Articulation of personal despair by change agents

Implication of Personal Despair in Planetary Despair (Part #5)

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It is appropriate to note various insightful efforts to articulate despair at reaction to change initiatives. A valuable example is that of management cybernetician Stafford Beer, who argued for an adaptation of Le Chatelier's Principle:

Reformers, critics of institutions, consultants in innovation, people in short who "want to get something done", often fail to see this point. They cannot understand why their strictures, advice or demands do not result in effective change. They expect either to achieve a measure of success in their own terms or to be flung off the premises. But an ultra-stable system (like a social institution)... has no need to react in either of these ways. It specializes in equilibrial readjustment, which is to the observer a secret form of change requiring no actual alteration in the macro-systemic characteristics that he is trying to do something about. (The cybernetic cytoblast - management itself. Chairman's Address to the International Cybernetic Congress. September 1969)

Jim Reeds (Petronius Arbiter, Time Traveller, 2004) has provided a web page commenting on the spurious nature of the following quote and its variants -- purportedly from Petronius Arbiter (210 B.C.) a legionnaire in classical Rome -- and on the number of people who have considered it appropriate in requoting it so widely:

We trained hard . . . but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.

An emphasis may be given to victimization by a shadowy "them", namely those purportedly able to maintain surveillance and block communications. This may be reframed through sophisticated insights into "paranoia" (Paranoid Quotes). With respect to game-playing around change agents, an analysis of associated traps is offered by Gail Golden (Avoiding The 'Change Agent' Trap).

The analysis by Mathew Melko of the development of supposedly beneficial conceptual frameworks and models is also indicative (The Hazards of System Building, Presented at the Foundation for Integrative Education Conference, Oswego, New York, 1969; reproduced in Main Currents in Modern Thought, vol. 269 no. 2):

1. You identify with your system. It cost you blood to build it, and if it is attacked, it is your blood that is being shed.
2. You cannot tolerate tentativeness, suspension of judgment, or anything that does not fit the system.
3. You cannot apprehend anyone else's system unless it supports yours.
4. You believe that other systems are based on selected data.
5. Commitment to systems other than your own is fanaticism.
6. You come to believe that your system entitles you to proprietorship of the entities within it.
7. Since humour involves incongruity and. your system explains all seeming incongruities, you lose your sense of humour.
8. You lose your humility.
9. You accept all these points -- insofar as they apply to builders of other systems.
10. So do I. (P.S. I hope I believe in the cult of fallibility)

This provocative comment might be considered an anticipation of the consequence of the explosion of models, theories, insights and belief systems -- each assuming greater relevance to their context than is widely appreciated within that larger context. With the amplification of this process by internet and web facilities, the emergence of a "blip culture", the degree of information overload, and the erosion of attention span, a "memetic singularity" may be foreseen (Emerging Memetic Singularity in the Global Knowledge Society, 2009). This has fundamental implications for any hope dependent on global consensus on social change -- and for the despair associated with the evident fragmentation.

With respect to burnout, advice is distributed by Women In Higher Education (Advice to Avoid Burnout from a Campus Change Agent, 1998). Global Grassroots: conscious social change for women offers a series of posts tagged "burnout" in relation to their Five Principles and Supporting Practices of Conscious Social Change. The phenomenon of emotional burnout is recognized as very important for people working in the sphere of 'helper' professions, notably among the experts who work in the 'person-to-person' sphere. A helpful analysis is provided for the change agents who participated in its trainings by the Public Fund 'Mental Health', including an indication of the stages of burnout (Syndrome of emotional burnout', Bulletin №1 (3) 2008).

The sense of despair experienced by change agents, but especially the attitude required to respond to it, has been reviewed from a valuable perspective by Val Larson and Mike Carnell (Developing Black Belt Change Agents, iSixSigma, 26 February 2010). Dave Andrews (The Special "Fools-rush-in-where-angels-fear-to-tread": Change Agent's First aid Kit) offers much commentary on the stages and conditions of existential pain experienced by change agents. Those offering tips for change agents typically identify traps the change agent may encounter in the process (Don Jacobson, Tips for Change Agents, GovLeaders.org)

An insightful comment is offered by the Meta System Consulting Group with regard to the significance of the blues as a metaphor for change in emerging from a condition readily characterized by despair, as argued by Paul Kweicinski (aka South Bend Slim):

If the blues teaches us anything, it's that despair is not the only alternative to adversity. But the blues isn't about finding a solution to what's wrong; it's about stating what the feeling is. To change a bad situation, you first have to acknowledge it.

The insidious relation between the recognition of "mass man" and the collective nature of despair is presented in a commentary on the articulation by Anti-Climacus (The Sickness Unto Death, 1849). Anti-Climacus was one of a number of pseudonyms used by Søren Kierkegaard. For Daniel W. Conway and K. E. Gover (Søren Kierkegaard: Social and political philosophy: Kierkegaard and the "Present Age", 2002):

The introduction of the slogan "mass man"...is certainly an instance of the loss of imagination and spiritual identity that Anti-Climacus considers the despair of finitude. But the mass man is a social pathology not inherent in sociality as such. Anti-Climacus is right in considering it a form of despair, but it is precisely a collective despair. It is not merely an individual despair induced by the sociality of human life. The dialectical heart of this text is the insight that despair is a pathology of self in its freedom, a misrelation of the realtional self. The self is freedom" and that is why it can despair. A stone or a lump canmot despair, and just as despair in the individual is dialectical testimony to the spiritual fredom of the individual, so the horrific social pathologies of modern times, the collective despair that is epidemic in modern experience, is dialectical testimony to the spiritual freedom inherent in the social nature of human beings. (p. 57)

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