“We can’t impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.”
~Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems
What do you think of Donella Meadows’ leverage points for systems change?
Donella Meadows is formidable. Nevertheless, my perpetual concern with any model is - how to implement it? How to put it to work for some useful purpose?
What that in mind, an inventory of potential leverage points is certainly useful. But nothing much can come of it until particular systems are defined and specified. For anything complex, this will generally require decomposition into subsystems.
For example, I generally consider changing “modernity” as a comprehensive system to be overly vague and not affording leverage for any specific change. It’s tempting to just escalate to the extreme end of Meadows’s scale and set out to change the modern “paradigm” or “mindset”, but what would that look like really? If any one of us trades in “modernity” for some other paradigm or mindset, how exactly will our lives then be? (Will we still be posting on the 2R online forum, for example?)
My interest is more in human-scaled systems changes. Things like how do we eat? How do we travel? How do we construct dwellings? How do we conduct conversations? What do we plant in our gardens? How do we educate children? And so on. Any one of these topics might be mapped in systems terms, and if change is desired in any of those systems, then exploring Meadows’s leverage points may be of use.
On the larger topic of metacrisis or polycrisis response, there is another thread going already. My question there again was human-scaled - who is the responder?
I think both are interesting. Things like how we eat, travel, converse, build etc. are shaped by our deepest values and assumptions about how the world is and what is real, relevant, and meaningful, no?
Have you encountered the work of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective on Hospicing Modernity? I find their work very interesting in terms of practices and reflective exercises for how we might go about starting to “compost” modernity on the individual level and generally find their approach quite down-to-earth in a way I admire. Would be curious to hear your thoughts on it.
My response is posted in this thread: What does "hospicing modernity" mean?
A bit more here … the challenge is that “modernity” writ large is both practically necessary and equally inevitably headed for disaster. Machado do Oliveira sees the second half of that clearly. Her book sits on my shelf about 12 inches over from Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. My current mission is to make both of those sorts of views work together. They can - but it takes some carpentry.
@catherinet Yes, yes, this is the “structural humility” in my model. Same idea, different language.