IS NORMATIVE CHANGE (IM)POSSIBLE?

People only change when they see a benefit in the change. The benefits or advantages can, of course, vary. Someone who greatly values his health will adapt his unhealthy habits to increase his physical well-being. Others value material things and, hence, will adapt their behaviour to increase their financial gains. There always seems to be some sort of reward or outcome of value required for a person to change. Changing implies uncertainty, insecurity and difficulty. Uncertainty arises from not knowing the outcome of the adapted form of behaviour. Insecurity stems from inexperience in executing new forms of behaviour. Difficulty comes from learning new ways of action, inaction and interaction when changing. So far, this is an accurate summary of the reality as it is. However, we must acknowledge that this is inherently counterproductive to societal progress. Change is most effective when being driven by normative considerations. Normative change means that someone changes as the result of a thorough thought process that identifies ineffective or inefficient behaviour in the context of genuine knowledge production. We certainly could equate genuine knowledge production with the abovementioned benefit and argue that the change is then still driven by expectations of a benefit. This is partially true because genuine knowledge production is the sole objective purpose of our being, existing independently from our subjective perceptions. Money, family, love, health, power and everything else that we would identify as potential benefits that might incentivise us to change are socially constructed; we attach value to them, even though they might not be valuable in objective terms. There is a certain convenience in this situation as we get to determine what is valuable and are only pushed to change when we are deprived of this value. In this situation of double subjectivity, is there a chance to achieve normative change, meaning that we change because it is the right thing to do to fulfil our existential purpose?

False Change: Overvaluing Ourselves

Humans tend to overestimate their capacity to make sane decisions. Proper decision-making is a result of two elements: knowledge and consciousness. The first element, knowledge, describes the degree of familiarity with a subject matter across three dimensions: quantity, mechanism and context. The quantity dimension (not to confuse with quantitative knowledge) is the amount of knowledge one has on a subject matter. For example, when we are talking about history, knowing many dates and events in history would mean that the quantity dimension is developed. When we talk about the mechanism dimension, this person would be able to understand how these events influenced or continue to influence each other. In the context dimension, the person can identify dynamics and effects for other subject matters and derive rules from his observations. If knowledge of all three dimensions is extensive, the knowledge is of high quality. High-quality knowledge is an excellent precondition to making sound decisions. Next, consciousness is another pillar of any good decision. Consciousness in the context of decision-making primarily means that we are reflective on our own state of knowledge, emotion, preferences, strengths and weaknesses. Knowing why we think in certain ways, why we hold certain views, why we exclude other views, and why we feel what we feel is extremely important to direct the outcomes of our decisions towards our goals. It means that we are also conscious of our goals. The combination of being conscious of our current state of mind and our goals necessitates decisions to be made in progressive ways. Knowing about our mental position and goals and making decisions that would move us from our current position towards these goals means that we are changing because we are altering our starting position. Having sufficient levels of knowledge and consciousness and not making decisions that imply change means that we are mentally ill.

If the change formula appears so simple, why is normative change seen so seldom? Obtaining high-quality knowledge is, at least within the quantity and mechanism dimensions, relatively simple and only dependent on how extensively we are working on familiarising ourselves with empiric accounts on those matters. Although the context dimension also requires a certain biological setup to develop, a sufficient degree of knowledge can also be obtained in this dimension through thorough work. The problem is on the side of consciousness. We are not accurately informed about our own knowledge map, emotional dynamics and the roots of our preferences. We might know what we know, feel or like. Some people also know why they know, feel or like things. However, we are mostly unaware of the causes that created the reasons for our knowledge, emotion and preference map. With this lack of self-consciousness, we lack a fundamental element of sound decision-making and, therefore, our ability to change normatively. First of all, the consciousness gap can easily be filled by superficial external influences. We might feel that we like a certain type of music because it is repeatedly played in areas of public life. Or we might feel like we like a certain dressing style because many others wear it. In these cases, we adopt the decision made by others on topics that we are unreflective of. We basically outsource decision-making to others. The decision-making cannot, however, be said to be of high quality because we subconsciously change with our surroundings, which is no normative change. It does not result from reflective thought processes about our knowledge, emotions and preferences. As already not being reflective, a person who moves with the trends of his surroundings will unlikely acknowledge his inability to make independent and informed decisions but portray his decisions as original. He will believe that his current knowledge and emotions map result from his informed decision. Even though the normative dimension that influences his behaviour is defined by external forces, he will not acknowledge this as this would imply subordination. If there were a moment of realisation then change would be inevitable as subordination is in glaring contrast to our objective purpose: genuine knowledge production. Even though this is not known consciously, since it is our existential purpose, this is biologically given knowledge.

