CHALLENGES OF POLITICAL CHANGE

In principle, it is commonly known that change is one of the few constants in our lives. While there is little to no guarantee in many matters, we can rely on things to change, depending on our view of the world. Especially in political terms, change is omnipresent. Not only does politics aim to achieve change in various forms but it is also an integral expectation towards this field by citizens and politicians alike. Regardless of the situation, change accompanies us in political matters – either as an underlying expectation, a necessity or as something that is actively realised. However, change is everything but simple. Neither is it easy to grasp as a concept nor can change be easily achieved in an effective manner. In fact, change can have disastrous consequences and destroy centuries of progress if not administered properly.

In this essay, I am discussing the two biggest challenges to political change: goal displacement and civil rigidity. As always, answers to how to overcome those challenges are provided. In this case, the answers to the question as to how to achieve effective change are touched upon, though the multilayered nature of this complex question requires more attention than is devoted to in this short discussion. However, from treating these two problems in political change, developing a sharpened understanding and eye for those matters is already an important step towards informing future changes processes. Beginning with goal displacement, it is important to mention that the misalignment of priorities and the attached goals not only lead to the non-achievement of societal progress but also increases the distance towards that goal. Based on the devletist idea of genuine knowledge production, detrimental developments in this context would either mean an alienation of a society from its cultural core or the reduction of the cognitive capacities of citizens.

Vectorial Goal Displacement

The most common form of goal displacement is vectorial goal displacement. It describes a situation in which a wrong goal is selected and worked towards. Opposed to the subjective ontological view that attaches a certain validity to freely selected goals on the basis of accepting different perspectives as valid individual realities, vectorial goal displacement is embedded in an objective ontological setting, in line with devletist thinking, that makes qualitative distinctions between views, goals and other normative elements. Rather than accepting views and beliefs for the sake of their existence, Devletism allows us to assess the quality of those views and beliefs in terms of right/wrong, effective/ineffective, progressive/not progressive and so on. The basis for such assessment is provided by a hierarchical model of principles. First and foremost, there is the overarching goal of sharpening our understanding of the universe, which is the purpose of our existence, as we know from the devletist teachings. Since it is the only normative goal that can exist independently, it must be the purpose of our existence. However, this understanding can only be achieved through the process of genuine knowledge production, which is to be placed one level below our purpose of existence. Those two top levels cannot be altered, misinterpreted or in any other way used than outlined here and in Devlet. But since genuine knowledge production can come in very different forms, we cannot prescribe a universal approach to it. This process is dependent on the properties of every individual and their special trait. As long as the behavioural patterns of an individual are aligned with the specifics of the special trait, genuine knowledge production happens and opens the door to effective change. The same can be applied to whole societies since the aggregate of all individual special traits is forming the culture of a society. As long as a nation’s political system is built around this cultural core, change is going to be smooth and effective.

Vectoral goal displacement is a situation in which the political system fails either to identify, respect or operationalise the nation’s cultural properties. Rather than aiming to achieve goals that are logically embedded in the cultural core properties of a nation, the political system is aiming for other goals. Those goals might retain their validity and effectiveness in other cultural contexts and do not necessarily need to be ineffective or detrimental in themselves but if applied elsewhere, they will unfold negatively. The reason for that is an incompatibility between alien goals and domestic behaviour. Within the age-old nature-nurture-debate, this thought is to be placed in the nature camp. It is argued and sustained that, just as individuals, societies have certain biological, and accordingly also psychological, core properties, tendencies and characteristics. Goals that align with those properties, in the sense of the efficiency of achieving them or use for the society in the context of its core properties, will require a society to rely on its cultural core, creating harmonic behavioural patterns. Surely, this does not fully discredit the nurture argument of socialised behaviour, as societies are also changing due to global influences, but our biological core characteristics and the psychological elements tied to them are much more rigid in changing, thus, requiring natural adaptions to happen within socialisation processes as well, if we aim for sustained alteration of a society.

As one of the biggest challenges to change, vectorial goals displacement would pull societies away from their core values and their harmonic behavioural patterns. For example, we can think of a situation in which rulers of a nation aim for the nationwide adaptation of a new religion from a completely different cultural context. Another example would be to aim for an economic strategy that is built around agriculture, even though the nation lies in the desert. Yet another example would be a situation in which the rulers of a nation increase the import of cultural goods, such as music, movies and fashion while being already home to a rich domestic market of those goods. All of these examples describe instances of vectorial goals displacement; the goals imposed by the rulers do not lay in the direction of the goals that can function in the specific cultural context. Since we are looking at extensive and overarching dynamics and societal structures, there are certainly different forms of effective goals for each nation, but being completely off-track would mean that political change is developing for the worse. It follows that vectorial goal displacement must be avoided by understanding of the own society and its culture.

