“But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”

― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, 1974

Is change possible? People and families and institutions and nations and cultures all exist in perpetual states of disequilibrium, so it’s easy to mistake all that back-and-forth and up-and-down as “change.”  Yet real change — meaningful change — happens. It’s just that real change doesn’t always last.

There’s a perspective problem involved. For instance: If a change is only “real” if that change is “lasting,” then our mortality distorts everything. If your diet and exercise routine fluctuates, is a behavioral change “real” if it doesn’t extend to the day you drop dead? Is it foolish to try to improve your health?

Or think of it in a larger context: After fighting his way to Berlin in 1945, a 70-year-old former GI born in 1922 lies on his deathbed, surrounded by his loving family. “I grew up in the Great Depression at a time when people seriously questioned whether democracy could prevail against fascism and communism,” he tells his 10-year-old grandson. “Well, we had to fight for it, but now we finally know the answer. And it was all worth it.”

Today that grandson is 40, and global fascism is on the march again.

He may have even voted for it in the last election.

Cue the obvious conclusions, starting with “Circumstances change, but human nature doesn’t.”

I think that’s wrong, but I’m thinking on evolutionary time scales. Suffice it to say that we’ve evolved biologically, but also intellectually and socially. A person born in the 21st century would be out of place in the 11th, and vice versa. And a big part of that change is nothing more substantial than the stories we learn as children.

What Pirsig calls “Systems of Thought” are what I call “Master Narratives.” Here’s why: I think it’s increasingly clear that human beings store information in stories. They tell us who we are, how the world works, what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s possible. It’s humanity’s operating system. That’s true of individuals, and also of cultures. Pirsig’s not wrong to call that a “system of thought,” but to my mind calling our jumbled collection of inherited myths and stories a “system” implies something far more reasonable than the reality.

All stories have one thing in common: Conflict. And to the extent that our “Master Narrative” stories accurately describe the world and our place in it, processing the conflicts in our lives via those stories produces good outcomes. But what happens when the stories that explain the world and our place in it no longer reflect reality?

Nothing good, that’s for sure. The gap between what we believe and what we experience creates unresolvable conflicts, and that’s what we’re witnessing today. Real change that doesn’t last. A world stuck in a cycle of conflict, with no way out.

The Age of Chaos.

You can create “real change” in your personal life without changing the stories that define your view of the world and yourself. But until you update those stories to something more accurate, the cycles of conflict in your life will perpetuate themselves. The only way to break old cycles and unlock new possibilities is to embrace a better story. And that’s equally true for families, companies, countries and cultures.

So I’m not saying a better world is possible.

I’m saying a better world is impossible without better stories.

And that’s the story I’m telling in The Darbas Cycle.