What is positive or good social change?

Zsolt Hermann
1 min readJun 9, 2022

Question from the Internet:

“When does social change become good? Explain your answer.”

What is good? Towards what standard can we measure if we change for good?

This has been the problem all through history. We have been changing, destroying and rebuilding human societies for millennia, we have come up with myriads of different ideologies, philosophies, religions, and social, political and economic systems. And we failed with all of them, including our last “experiment” with “liberal, parliamentary democracy and free-market capitalism”.

We have been failing as wherever we have ever built or invented, was designed by and for our inherently self-serving, self-justifying, egocentric, individualistic and exploitative nature. And as long as we try to “reinvent the wheel”, resuscitating systems we already tried and failed with, as long as we keep changing leaders, governments or ideologies but we ourselves remain unchanged, we will continue to fail until we self-destruct.

So how can we change society for good?!

Fortunately, we have the necessary template in Nature. Nature’s finely balanced, mutually integrated system, where each element and particle from the smallest to the largest selflessly performs its unique, crucially important and irreplaceable role for the whole, helping to sustain the general balance and homeostasis life depends on.

Social change will become good when we start adapting our human relationships and the fabric of human society to Nature’s finely balanced, mutually integrated system.

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Zsolt Hermann

I am a Hungarian-born Orthopedic surgeon presently living in New Zealand, with a profound interest in how mutually integrated living systems work.