Influence, Responsibility, And Learning To See Ourselves As Part Of The Whole
Society is easy to talk about as though it were something separate from us. We say society has changed. Society has a problem. Society needs to do something. Society values the wrong things. Society is becoming better or worse.
Sometimes those observations may be accurate. But there is something hidden inside the language: Who exactly is society? Governments and institutions are part of it. Businesses are part of it. Schools, religions, communities, media, technology, laws, economies, and cultures are all part of it. But so are we.
Society isn’t simply the environment surrounding us. It is also something we participate in creating. That doesn’t mean any individual person controls the society in which they live. We don’t. But once we recognize ourselves as participants rather than merely spectators, a different set of questions becomes available. Not simply: What is society doing? But: What am I contributing to the society I’m criticizing, supporting, changing, or attempting to understand?
We Enter A World Already In Progress
Much like family, none of us begins with a blank page. We’re born into existing cultures, economic systems, laws, technologies, traditions, institutions, social expectations, and conflicts. We don’t choose most of them. We learn a language someone else developed. We inherit concepts and categories created before we were born. We are taught what behaviors are considered acceptable and unacceptable. We inherit arguments that may have been happening for generations.
And because these things surround us from childhood, they can become so familiar that we stop seeing them as things that were created at all. They simply appear to be the way things are. Until we encounter another way. Travel can do that. Education can do it. History can. Meeting people from different backgrounds can. Sometimes merely encountering an idea we have never considered is enough to reveal that something we assumed was universal was actually cultural.
That doesn’t automatically mean the alternative is better. It means we’ve gained perspective. And perspective gives us something to examine.
Society Influences Us Before We Understand The Influence
Social influence is unavoidable. Human beings learn from other human beings. We watch. Imitate. Compare. Cooperate. Compete. We absorb language, customs, expectations, values, and standards from the people around us. Even rebellion is partly relational. We need something to rebel against before we can define ourselves in opposition to it.
The question therefore isn’t whether society influences us. It does. The more useful question is: How aware are we of that influence? Why do we consider one kind of life successful and another unsuccessful? Why do we want the things we want? Why do certain appearances matter? Why do particular opinions feel normal? Why do we consider some occupations prestigious? Why do we believe people should reach particular milestones at particular ages?
Sometimes we’ll examine those expectations and decide they make perfect sense. Sometimes we’ll discover that we’ve spent years pursuing something we never consciously chose. That is where social awareness becomes personal development.
Participation Is Not The Same As Control
Society may be the clearest example of the difference between control and influence. I cannot individually control millions of other people. Neither can you. We don’t personally determine an entire country’s laws, economy, culture, institutions, or political decisions. We can participate in some of those systems. We can influence them to varying degrees. But we don’t control them.
That distinction can prevent two opposite mistakes. The first is believing that if we care enough, argue enough, or become sufficiently convinced of our own correctness, everyone else should behave according to our preferences. The second is believing that because we cannot control the whole, nothing we do matters. Neither is particularly useful.
Our sphere of influence may be small compared with society as a whole. But small is not the same thing as nonexistent. We influence the people we interact with. The businesses we support. The information we repeat. The standards we accept. The behavior we reward. The work we perform. The communities we participate in. The things we create. The things we teach.
Our individual contribution may be tiny when measured against billions of people. But billions of individual contributions are exactly what society is made from.
The Crowd Doesn’t Remove Individual Responsibility
Groups can do strange things to individual judgment. Something can become normal because enough people are doing it. An idea can begin feeling true because we hear it repeatedly. Responsibility can become diluted because everybody participated. We can tell ourselves: That’s just how things are done. Sometimes that’s simply an observation. Other times it’s how we avoid asking whether we should be participating.
The fact that a behavior is socially accepted doesn’t automatically make it wise. The fact that a belief is unpopular doesn’t automatically make it wise either. Being different isn’t the same thing as being correct. Conformity and rebellion can both become substitutes for thinking. If our position is simply whatever the crowd believes, the crowd is doing our thinking for us. If our position is automatically the opposite of whatever the crowd believes, the crowd is still doing our thinking for us. It is merely controlling us in reverse. Individual judgment requires more work. We have to examine the issue itself.
Information Changes The Scale Of Society
Technology has dramatically changed how much of society we can see and how quickly society can influence us. For most of human history, our immediate social environment was relatively small. Now we can wake up, pick up a phone, and immediately expose ourselves to the opinions, conflicts, tragedies, accomplishments, advertising, fears, desires, arguments, and lifestyles of people across the planet.
That has enormous benefits. We have access to information that previous generations could barely imagine. We can learn from people we’ve never met. Communities can form across geographic boundaries. Ideas can travel almost instantly.
