Conscious Choice: The Memetics of Change

November 2006 | From the Editor

The Memetics of Change

If you’ve been following along with us these last few months you’ve undoubtedly noticed that there is a prevailing theme in the Conscious Choice meme these days, and it’s change. This month is no exception. This month is all about massive change.

Conceptual designer Bruce Mau says that “design is invisible, until it fails.” Reflect a moment on the wisdom of that statement. While you’re reflecting, consider that one day in 1982 someone put cyanide in a few bottles of Tylenol scattered on shelves across the Chicago area, and seven people ended up dead. There was a nationwide panic, and within hours every bottle of Tylenol, and eventually every bottle of over-the-counter-medicine sold retail in the United States, was pulled and disposed of, and the “tamper-proof” seal introduced, forever changing the industry and people’s perceptions of product safety.

Now consider that certain corporations, products, and industrial practices in business today are responsible for the death and illness of millions of people every year worldwide, while macro-scale food, drug and environmental regulation and enforcement is abysmal. It’s worse than abysmal, it’s simply a veneer. Worse still, virtually all of this massive, systemic, ecocidal malfeasance flies under the public radar. See The Corporation, Iraq For Sale, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price or a dozen other remarkable documentaries for a glimpse at the truth.

So, naturally, when the public hears hysteria around E. coli in spinach, the response is to pull all the good spinach nationwide and replace it with spinach that comes from the same places, rather than, for example, addressing the need to eliminate CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) which create the massive amounts of waste that breeds the E. coli that seeps into the water table. This is a massive failure of design, yet the story never surfaces in the mainstream consciousness.

Now, as we extrapolate this to systems across the world, we see that the models and practices of industrial society are all failing. We are having to re-invent our world again in order to sustain life on this planet.

And as much as we cheerlead the innovators and try to shepherd change, there are many for whom change causes a tremendous amount of anxiety, and their response is reactionary. This is because change always seeks balance, and whenever something new emerges, something older must step aside. This means systemic change, which means inconvenience, insecurity, and intimidation. This is where author and activist David Korten, profiled inside this issue, warns of the “deep and rapid” changes coming to our society, but also shows us how we can navigate the “Great Turning” to create a more equitable and sustainable world together.

Many recent events surrounding the shift in design and editorial content at Conscious Choice have caused a measure of controversy. We have become targets in both the good and bad sense, but the one constant throughout has been change. Conscious Choice is reflecting the “deep and rapid” changes that are beginning to shape our world. It is a place, I hope, that aspires to both inform and challenge, but also adapt, evolve, improvise. Are you anything like you were twenty years ago? Should you be?

Chatting with friends recently, someone expressed concern that Conscious Choice was expressing “political” opinions, and said to me, “You’re Conscious Choice, you’re not supposed to care about such petty worldly concerns, right? You’re supposed to be about the detached enlightened.”

Oh no. No no no…. Here’s how we see it. To be conscious is to be aware, and to be aware, you must be engaged. To be able to make a “conscious choice” you have to be an educated chooser, and that means understanding all sides of an issue. We aim to speak to the conscious citizen, to help support him or her to successfully navigate the massive changes ahead. We’d like to reach beyond the arcane concepts of competitive “demographic groups”—be they social, economic, gender, racial, or otherwise—and aspire to reflect the values of community. There can be something for everybody, if we all just work together.

There’s no getting around it. Change is hard. Massive change is even harder. The sooner we get used to it, the better. It’s OK to be afraid, and it’s OK to worry. It’s not OK to try and stop it—in the end, you can’t. Embracing it is the only way to go, and we’re here to develop a language, and a method, of coping, managing, and in the end, progressing. Who’s with us?

— Charles Shaw

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