Can I Change the World?
Entering graduate school, unbeknownst to myself, I represented something of a paradox.
Going back to school was a big decision. It required uprooting my life in Seattle and moving across the country to Washington, D.C. I chose to put my career on hold to re-focus on learning. Most near and dear to my heart, I left behind close friends and a community that I loved. The choice required sacrifice, but I made it anyways, because it was fundamentally a bet on myself.
At the same time, my world view had changed. I returned to school to study international relations at a time when the world seemed more complicated than ever. Rapidly accelerating technologies were changing how people communicated, and at times the fabric of reality. Intricate cross-border capital flows were re-orienting industries from sports to energy. And the liberal international order was no longer the only game in town with the rise of China. It seemed to me that the future would be fundamentally determined by these complex systems.
These two impulses – one towards agency and the other towards structure – are not inherently untenable together, but they were in how I was holding them in my head.
Structure – The systems – political, economic, cultural, technological – which influence how we perceive and interact with the world.
Agency – The ability for an individual to assert their own free will in a way that challenges or alters the world around them.
Yes, I had made a bet on myself to further my education, but I was doing so in a self-defeating manner, believing that at most I could better understand the imposing systems around me and hold on for dear life.
My professors quickly helped me to recognize, and then to challenge, this bias. There are few more imposing structures than Russian revisionism, manifesting in soldiers, tanks, and missiles streaming across the Ukrainian border. Yet surely Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s composure and assured leadership has been crucial to his country’s resistance, a brazen act of agency.
War is often a classic case study in the impact of agency against overwhelming structural odds, but the example of Ukraine extends beyond the battlefield. The world will not soon be rid of large and complex forces, often destructive, that challenge how we live our lives and what we want for our futures. But these same forces, no matter their power, are always vulnerable to the will of committed individuals who resolve to envision a better way.
One of my professors struck at the heart of my paradox – why did I even bother coming to SAIS if I didn’t believe that I could change the world?
Of course, there is no clear winner in the battle between structure and agency. They both matter. The conversation bears similarities to the debate over nurture and nature, an intriguing if frustrating exercise in seeking certainty about why things happen the way they do.
This philosophical examination of structure and agency resonated with me far more than I expected. Thinking on it more, though, the importance of the matter came more into view – I struggled to believe in the power of agency because of the enormity of the structures in front of me; and yet, I needed to believe in the power of agency because of the failures of those very same structures.
Though I harbor largely positive sentiments about the direction of humanity, there is no doubt that the world is facing numerous structural challenges, perhaps more now than ever. It feels almost pedantic listing some of them out, and yet it feels necessary to capture their enormity:
Climate Change is altering environments, often displacing those already experiencing hardship and wreaking economic havoc on rich and poor countries alike who need to pay for mitigation and adaptation.
Exponential Technologies[1] are progressing faster than societies are able to reckon with them, siphoning enormous wealth to a small cadre of tech corporations and radically altering how information is shared and believed.
Illiberal Governance is robbing citizens of their rights, subjecting those least able to defend themselves to the whims of the wealthy and powerful.
Nationalist Resentments are coming back to the fore, leading to a more confrontational and violent international system than we’ve seen in many decades.
These forces, which are of course only a partial list, are exactly what motivated me to go back to school. I wanted to understand not just how these changes are likely to impact the world moving forward, but what role I could play in rethinking the world’s ailing systems. The ensuing awareness of structure and agency helped to clarify my understanding of the moment we are in, and it has spawned a theory – the structures around us are increasingly minimizing agency when they should be maximizing it.
Last summer, after a particularly spirited conversation with my fiscally conservative father, and perhaps channeling my growing enthusiasm to return to academia, I decided to watch Milton and Rose Friedman’s famous 1980 documentary series Free to Choose.
Ideological observations aside (I’ll save that for another post), it was an apt preparation for grad school, because it was a series about examining how a very large structure – government bureaucracy – was in Friedman’s view, limiting the potential of the individual agents under its strain. In one episode, attacking the inefficiencies of big government, Friedman proffered a line that has stuck with me since – “a system that depends on the right man is a bad system.”
Though I would probably quibble with Friedman about the proper role of government in society, I couldn’t help but confess the wisdom of this statement. It is certainly baked into the origin story of the United States, shedding the problematic nature of divine right of kings for a more equitable and representative system, a system that empower more agents. That that system was imbued with its own prejudices and flaws, which have been slowly ameliorated by two and half centuries of progress, gives Friedman’s sentiment even more heft. America has, over the long arc of history, been a place that has empowered more people with greater freedoms and opportunities than any nation that has ever come before.
Which is why it is so striking when that reputation begins to recede on itself. My theory, about the minimization of agency, stems from the structural failures I shared earlier. In other words, the key systems around us today – technologies, politics, free market capitalism – are more often serving to narrow opportunities for the average citizen rather than to empower them.
Let’s take one example – network effects. Network effects, or the idea that a service gains additional value as more people use it, was originally sold as an immense benefit to the user. With Facebook, you could now keep in touch regularly with friends and family on the other side of the world. In reality, the benefits of these networks have vastly skewed towards the owners of the technology. Capital, data, and societal influence have not become more distributed in the intervening two decades, but less!
Which is perhaps an appropriate moment to return to the question that has animated this entire thought experiment – can I change the world? Can any of us?
Of course we can. I’m an optimist so I have to say that. But seriously, the entire point of thinking about structure and agency is to recognize the potential and limitations of both. There is no denying, as I’ve pointed out here, that the structures around us today are imposing and plentiful. To some degree, however, this is an eternal tension that has always been with the human species, and always will.
If structure and agency was perhaps an implicit lesson of grad school, the studying of history was far more explicit. Studying history, especially the further back you go, is a fascinating and bewildering experience that often starts and ends with the same question – how did people used to live like this?! It will be said of our generation too. The answer of course, is that new systems take hold, systems that were conceived of by agents, propagated by agents, and agreed to by agents, until they maintain power as structures.
For the impatient among us, of which I count myself one of, it is a frustrating lesson in the gradualness of progress. But that does not make it a hopeless one. Rather, this pendulum between structure and agency ensures two realities – that structures are always changing, and that agents are the makers of change. So I can change the world, so can we all – the question then becomes how?
[1] To borrow the phrase of Azeem Azhar
