Can We Change the World?

I heard a question today: Can we make the world better?

I was stymied. I found I could not give a yes or no answer. I did, however, know that I had an answer. The first point seemed obvious to me: Those given to change a system are not necessarily those given to improve a system. Furthermore, those given to change a system are, statistically, the least likely to improve a system. On these points, the obvious answer is no, we cannot make the world better. Howbeit, though, that there are great reformers of systems, that there are instances where the world has been made better?

The next point was more depressing. Few have the power to change the system. In recent history, the last two presidents of these states have been fundamentally opposed to some system. Their opposition was a major catalyst to their success. In both cases, the systems seem to get the better of the conflict. A system is often too great for an individual to conquer, even to those governing the system.

If those running the systems are slaves to the system itself, and those who are outside the system are incompetent for improving the system, how can the system be changed for the better? Those who are part of the world, the class of people who want good for the world, are slaves to the world. Those outside the world, if they are capable of changing the world, are invaders of the world incapable of improving it.

Yet there is a counter to all this. The system is too great to be changed by anyone, but anyone can change himself. You cannot bend the spoon, or affect the Matrix, but you can bend yourself.

It comes into my mind that the world, not in itself necessarily a bad thing, is an imperfect thing. The systems we create, that is our world, and we would not need them but for each other and ourselves. The word is not within the category of things which can be improved because it is only a reflection of ourselves. To change the reflection is impossible, but to change that which is reflected, namely ourselves, is.

The world, a certain rock falling through space, cannot be either good or bad, cannot be changed for the better. The world, our interrelated reality, is only a spoon.

Can we make the world better? No, but we can make one tiny aspect better. You, today, can make yourself better, can choose to seek and love the good, can practice and hone virtue. Perhaps a critic would say that such a change is irrelevant, a pinprick. I dissent from this opinion, but will take my point further. As virtue increases in a person, those virtues infect the world, infect other men. One man, being virtuous, is smaller than a pinprick; he is a virus which can consume the body.

So, it is my opinion that the world can and cannot be changed for the better. If you intend to change the world for the better, I doubt you will. If you seek out, if you can come to know, the good, you may find that along the way, you brought that good into the world.