JL Beautiful Trouble

The social cure

The social cure, the idea that people respond to collective action, peer pressure, and social behavior more so than to facts and that this pattern can be leveraged to cure political violences and inequities, is complicated by mass media and overpopulation. What is the critical mass of social capital one must amass in a given community to create a lasting, structural change to the whole social unit? In a world of overpopulation, one has a larger number of people to convince and larger number of subcultures which must be influenced. The prevalence of social media provides an indirect method of spreading information quickly in a sea of messages vying for attention. Direct face to face interaction may still be more effective to convince and mobilize individuals, while a barrage of social media campaigning combined with a leveraging of the news media may be useful in communicating whole crowds.

Cultural Hegemony

The prevailing mores of society, the norms of behavior and communication, and the supremacy of a power structure and the viewpoints it imposes upon those it is willed upon create the cultural hegemony. Challenging and changing the cultural hegemony is an important part of achieving lasting cultural advancement. If the hegemony which originally resisted a behavior can be changed so that the behavior is accepted and has become part of the new hegemony, an incremental change has been achieved. If the endgame of activism is to shatter the cultural hegemony and achieve a cultural network based on plurality.

Direct action

As is mentioned in the article, much of the advancement of humanity has been achieved through direct action and direct action often involves risk. It is important to take direct action to affect the world one lives in, whether in one’s personal life or with regards to politics. If one does not take direct action, they leave their fate to be decided by others. Depending on who is doing the deciding, they may choose to let themselves be pulled along with the currant, as one is in childhood. On other occasions, if one does not agree with the direction of the current, with the actions of their society or a particular state, they may choose to take direct action in resistance against the direct actions of others. This struggle of direct actions, in a sea of indirect actions and circumstance, is politics. It is imperative to take direct action if one is to have a say in defining the world around them. As society gives the gift of a collective life and a shared legacy, it can be argued that is incumbent upon one to participate in creating a more sustainable social aggregate, to improve the homeostasis between humanity and earth’s ecosystem.