Can Anyone Create Social Change?

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FEATURING MICHAEL BROWNSTEIN - We live in an age when fascism and authoritarianism are rising so fast, we are left feeling more helpless and disengaged each day. It’s impossible for one person to make a difference, we tell ourselves, so we disconnect from reading the news to protect our own mental health, or consider moving to another country altogether to avoid fixing our own. But this sense of helplessness has been cultivated in an individualist society. Overcoming it takes work but is eminently doable. In a new book called Somebody Should Do Something, authors Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelley show how “anyone can help create social change.”

Michael Brownstein is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at John Jay College and Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of The Implicit Mind. His new book, co-authored with Alex Madva and Daniel Kelley is Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change. He discussed it with Sonali Kolhatkar.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Michael Brownstein: Thank you so much for having me, and it's an honor to be here. 

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, let's first talk about what I mentioned the sense of individualist action and helplessness is cultivated, right? I don't know if it's uniquely American, but it is very American that we think of problems, issues, and even ideas and progress in individualist terms, that individuals did this or that, or weren't able to do this or that, right? We don't really think of things in terms of systems. 

Brownstein: Yeah, that's right. So that's the jumping off place for the book, that we were raised with a message about how to make change that me and my co-authors all imbibed as kids, which is basically that there are good guys and bad guys in the world, and that the bad individuals cause the problems and the good individuals act like heroes and come along and vanquish them from time to time. 

It's suffused throughout our culture from John Wayne and Horatio Alger all the way up to our superhero movies today. But I think the more surprising thing is how suffused our concepts about social and political change are with an individualist ethos.