How do you change a system?
I read an amazing essay in the New Yorker, My Father’s Body, at Rest and in Motion.
It’s by Siddhartha Mukherjee, and it’s primarily about his father’s death, but it’s also about systems, and the work that goes into sustaining them. And how that work is largely invisible, when the system is working well.
“To dwell inside a well-functioning machine is to be largely unaware of its functioning.”
And “ In the late nineteen-twenties, the physiologist Walter Cannon coined the term “homeostasis”—joining together the Greek homoios (similar) and stasis (stillness). The capacity to sustain internal constancy was an essential feature of an organism, he argued.”
And “In shifting physiology’s focus from action to the maintenance of fixity, Cannon (and Bernard) had fundamentally changed our conception of how the human body works. A major point of physiological “activity,” paradoxically, was to enable stasis. Don’t just do something, stand there.”
But the idea that feels the most pertinent to the story of ms. estrada (which follows Lysistrata in its basic premise: a woman organizes a sex strike in order to change her society in a major way), is this: “Such is the power of homeostasis that it’s hard to see a failure cascade coming; everything returns to normal, until normality gives way.”
Homeostasis is the reason that any kind of change is so hard. It’s hard to change yourself, and it’s hard to change the world around you. The systems that make a society function are inherently resistant to change. That’s the whole point of them, to make us all “unaware of [their] functioning.” But in the story of his father’s death, Mukherjee points out a clue to how to change a system: you have to detect when the system is under enough stress that a “failure cascade” is possible. Why are so many women now willing to come forward and tell their stories of sexual harassment and abuse? Because they sense the system is crumbling, that it is under so much stress that a “failure cascade” is possible. In order to tell the story of ms. estrada, we have to see the stress that the system is under, that makes it possible for the women to take it down with one tool that turns out to have extraordinary impact.