I tried a new thing in 2018 where I used an essay writing guide to write a blog post. This is it. The latin root of essay is “to try”, so this essay was me trying to organise my thoughts around a topic. You be the judge of how well I’ve done.
Some of the things which got me started thinking about influence were the recent cricket ball tampering scandal, the fact that Donald Trump is POTUS and general Australian public reactions to Auspol.
Phrases like “societal change” are difficult to define in a measurable way, and it’s difficult to track how influence works on a societal level. In the above examples, did the media blow up the ball tampering thing, hence the public thought they cared, or did they actually care? Does a Trump victory mean that “America” is more right wing than previously, or just less left wing, considering that there are many reasons people voted for him? If there’s bipartisan pushback on processing the ex-Manus Island detainees (I think many are in Port Moresby now), what can the public actually do about it? I guess what I mean is, if society is the sum of the thoughts and the actions of those within it, how and why does it change, and should we even care, or should we just do our thing? For the purpose of this post, assume that I’m confused about what society and culture mean, because I am.
My intuitive sense of how much difference I can make in the world is “very little”, though here I’m arguing against this. I can write a blog, change my behaviour, and maybe influence a few people a little bit, but compared with general trends, the things I do, don’t really matter. If I were a podcaster, had my own tv show or Youtube channel, or became an Instagram model, then I would have some ability to change people’s thoughts and actions, but as Chris Jones Wintergreen with around 30 people that click on a blog link on Facebook once every six months, I’m not really changing minds. A medium influence on a few people is much less overall than a tiny influence on millions of people.
You can define a person by their thoughts plus their actions. I’m not sure much really falls outside of that. You could add in their “connections”, but the connection being real is reliant on thoughts or actions between the two people. You can look at each individual thing as kind of a “thoughtaction”. If we look at the timeline for each thoughtaction, it goes from “I don’t think this thought”, to “I think this thought for the first time”, to “I kind of understand this thought”, to “I feel strongly about this thought”, to “I do the thing associated with this thought”. If you decide it’s something you don’t want do, you can throw it in the bin at any point.
For example, at some point in my life, I’d never heard of veganism (probably for 18 years), then I heard of it, then I was kind of convinced by it based on how I thought about other things, then I wanted to do it, then I did it. I spend a fair amount of time at each step, and there are further gradations within each step. Another example is: at some point I’d never heard of giving money to charity, then for a long time I thought I would like to do it, then I actually did it. And if you add up all my current thoughtactions (not ones I haven’t had yet obviously), that’s me!
If I am introduced to something for the first time by someone who isn’t doing that thing, maybe I think it’s interesting, but I’m probably not going to take it up immediately. That’s why commercials don’t show “this is good”, they show “I use this thing and I’m happy/powerful/successful”. As a general rule, Ray Dalio doesn’t take advice from anyone who hasn’t done that thing successfully themselves at least three times. You can imagine this in practice coming from a wannabe entrepreneur telling you how to start a business, or someone who thinks it’s the right thing to do to give money to charity, but can’t at the moment because they really need to pay off their mortgage as fast as they can to reduce the interest. You know someone actually believes something if they are actually doing it, and you naturally doubt that they truly believe it if they don’t do it. It’s important to lead by example if you want to propagate good behaviour.
The first time I really thought about this was in San Francisco after an enlightening trip to Starbucks to get Greg a coffee. I was waiting in line with my Bernie hat on and the fella behind me says hi, hears my accent, and strikes up a convo about why I’m there campaigning, things about Bernie/Hillary etc. Pretty normal stuff. When I got to the front of the line and ordered the coffee, he insisted that he pay for it. He wasn’t pushy, he just said that he wanted to. Afterwards, I was in a great mood. The actual cost of the coffee made literally no difference to me (it was Greg’s money anyway), but there was something about the random act of kindness that was just nice.