Temporal Goal Displacement

Under temporal goal displacement, we are confronted with a situation in which the rulers of the nation, or the citizens, apply the wrong timeframes to the achievement of political goals. Certainly, being informed by the wrong goals in the first place, as we have seen above, is bad enough, but miscalculating the time required for achieving suitable goals will be inefficient, too. Political measures require different timeframes to effectively unfold. Premature cancelling political strategies in the middle of their development will create unbearable transaction costs without creating a useful outcome at all. For example, education reforms are lengthy. First of all, there need to be 3-5 years of students that experience the new education policies at various levels of their educational career. Then those classes need to graduate. Finally, there needs to be proper monitoring of those classes in the labour market to eventually have some sort of reliable dataset on which assessments of the success of the education reform can be made. Constantly switching strategies will create useless hybrid situations. But being late to political change is also ineffective in its own right. Some courses of policy action are only meant to be in place for a certain amount of time. Economic policy serves as an excellent example since the success of this field is dependent on the constant balancing of different macroeconomic approaches. For example, a nation might want to utilise contractionary monetary policies and austerity measures to bridge an economic crisis and later recover from it. Because such a situation will likely cause significant improvements and the end of the economic crisis, a positive bias might arise that would make politicians reluctant to change this successful policy strategy. Unfortunately, the next crisis will be just around the corner when policies are not adapted to the new circumstances; in other words: when the time is up, the policies need to change.

Sometimes, temporal goal displacement can lead to catastrophic situations and cause vectorial goal displacement. They might have effects on cultural elements of a society, due to decreased policy effectiveness that arises from improper adaptation. Citizens might be more vulnerable to alien ideas and ideologies when domestic discontent with the course of policymaking is rising. Yet another problem, that temporal goal displacement encompasses, is the unawareness of very long-term political goals. Politicians tend to limit their scope of political thinking to very laughable timeframes, not even exceeding 100 years. Politics, in its purest and most beautiful form, is for centuries, not for years. With such timeframes, that appear to overwhelm regular politicians, the political agendas are short and are characterised by a certain planlessness. The purpose of existence moves into the backs of our heads and makes room for the matters of the day. At the aggregate and temporal levels, this implies enormous transaction costs. Not being constantly aware of our purpose of existence and instead being busy with the minor matters that leave us where we are, political change becomes difficult. Where should change lead us if we are so occupied with little things? What value does political change have, when our time horizons are now so limited that we cannot see our goals anymore? Therefore, we need to always remind ourselves that political measures need adequate time to unfold.

Cognitive Capacity Of Citizens: Accepting Change

Humans love to be changed but never to change. In words, we can articulate how important changes can be, that we need them at times or that we are willing to change. However, we never change unless we are physically forced to do so or when structures, regardless of their nature, either do not allow us to behave differently or make such behaviour highly inefficient. Our initial reaction, however, will always be to reject change. Our minds and bodies are highly challenged by different situations and therefore always try to retain a currently functioning situation. Even when forced to change for the better, human beings tend to seek a return to the situation of former comfort. The only way to achieve lasting change at the aggregate level is to make citizens want the aspired change. Either the benefits need to satisfy the most pressing demands, provide unreasonable material advantages or appeal to psychological needs, such as addressing mental weaknesses. Unfortunately, all of these motives are of superficial and material nature and solely aim at satisfying the misconceived values of comfort and power. Due to these values that are so prominent in contemporary political systems, citizens tend to assess the quality of political change solely on the basis of those material aspects. The uncomfortable path towards societal success, namely through conscious work on the own craft, appears to be a demanding, rather than a beneficial, change.

Knowing that politicians utilise this lethargy to gain political power. Through the use of soft power, citizens are pushed into believing that the idea of change into a certain political direction originated from themselves. They not only accept a new political direction but fight at the forefront of it. Once captured by the idea through the various manipulative means of structurally powerful actors, change has already occurred in the minds of those citizens and the material reality of the nation merely follows suit. Now, if that direction happens to be subject to the goal displacement factors from above, reversing the change and redirecting it towards the proper goals becomes twice as difficult. The freshly changed minds now have momentum in the new direction that they think they have found. Accordingly, they will not let this new idea go, meaning a freshly established idea of change needs to first experience a certain life cycle and lose momentum until a redirection can occur. Needless to say, this implies massive transaction costs – potentially over generations. All the time lost during this stagnation is also time lost in effective progress that could have brought us farther. Thus, political change needs to consider the rigidity of the human mind in matters of change. Once it caught fire, however, stopping the change is quite difficult as long it retains momentum. Especially in times when a nation already is in detrimental situations that make the calls for change louder, the new direction of political movement must be an effective one, because the momentum of the new direction, regardless of what it might be, will gain amplified momentum as there will be a positive comparative bias in the context of the ongoing detrimental situation. We can look at the Turkish example here. Over the past 20 years, the Turkish nation drifted into a direction of political inefficiency, economic crisis and societal disruption. The current situation is not sustainable and the calls for change are getting louder by the day. Nearly all directions that promise to move away from the current situation seem to be welcomed. However, if there is a regime or paradigm shift that is also not encompassing the cultural core, the momentum of that change, gained through the acceptance of the politically uneducated majority, will lead the nation into yet another unsustainable situation, costing valuable time, energy and resources. Accordingly, the change elasticity of citizens must be considered in change management as this characteristic can cause long-term inefficiencies.

In the end, change is not only inevitable but also a very important core property of our being. However, successful political change leaves little room for error if we want to maintain lasting progress. While societal advancement is very difficult and slow, societal decline through minor mistakes in change management can unfold its negative effects rapidly, negating sometimes centuries of progress within a couple of decades.