Two other forms of dependent change are incentivised and coercive change. The former is achieved through highly attractive incentives, such as financial incentives or other benefits that stimulate us in the context of things we perceive as valuable. As explained above, when we are unconscious about ourselves, we are in no condition to truthfully determine what our preferences are. In this case, incentives can be used to alter behavioural patterns of people. A person who is in line with the existential purpose of genuine knowledge production will not be influenced by outside offers, as only we can engage in genuine knowledge production by ourselves. Via the opposite logic, coercive change can only be successful if there is a fear of something. Fear is the exact opposite of those artificially constructed values we explained above. For example, if power over people is a normative value of a person, then the loss of control is the consequent fear of this person. All our fears are directly tied to our wishes, and those wishes arise from the normative values we have constructed for ourselves. Coercive change is tapping into this dynamic as it endangers the realisation of our values through the threat of violence. Fearing the realisation of this violence and consequently moving away from realising our values, people can change to conform to the wishes of the threat. In either case, change is reactive. We could draw a parallel by saying that this is also a form of response to our surroundings but much more direct. Self-explanatorily, this is no normative change.

Better Forms Of Change?

Change is very much dependent on how accurately we perceive ourselves. The better we understand how close we are to a constant mode of genuine knowledge production, the more likely we are able to adapt our behaviour in accordance with genuine knowledge production. Any other form of change is not normatively driven but externally induced. The difficulty in normative change lies in the dependence on some activation of conscious self-reflection. There is no reliable formula that would predict whether someone can experience such a moment or continue to act accordingly once such a moment occurs. Also, society cannot wait for widespread self-reflective processes to occur in order to progress. For politics, there is a need to manage change. Establishing trends to influence the minds normatively is harmful, just as incentivised and coerced change are. However, if we combine those three dimensions and channel it through the education system under the ideal of genuine knowledge production, we might get a very desirable result, although this type of change cannot said to be normative. Politics can only create a fundament for such normative change through devletist education policymaking. In such an education system, the main focus is on developing the special traits of children so that they can organically realise their potential and contribute to society through genuine knowledge production in their respective areas of strength. The more people are educated with this focus, the more likely they are to develop reflective thoughts and behavioural patterns that help them to change when change is needed to continue to engage in genuine knowledge production.

Structural Change

Of course, this educational approach is a long-term and very indirect way to achieve lasting but extremely reliable normative change. A more direct way of achieving change would be structural change. It is not normative because it is not driven by reflective thought processes but by structural necessities. The structural approach to change is based on the idea that politics crafts legislation in ways that direct citizens to behave in certain ways. It is neither primarily based on banning nor incentivising certain actions but rather an interplay of those two approaches. For example, taxing television devices and their use would reduce their consumption, but banning them would make citizens feel patronised. Subsidising books would make them more attractive to buy, but making them free would reduce their perceived value. But even these measures would not overcome a situation in which citizens actively make decisions to watch television and not read books. In terms of structural change, politics must then design the social structures in ways that lead citizens to perceive books as more desirable to consume than televisions. The most effective way to achieve such a rewiring of our perception is to alter the overarching trigger of the benefits that we talked about at the beginning. People tend to change only when there is a direct personal benefit attached to their change; in terms of coercive change, the benefit is that we do not get to experience negative consequences if we change. In the current political order, the overarching goals are wealth and power. This is given by the political system, which, in macro- and micro-structures, is designed to further those two aspects. Accordingly, citizens naturally assess their behaviour regarding those two goals, and their change patterns reflect that. Structural change taps into recalibrating those goals and building structures around the new and better goal of genuine knowledge production. It starts with defining genuine knowledge production as the ultimate state goal and internalising this as the objective reality. Legislation will inevitably follow to adapt to achieve this goal at the societal level. With such a restructuring, the perceived benefit that people apparently need to change will be assessed in the light of genuine knowledge production and not capital or power. Is this approach normative? No. However, it can advance our society more normatively than incentives and coercion can. Truly normative change can only be achieved individually but requires extended cognitive abilities.