Free Associations on Change in People and Society (article)

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus is reported to have said that “there is nothing permanent except change”; he also had a famous quote: “One man cannot step into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

Some say that improvements in science and technology caused progress and change in society. However, the meaning of progress is in the eyes of the beholder. To my eyes it does not mean change in human beings’ ideology and behavior toward each other. Now we can kill our enemies with much deadlier weapons and our bombs/chemical gas are much more lethal thanks to science and technology. But the concept of war and killing, the need for enemies, has not been “progressed”—it was not eradicated. Now advanced technology helps some corporations to create better torture machines/instruments. As an ex-political prisoner indicated, he had been tortured with a high-tech “smart” and “interactive” machine. Apparently, whenever he screamed, it would be amplified in his ear and the pain would somehow increase. He had to learn to suppress his screams to decrease the pain inflicted by a machine on his body.

Individual Change

The basic assumption in psychotherapy is: the human mind is changeable. In counseling a woman in an abusive relationship with a tyrannical husband, I asked her why she did not wish to get a divorce, and she answered that she does not “want to have another failure that would be my third divorce.” I utilized cognitive therapy, explaining “let’s re-define and re-frame the word ‘failure.’ In my opinion, failure is staying in an abusive relationship; leaving the

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abusive environment is a success.” She was shocked with this simple statement. She repeated it multiple times and left my office; not long after she was divorced for the third time and considered it a “success.”

Metaphors in psychotherapy have the capacity to create change. In response to another woman, who told me that if her boyfriend did one thing she would remain in the relationship and if he did another thing she would not remain, I explained in metaphor that she sounds like a fallen leaf at mercy of the wind. “Why do you not want to be a tree, rather than a leaf? A tree diverts the wind, while a leaf is under the authority of the wind.” Years later, she told me the metaphor was the most important element that influenced her to change, saying “I repeated it a hundred times.”

Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” In India, the issue of fate and destiny is a critical element of not changing within certain populations. A man may be born on a street, later lives there, marries there, raises his family there, and dies there. On that street may be a maharajah’s million-dollar palace, but neither man is eager to ask why such inequality exists, with both believing it is their “destiny.” In E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), when an Indian man is wrongly accused of raping an English girl, his family seeks to find a “character witness” to support his defense in court. They approach his friend, a professor of philosophy, who declines to help because he declares it to be of no consequence if he cares since the outcome is already determined.

Identification with Aggressor: 180 Degree Change

Identification with one’s aggressor is a phenomenon in which the individual undergoes dramatic change; one may undertake actions that one never dreamt of undertaking, as these run in opposition to one’s mentality and morality. On societal and cultural levels, change may be imposed by outside brutal forces or elements. Before the September 11 terrorist attacks, the endorsement of torture without secrecy and shame or guilt by a White House administration would have been incomprehensible. Thus, it is possible that a terrorist group could “change” the United States—transforming it to be more like them—by participating in torture and atrocities.

The Generation Gap is a change phenomenon that to date no one has succeeded in stopping or slowing. During an adolescent’s

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development, he or she usually undergoes the process of “separation, individuation,” and eventually achieves adulthood. This phenomenon exemplifies “change,” and thus an adolescent would be expected to participate in a lifestyle, ideology, or mannerism that runs in opposition of the parents, or is different from that of the previous generation. They seek to prove to themselves and to the world that they are no longer an extension of their parents, instead they are “different, changed.” Evidence of this change can be found in an adolescent’s mannerism, clothes, attitude, hair, as well as their ideology and school of thought in behavior and attraction to objects.

Our Judgment Changes

President Woodrow Wilson succeeded in changing Americans’ popular opinion through war propaganda. As Noam Chomsky noted in Media Control (2002), in 1916 Europe was embroiled in WWI, and the U.S. population was not inclined to join this European war. However the Wilson administration became committed to joining the fight overseas. As The Wall Street Journal reported at the time, it would be good for the U.S. economy and the stock market to join the war. In order to change public opinion, the Wilson administration established the Committee on Public Information, also known as the Creel Committee, which over 26 months produced propaganda to grow support for the war. It transformed the once-reluctant and pacifist American populace into a people prepared to destroy everything German. The U.S. was not alone in fabricating horrific acts to incite its citizens to pursue war; false stories of atrocities committed by the Huns, such as Belgian babies having their arms torn off, were invented by the British propaganda ministry.

To change public opinion from peace to war (during the first Gulf War), the U.S. government also produced false propaganda, this time in the form of a video recording featuring a sobbing female Kuwaiti nurse who reported that Iraqi soldiers had stormed a hospital in Kuwait. They reportedly threw babies out of their incubators onto the floor in order to steal the machines and send them to Iraq. After several months, human rights organizations learned that the woman had been an actress, and the video was allegedly the product of a Washington D.C. public relations firm (John R. MacArthur, “Remember Nayirah, Witness for Kuwait?” The New York Times, January 6, 2011).

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Conclusion

Change is an inevitable part of both individuals and society, although change is accompanied by resistance. The quality of change may be as important as change itself, as some are “regressive changes” while others may be progressive ones, so the word “change” should not be accepted as an “improvement.” We indicated that the basic principle of psychotherapy is that human beings can change and an example is how clients have been changed positively by the use of metaphor/cognitive therapy and conversely in a negative way by identifying with the aggressor. The judgment of a person/nation is connected to the information that they receive. This article explained how governments, through propaganda, false information, and demonization of “perceived enemies” can change a peaceful society to a warmonger/combative one. The influence of terrorism can also change us, for example, before the 9/11 tragedy, no White House official would openly endorse torture of prisoners, but as we know, they did! Then they justified it for the sake of security of the nation. Perhaps we should remind them of Benjamin Franklin’s statement, “Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.”

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