Systems
Urg… blarg… I had writer goals. I had hoped to be chatting about the individual stories that society brings on us by now… but… nope. Ok. I’ve had my tiny tantrum, and hopefully you’re not too disappointed.
The steps I talked about last week, about moving from trauma to hero… That’s the process that you go through to change yourself.
Unfortunately all the changes we make to ourselves, can’t change established systems.
So I’m gonna have to crack into systems.
Let’s go.
A system is an established culture or set of rules, steps or circumstances that need to be worked within in order to navigate life. Our jobs are often systems. We have to go through a set of actions to get where we need to be in order to complete our daily tasks.
Our families function (or dysfunction) in systems which are patterns of behavior, just like professional systems (school, work, government, etc.). These systems are so ingrained we don’t notice them.
For instance… food supply…
We run out of something, we go to a grocery store. We rarely think about how whatever we’re buying got to the grocery store… at least we didn’t think about that until we all ran out of toilet paper in 2020.
And then we all had to learn about where toilet paper comes from an how to deal without it… because the system for getting it to us, was being dysfunctional.
The dysfunction or function of systems within society and family structure is based on routines and patterns of behavior. What we allow in these systems determines how much functioning we can do.
Several weeks ago I talked about bullying. By allowing bullying at a school system level, we allowed bad behavior to continue into adulthood, the workplace, relationships, and society. That’s a system of behavior. That system of behavior and attitude or story of ‘bullying is harmless. All kids face it,’ has made schools dangerous.
I was chatting with a political analyst about corruption and he said something striking. “They’re not going to give up their bad acting (bad behavior) because they’re being rewarded for it,” he told me.
“So what do we do?” I asked.
He grinned (he looks like Hannibal Smith of the A-Team) and replied, “We make their bad behavior non-profitable, and we reward the behavior we want to see.”
When we as individuals interact with the system, we have to walk through it and deal with the culture on our own and figure things out as we go along, like me at my first job at the weird camp. I was alone there. I didn’t know what was normal, or how the system was supposed to behave in order to get an outcome that was favorable to me.
Eventually I realized that working that camp’s system was hopeless and stupid. They weren’t going to change - but I could take what I wanted from the system and what I had learned and use it to change me.
There are two dynamics here - you either change the system, or the system changes you.
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