When change doesn't affect those who need it the most
When a problem is identified with a large group of people, there is a sort of pressure that arises to change those people accordingly: men could do with being softer, less in their head, less invested in power games, and listen more to the people around them, follow their heart more, etc. Or, the terrible watered down version which inevitably arises from communicating nuanced ideas to billions of people: men are terrible power-hungry people who cannot love anyone and they should feel ashamed for that.
The pattern I'm talking about isn't this distortion that arises to spread an idea more easily, though it's evidently crucial to notice, but about what happens next. Men obviously do not form a homogeneous group, quite the contrary. This means that there will be significant differences in how they receive the push-back. Some will listen to the signal within the noise and the pain, and understand the importance of the heart in masculinity. Others will react the exact opposite way, and double down on cruelty and power, because they feel like they're being manipulated. And others, the subject of this mini-essay, will get utterly crushed by shame, which has been channeled on them because they are the only ones who agree with the premise that men are terrible people.
But what this means is that the most cruel men will not change, and worse, they will double down on their cruelty! And only those who were fairly inoffensive, if not straight up impotent, get affected by the shaming strategy. In general, the tyranny of the path of least resistance is that any widespread change tends to only meaningfully influence those who resist it the least, which means it is either rather ineffective, or might even promote the exact opposite reaction to what the change tried to accomplish in the first place, by spreading shame rather than encouraging healthy change. There are other areas where this happens, but I'd say the tension between men and women is the most tangible and most universal. Other examples include:
§1. When several issues cause a more widespread problem in a computer system (or anything similar), employees often have an incentive to target the easiest ones first, and never address the hardest problems, to get a sense of progress and to please their managers. Because at the end of the day, the employee-manager relationship is closed off from reality, because having the manager on your side is more important than solving actual problems, and strategic employees know that very well.
This means that the wins over the trivial problems will be blown out of proportions and emphasized by the bullshitters, those who are good at playing the social games incentivized in any company of significant size, while the bigger problems will stay unresolved because they require large overhauls, both technical but also social
§2. I would say that the problem discussed above happens with basically every institution or large group of people focused on a single goal. Charities might start from a good intention, but ultimately, there are 2 major forces which steer them to becoming ineffective at addressing anything meaningful: 1) the pressure of making profits of course and 2) solving narrower and narrower problems which feel tangible and meaningful, but ultimately are futile because the system as a whole does not change in a way that is a desirable.
Having to make profits means that the charity is incentivized to appeal to the public, instead of focusing on solving real problems. This means its ability to pull the emotional strings of people is more important than the ways it can impact the real world. Targeting incredibly narrow issues, such as the well-being of pandas in Central China, has the advantage of providing a specific goal which is small enough that it gives people a sense of progress, unlike let's say targeting the roots of the entire system which gives rise to homelessness or any systemic problem. Thus the path of least resistance once again goes completely counter to the big picture goal of making a positive change on the world.
§3. When several teams in a company are problematic, there will be the most pressure put on the team that is the "nicest" in a sense, the one most inclined to comply to orders. The most problematic teams are so uncooperative that they do not listen to anything, which means that again, the biggest problem isn't actually addressed and often made worse, because it is being obscured. This can be seen as a smaller and far less violent of the scapegoat dynamic.
§4. Similar to the masculinity issue, religion tends to devolve readily into messages of shame, which again, only spread with those who are already compliant to authority, while the most insensitive people simply walk away from religion altogether.
What can be done to avoid this deeply problematic dynamic? The fundamental issue pointed at here again and again is that local power structures dictate behavior far more than global concerns, and that the former does not lead to good outcomes for the latter. In other words, doing well within a company, or a team, or a charity, is very rarely aligned with what actually helps people outside of it.
In my opinion, there is no winning move within the current system, because it has its own demands 1, therefore it is always better to minimize the number of middlemen and dependencies to it. You can be a lovely person to your neighbors or family and help them with all sorts of things, but this sense of care does not really scale beyond that local influence.
And I think that is completely fine. Scale is a God which I simply do not worship, a demon really in my eyes, which possesses people to act in its name while unconscious of the consequences of their actions. Scale tells you that spending time with a neighbor is meaningless compared to making millions of dollars which can then be given to charities acting all over the world, but what has been the result of our "global" world? Ironically, more disconnection than ever. A world where an increasing number of people feel like they do not belong anywhere.
Society is fundamentally not aligned with human quality of life because the technological system is a hyper-complicated collective which must maintain and grow itself at all costs, including the devastation of ecosystems and the utterly dead unworld we live in. This fundamental lack of alignment, magnified by the selfish individuals this world raises, is why we see again and again the disastrous consequences of people pursuing their local best interests, because the system which binds all these decisions together simply does not account the quality of life of human beings. Thus, how can companies, charities, institutions, "culture", governments and the economy get out of the tyranny of the path of least resistance? They can't, because those structures are precisely the problem.
1 As is discussed in The Technological System by Darren Allen
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