do some good, like helping each other on a small scale.

As a famous statement of unknown origin puts it, "It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness."

But we may never know whether our pursuit of large-scale political goals does some good or not. Even so, we need to keep on trying for big improvements, even while recognizing that the task may be beyond our capabilities.

The alternative would be to throw up our hands, focus on our personal lives, pay little attention to world events, and see where we are going when we get there.

I remember seeing a little ditty explaining why we should not get carried away with feelings of futility:

If futility were indeed my creed

to state that fact would be an act

that would negate my creed in deed.

"Onward!" I say. Onward and upward!

Paul F. deLespinasse is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science at Adrian College. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1966, and has been a National Merit Scholar, an NDEA Fellow, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and a Fellow in Law and Political Science at the Harvard Law School. His college textbook, "Thinking About Politics: American Government in Associational Perspective," was published in 1981. His most recent book is "The Case of the Racist Choir Conductor: Struggling With America's Original Sin." His columns have appeared in newspapers in Michigan, Oregon, and other states. Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.