Similarly, scrolling reddit the other day there was a story about a guy who had just a bag of coffee, while the guy in front of him at the checkout was fully laden, so he waved him through and said “just put it on my docket”. For either of them, the extra/saving ~$10 doesn’t really mean anything (they could lose/find $10 and it wouldn’t affect their purchases), but the recognition of that, and acting on the recognition was really nice. This and the above story I put in the category of “random difference”. It’s a first person encounter, but it’s not someone you know. It makes me wonder what would happen if this was a more commonplace thing.
I think the reason that this type of behaviour might propagate through society is that every time it happens, people around move slightly further along the “don’t think” > “think” > “do” scale. That’s kind of how heroes and endorsements work. If you look up to Mandela, Gandhi and MLK, there’s a good chance that you want to emulate what they do and the beliefs they have. You aren’t even close to them in what you actually do and how far you’re willing to go for your beliefs, you try to model certain behaviours on what they believed (their greatness is mainly bourne out in societal changes, so there are many ways they have influenced indirectly, but that’s a whole other thing). Compare that to someone who looks up to Hitler and Stalin, and the type of things they are emulating.
So that’s probably how it works in the end. When you see an action you like, you think about it, then eventually do it. Veganism is just an idea that got to me and I subscribed to, just the same as short back and sides. The more I see it happen, the more I think “maybe it’s normal to buy a stranger a coffee, and I should do stuff like that”.
One of the hardest things about being a person is that it feels like there is a thinking you which is quite separate from the doing you. I know it would be better for me now and I would feel better in the future if I’d vacuumed my room on the weekend, and I definitely had the opportunity to, but the doing me just didn’t feel like it, so I didn’t do it. The thinking me wants to be super productive every day at work, then I could spend less time at work (2023 interjection, this is referring to my old job, it doesn’t work like this for teachers), but the doing me only manages it some of the time. I think a lot of the way I’ve changed in the last few years has been because I’m starting to live more in the way that I think I should live. I’m not saying I’m a hero, I’m more saying that previously I was downright useless at doing the thing I should do rather than the thing that is good and easy at the time. Even now I’m pretty bad at it in many situations, but I’m getting better.
If you’re doing something that you think is the right thing, then almost by definition you would think that the world would be better if more people do it. From Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny: “Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do.” You can do what you want, but you must know that what you do or do not do causes things to happen or not happen in the world. If you think yourself a generally good person on balance (which most people do), then having more people do what you do is reasonably likely to be a good thing for your worldview.
I think there would be less suffering in the world if people ate much less meat, so I’m a vegan (except the eggs from our own chooks) and I am happy to talk about eating much less meat. If I can influence a few people to reduce their meat intake by half, they in turn might all do the same thing to influence others. Thus lessmeatism proliferates. Similarly, some people think it’s important that women and men are represented in their company as they are in society, so they spread that idea. Others think this is a bad idea and they push back by living in a certain way. At the end of the day, regardless of your beliefs, your actions will come down on one side of the issue, so if you feel strongly about it, influencing others is important to things ending up the way you think is best.
If you make what you think is a positive change in what you’re doing, then you hear that someone else has also made that change, that’s great. If they then directly attribute it to you, you’ll not only get a confidence boost, but it’ll make you more likely to think you can influence people, making you realise the consequences of your actions are greater than just what you do, which will make you more likely to make positive change in your life. It’s all upside. Plus it feels good to say to someone, “I like that you did that thing, I’m going to try to start doing it”, because you know that would feel good to hear, so you know you’re making someone happy. This is not news given how good we know gratitude is.
I’ve considered the fact that I might just think that I influence people in some way, but that it’s all in my head. There’s definitely an element of confirmation bias involved whereby I notice things that people do that I also do, and as the things I do change over time, I notice people changing in the same way. In my subconscious that’s me influencing, but in real life it’s just that I’m noticing my change in other people. I have not explained that well, but I know what I mean. Anyway, I think there is at least an element of that involved, but I am fairly certain that some people are changing some things because of things I’m doing. For example, I think it unlikely that my sisters would have taken on a mostly vegan diet if not for my veganism.
I’d love to hear what anyone thinks about this in the comments!