I suspect that what makes change so difficult in a large-scale society is both human nature and the nature of the composition of the society itself. After all, if every one of us was inculcated from the very beginning to scrutinize ruthlessly every last logical assertion, and to question our superiors on every point, things would be very different. What we usually find instead is a systematic implementation of rule-following and conformity.
Don't talk back to your parents! Don't question teacher! And powerful-anthropomorphic-judgmental-deity-in-the-sky help you if you second-guess the boss! Maybe he or she will forgive you or maybe just throw you out on your bum, hmm? So the avenue to becoming powerful is overwhelmingly following the instructions of beings more powerful, doing things right - within a blueprint long ago set by betters, becoming liked by beings more powerful, and etc. And well how can you blame em? When you find something that works, you keep doing it...often long after it actually ceases to work, which is the kicker.
Some societies manage to be more flexible but this seems to be a common quality found in human nature. Besides a creative minority (whose numbers I suppose expand and contract in times good and bad, though I could be wrong about this) a large proportion of a populace tend to continue vibrating - or orbiting, I don't know, that's the simplest way to put it for now - in the manner at which they were first touched off. And it is not that this is an intrinsically bad thing - no, after all where would we stand had not the earth below us possessed the quality of forming strong, regular bonds that at least undergo change slower than it takes to adapt to that landscape. However when change becomes a necessity, this characteristic makes for troublesome weight, or a higher necessary threshold at which action is supposed to happen.
But back to people. I can't tell you how many conservative or even center-left individuals I've talked to have demonstrated the following: we'd agree on some damning set of facts and nod together solemnly in unison, and then they would go right back to repeating line-for-line tired strings of propagandistic logic. It is almost universally acknowledged that our congress is dysfunctional, our largest corporations are more destructive than useful, and that our political establishment is increasingly incapable of governing its own realm. But well "we have to do something about Iraq" and "oh well those crazies out there need to be taught a lesson" and "just look at how they treat their populations we have to do something!"
We have become increasingly incapable of governing ourselves, but somehow we can build shining democracies out in the imperial borderlands. And somehow the chaos out there is completely unconnected to the chaos in here, and all of the increasingly desperate efforts to shape and control it. I was baffled reading Arendt's account of European imperialism just before the outbreak of WWI: here societies that were in the process of disintegration could be placated by exhilarating tales of bettering the lives of all those poor brutes out in those foreign places. How do people fall for it?
Yet it is happening here and now! The same political process seems to have happened to the center left. With the failure of domestic transformation, ex-lefties turn to rooting for imperial nation-building. Right in front of us. If anything, an opportune moment for revelation.
It seems that if one has emotional commitments strong enough and axiomatic enough, no sort of boatload of facts can unseat them. The facts can be tucked away in harmless compartments, or even worked into an existing set of beliefs with baffling, athletic displays of pretzel logic. If one really believes in the goodness of the idea of American democracy and progress, no amount of facts to the contrary can dislodge that commitment. It really is a pretty common psychological observation. Again, this tendency is excellent if one is trying to build something worthwhile in times of adversity, but when it comes to dismantling that thing - when necessary of course - in times of adversity, this seems to become a problematic quality.
Part of this is owed to the fact that an emotional belief seems to be less an act of one's volition, but more a passive event which requires an external event to become active. In other words, it takes being acted on to exercise one's emotions. Emotions happen to us. We aren't quite sure where they come from, besides the structures they originate from. They are what bind us to the external. Granted, our executive functions can modulate our emotions and direct them into various actions, to an extent, but when they become strong enough, we are merely swept away, as it were. We become vessels to something else.
But then more sensitive individuals seem to have a freer movement of their emotional faculties. They are more able to investigate their commitments with clarity. They are acted on like everyone else, but perhaps they are less susceptible to becoming "stuck" on problematic notions.
So it is the case that broad, sweeping change is often initiated by a creative minority, whose passionate intensity sweeps through the rest of the populace like waves. As noted before, however, these changes aren't always revolutionary...reactionaries can be just as sensitive and just as powerful. It is all in the direction the wind is blowing, so to speak.
And then the process of revolution itself has a contentious quality. The largest revolutionary movements in the charged era of great depressions and world wars in the century before focused on the seizure of state machinery and top-down political transformations which seems less probable today. There are serious problems associated with top-down change, and then there is the question of what centralized levers of power can even be grabbed in this age? And will they hold when exerted on?
It seems to me, and many others, that this is an age of bottom-up transformation. Change must be initiated on the individual level, and in local peer to peer relationships. No one can be forced to take any given path because all of the force has been exhausted, as the trust in any sort of large-scale social endeavor has been exhausted. Effective power then, as opposed to force, consists in ability and integrity. If one can do things without becoming corrupted...if one can live frugally without inordinate wants and yet produce for oneself while remaining somewhat satisfied...and perhaps most importantly...dignified...there is power in that, because that is what everyone wants. If one can achieve these things, the ideology won't matter, everyone will want it. Yet paradoxically it requires ideology to implement.
It would take spiritual satisfaction, relational satisfaction, and material satisfaction, which are all interconnected but which require different practical and intellectual abilities to bring about. Changing oneself is perhaps the most difficult thing. Like lifting a body twice one's size, one has to simultaneously subsist in a deteriorating world while building for oneself something worthwhile. The practical skills required, and the intellectual peace of mind...well these things are hard won. Just surveying what it takes, and spending time in the wilderness away from the comforts of civilization, one gains an understanding of just what sort of a task we are talking about. But it can definitely be done.
