Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.
Interpretation
Collective efforts toward change can lead to significant movements even if the individuals involved aren't aware of their shared goals.
In this quote, Steven Johnson highlights the organic nature of social movements, where numerous individuals and groups independently start thinking about change, potentially guided by a shared language or ethos. Over time, these individual endeavors converge into a larger collective force or 'wave' that can instigate significant change, illustrating how collaboration and solidarity can emerge without overt recognition of commonalities at the outset.
In practice
During a workshop on community activism, one might reference this quote to inspire participants about the power of grassroots movements.
How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.
The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.
Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen on a more local level end up being more adaptive and resilient because there are more minds involved in the problem.
What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.
For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.
We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.
In an organization that is unwilling to change, find the opportunity to talk and interact with people - figure out why they don't want to change. It could be habits. It could be people's personal equities and reputations are defined by the role they're in or the process they've mastered.
I see many more men who are feminist, or at least who have learned about life in the context of feminism.
Our country's liberation struggle arose as a consequence of the contradiction between colonized and colonizers, between exploited and exploiters. Reformist patterns of nationalist pressure were precluded by the very nature of colonial fascism.
Were all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren't we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we'll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that's all.
No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike. Times change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us.
The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old regime. Only the guiding layers of a class have a political program, and even this still requires the test of events and the approval of the masses.
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