But access creates another responsibility: We have to decide what we allow into our attention. Not every problem we can see is ours to solve. Not every argument requires our participation. Not every piece of information deserves equal credibility. And not everything that produces an emotional reaction deserves to be immediately repeated.
Technology has increased our ability to influence one another faster than it has necessarily increased our wisdom about how to use that influence. That makes attention, judgment, and self-regulation increasingly important social skills.
Other People Are Not Abstractions
One danger of thinking at the societal level is that people can turn into categories. Demographics. Political groups. Economic classes. Religions. Generations. Professions. Races. Nationalities. Statistics. Those categories can be useful when we’re trying to understand patterns across large populations.
But categories aren’t people. The closer we get to an actual individual, the more complicated the picture usually becomes. Someone may fit a statistical pattern in one way and completely violate it in another. That is why perspective needs depth. We should be capable of looking at the larger pattern without forgetting that the pattern is composed of individual human beings. And we should be capable of understanding an individual experience without automatically assuming it describes everyone. Both views contain information. Neither is sufficient by itself.
Society Reflects What We Reward
One of the simplest ways we participate socially is through what we reward. Attention is a reward. Money is a reward. Status is a reward. Approval is a reward. Votes can be rewards. Clicks can be rewards. Imitation can be a reward. When enough people consistently reward something, we should not be surprised when society produces more of it.
This doesn’t mean we individually created everything we dislike simply because we live within the system. It means participation has consequences. If we complain about a behavior while continually rewarding it, there is a contradiction worth examining. If we say we value one thing but consistently support another, that is information.
The same principle applies positively. If we want certain qualities to exist around us, we can help make those qualities valuable. Competence. Reliability. Honesty. Creativity. Responsibility. Compassion. Courage. Discipline. Independent thought. We don’t need control over society to reinforce those things where we actually stand.
Learning To Disagree Without Losing Perspective
Living among other people guarantees disagreement. Different people have different histories, priorities, interests, values, information, abilities, and interpretations. Some disagreements can be resolved. Others probably cannot.
A functioning society therefore requires something more complicated than universal agreement. We have to learn how to live among people we do not completely agree with. That doesn’t require moral indifference. There are things worth opposing. There are boundaries worth defending. There are behaviors societies reasonably prohibit.
But disagreement becomes dangerous when we stop seeing the person on the other side as a person at all. Once someone becomes nothing but an enemy category, almost anything can begin feeling justified. Perspective allows us to disagree strongly without automatically abandoning our ability to observe ourselves while doing it.
What am I defending? What evidence am I using? Am I listening? Am I representing the other position accurately? Would I recognize evidence that contradicted me? Am I trying to understand, persuade, defeat, punish, or simply perform for the people who already agree with me? Those questions matter regardless of which side of an argument we’re standing on.
We Are Both Individual And Collective
There is a tension here that I don’t think needs to be eliminated. We are individuals. Our choices belong to us. Our development cannot be outsourced to the group. But we are also relational beings living inside systems created and maintained by other people. Complete individualism ignores our interdependence. Complete collectivism risks losing the individual inside the whole.
We have to hold both. We develop ourselves so that we can participate more consciously with others. Then participation with others reveals additional things about ourselves that still need development. The process moves in both directions.
From Society To Humanity
There is one final expansion of perspective worth considering. Most of our social identities are nested inside larger ones. We may identify with a neighborhood, city, state, region, country, culture, religion, profession, community, or any number of other groups. Those identities can have real meaning.
But if we continue pulling the perspective farther back, eventually something else becomes visible. Humanity. From far enough away, many of the divisions that dominate our daily lives become smaller parts of a much larger picture. That doesn’t erase cultural differences or political borders. It changes the scale from which we’re viewing them.
We can remain members of particular communities while also recognizing that we’re participating in something larger than any one of them. That shift in perspective doesn’t solve humanity’s problems by itself. But it changes the level from which we’re capable of looking at them.
Society Begins Somewhere
It is easy to imagine that meaningful social change always occurs somewhere else. In governments. Institutions. Corporations. Movements. Large organizations. And sometimes it does. But society also exists in much smaller places. A workplace. A household. A conversation. A business. A classroom. A neighborhood. An online community. Two strangers deciding how they’re going to treat each other.
We may not control the larger structure. But wherever we participate, we contribute something to it. That brings the question back from the abstract world of society to the individual standing inside it: What am I contributing where I actually have influence?
We can criticize the world. Sometimes we should. We can attempt to change systems. Sometimes we should do that too. But we should also be willing to examine the small portion of society that moves through our own choices. Because society isn’t merely something other people built and handed to us. It is something we inherited, something we influence, something we pass forward—and something we are continually helping create through the way we choose to participate in it.
