Can you be the change you’d like to see? Three US philosophers aim to offer hope

Can one individual truly change the world? In our age of discontent, when so many people feel frustrated, powerless and disconnected from those around them, this is a cardinal question.

US philosophers Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva and Daniel Kelly believe individuals can make a difference. In 14 short, lucid chapters, their new book offers a framework and examples designed to activate the agency most people don’t realise they have.

Review: Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change – Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva and Daniel Kelly (MIT Press)

The authors aim to show readers how certain personal choices can alter the “structures” and “systems” that govern the myriad decisions we make, usually quite passively. As such, their book aims to empower and inspire.

Written for a general audience, the gist of their argument is captured by the words of US environmental activist Bill McKibben. “The most important thing an individual can do,” he once said, “is become somewhat less of an individual.”

This book is timely. In the Anglosphere, and further afield, many people are unhappy. Public rallies have become commonplace, from student protests in Indonesia to Australia’s recent marches for stricter immigration controls. This feels like a historical turning point, but who’s doing the turning and to what purpose?

Many see a world awash with serious problems: climate change, wars, poverty, species extinctions, unaffordable housing, racism, gun crime, sexism, drug addiction … the list goes on.

One response has been a widespread loss of belief that joining an established political party or even voting in an election can achieve change. Another response has been the new, right-wing, ethno-national politics, seen in the United States, Hungary, Italy, France and elsewhere.

What, then, are the other options for aspiring change-makers at the grassroots? Brownstein, Madva and Kelly focus on the US and, by implication, other countries where neoliberal values have greatly altered peoples’ self-understanding since around 1990. In these contexts, the trio argue, an unhelpful either/or choice presents itself.

You can assume personal responsibility and try to address problems one quotidian act at a time (recycling waste, offsetting air travel or going vegetarian). Or you can attempt to “change the system”, be it capitalism, mortgage finance or the national migration system. However this is “a terrible choice, since the first seems ineffective and the second beyond our reach”.

“This book is about getting unstuck,” the authors continue: “our most powerful personal choice [is] to work together with others […] to build systems that help people make better choices.”

Sparking change

The authors are strong critics of the “self-responsibilisation” that big fossil fuel, tobacco, betting and other companies have foisted on people to head off real systemic change. They advocate an approach in which individuals focus on those activities most likely to trigger other people into changing entrenched structures.

Quoting 19th-century anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass’s famous refrain that “power concedes nothing without a demand”, they cite historical examples of change-makers who got results.

These include a number of Americans: Candace Lightner, founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving; Patricia Devine, whose anti-bias workshops have done much to counter unconscious racism in the US; Chris Smalls, the Amazon employee who sparked a certain revival of US trade unionism; and the late Harlon Carter, a key member of the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Others highlighted include pioneering Nigerian anti-colonial feminist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and University of Toronto philosopher and refugee sponsor Jennifer Nagel (whose inspiring Room For More group raised funds to settle war-affected Syrians in Canada, showing the power of collective action even on a small scale).

These examples range across the political spectrum. Devine’s powerful workshops take participants beyond a “tick box” approach to racial equality. They illustrate the authors’ key point: changing individuals’ sense of self offers the best hope for creating better structures and systems.

More historically, Carter’s work in the NRA successfully drew strong links between the right to bear arms and freedom as a core value of US citizens. The NRA (for better or worse) has exerted an outsized influence on US law and custom since the mid-1970s.

None of these people were especially powerful when they first became politically active. But they demonstrate how individual actions beginning at a grassroots level inspired others to join the fray. Implementing and sustaining change requires other people to step forward and become active.

Tipping points

In many respects, the book is inspiring. The examples show how some ordinary people can become change agents without, metaphorically, having to climb Mount Everest.

The authors are clear many “systems” and “structures” need to change. Depending on your politics, these range from public school curricula to right-to-die legislation to land-zoning rules to national voting systems. In critiquing current arrangements, they argue, people will change themselves and others to various degrees – though not always.

The authors chide the #MeToo movement for its individualism, arguing an aggregation of voices, some famous, substituted for durable, collective organising against male sexual predation suffered by women. #MeToo, they write, was more about complaint than about designing alternative structures that will mitigate sexual abuse.

The authors are interested in how, eventually, positive feedbacks and social tipping points – where lots of people voluntarily support significant change in a short space of time – can be created when a few people take action. (There’s an overlap here with British geoscientist Timothy Lenton’s just-published monograph Positive Tipping Points, which identifies the preconditions for rapid societal embrace of major changes).

It usually takes years of prior action before a tipping point can be crossed and new structures instituted and widely accepted. We’ve seen this with attitudes to same-sex marriages and, further back in time, with public controls on smoking.

Somebody Should Do Something aspires to be a hopeful “can-do” book, without being naïve. (“Changing the status quo is far from a fair fight,” the authors rightly note at one point). It’s a measured call to arms, noting “structures” and “systems” aren’t always enormous ones, such as the US national healthcare system, which can appear beyond the influence of ordinary people. Many are close to hand, such as local government rules or the workplace culture of a small employer.

At several points, the authors remind readers that one of the greatest transformations in human history – the virtual doubling of an average human lifespan in Western countries – occurred in less than 50 years (beginning in the late 19th century).

This change arose from intersecting actions, which created new norms, rules, regulations and institutions. Along with scientific developments and medical research, changes in public health have been sparked by advocates in areas such as food safety, personal hygiene practices and workplace safety. This was a revolution without the equivalent of a vanguard party, political coup or central plan. It was a fortuitous convergence of initially separate arenas of change.

However, the second Trump administration’s rapid and ferocious attempt to incinerate various systems and structures that work well – for instance, its cuts to USAID and attacks on the EPA – points to some key weaknesses in the authors’ argument. Aside from a whole set of military, theocratic and other authoritarian regimes, many of the world’s democracies have undergone a profound power shift.

Exceedingly large businesses and their chief executives act as unelected governors (witness the world-changing commitment to AI led by Google, Microsoft and others). Elected national governments often seem out of touch or obliged to dance to someone else’s tune (for instance, that of money markets). Meanwhile, trade unions are relatively weak, individualism is rampant, and wealth inequality has soared. Many powerful, self-interested, businesspeople support divisive and destructive figures such as US President Donald Trump. The political Left has been left figuring out how to respond.

Brownstein, Madva and Kelly have virtually nothing to say about this. The authors are right to suggest more of us need to stop being spectators and start being “the people who change systems that change people”. But the magnitude and scope of change needed to tackle various present-day injustices is simply daunting.

Large-scale, sustained, collective responses are needed to instigate changes that will benefit millions of people at home and overseas. Sometimes these have to be militant and pose risks to participants, as we saw in the successful ousting of the Sheikh Hasina government in Bangladesh.

The more achievable changes the authors focus on certainly matter – such as ongoing advocacy by DREAMers (young Californians brought to the US by parents as undocumented child migrants) for new laws supportive of undocumented migrants in the US. But structures and systems are multiple, intersectional and tiered.

As US Democratic senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has repeatedly said, “big organising” is required. Trump has already achieved this with the MAGA movement. And the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor offers a glimmer of hope for otherwise divided and dispirited US progressives.

Strength in huge numbers is surely the only way to shape the major systems and structures of our time. This is not to discount the many smaller ones shaping our lives, but to urge focus where it matters the most.