Can you fix everything by fixing all the small things individually?

Maybe not. Not all things can be improved iteratively. Whether you can even “fix" a complex system is itself a difficult question. The answer is probably “no”. But most likely, it depends on the system.

Is culture a system? No. Culture is the aggregate of all the subjective opinions, preferences, and values of the people who identify as members of that culture. It’s an approximation of a set of beliefs. It is not a system.

Society is a description of the behaviours of the people who participate in that society. Society is empirical, observable, and thus objective. And yet, because there are so many people, with some dying and more being born, and their behaviours are so complex, and constantly changing, every description of society is incomplete and instantly obsolete.

Society is a system that includes cultural programming. Culture is: “I like vanilla ice cream.” Society is: “some people eat vanilla ice cream; some claim the reason is that 'they like it'."

Human beliefs are just one of the causes of observed social behaviours. They are the least reliable. But in any case, human nature—including biology and psychology—are the underlying drivers of human society, within the constraints of the external world, both natural and artificial.

The statement that “society is broken” is a cultural expression, a declaration of the values of the person who says it. We all think that society is imperfect, and we always will, because of our human nature.

We all want the impossible, and will always be dissatisfied with reality. But even if we weren’t so intrinsically paradoxical—intrinsically insatiable—we are simultaneously too similar and too varied for any functioning society to satisfy everyone, or probably even the majority of people. Our expectations are ridiculous, by every measure.

Worse, we won’t even all admit to this intractable fact. Most people assume that “fixing” the world would be easy, if it weren’t for some small number of trouble-makers. Simply get rid of the trouble-makers, they suggest, and everything will be fine. Maybe a few people will grumble, sometimes, but we can all live with that.

Most people, it seems, are not comfortable with the idea of complexity. Nor with the uncertainty—the rapidly evolving non-describability—of complex systems, including (and especially) society. Their lack of understanding puts some limits on the feedback loops in those societies. But there are already too many such feedback loops to enumerate, let alone comprehensively understand.

Most people are naive. Actually, everyone is naive, insofar as everyone is ignorant, and everyone makes wrong assumptions about the world as a consequence. That is another fact that most people are also unwilling to accept, and as such, most people are, to some degree, fools.

Most people are also arrogant and over-confident. That makes them resistent to certain kinds of ideas, theories, conversations. It makes them unable to evaluate certain kinds of proposals for how to make society less miserable. It make them resistant to changing their behaviour. Since changing society requires changing individual behaviours, such resistance is an obstacle to social change and the potential for improving our general prospects.

As a result, we are stuck with mostly near-horizon patchwork Band-Aid treatments. These only address the superficial symptoms of underlying problems, and only for a short time. The underlying issues cause they symptoms to quickly return.

Some of the underlying issues are intractable. They are usually variations of the same problem: humans are ill-suited to the environment in which they live. The behaviours we evolved long ago, in different environments, caused changes that utterly transformed those environments, to the point that we are now maladapted. This can never be addressed, without either restoring those old environments—how?—or evolving the human race into something else. Or maybe a mixture of both.

But most people do not believe that they are maladaptive. It is a side effect of who we are. We—at least some of us—adapt well enough—to survive, to reproduce, to satisfy our needs and urges. Even if we are nevertheless anxious, depressed, frustrated, scared, lonely, and confused. That is, we feel bad, even when we also feel good.

Fixing what makes us feel bad would threaten our idea of what makes us feel good. We cannot really imagine being better off with fundamental change—societal change. Instead, we mostly crave superficial change: changes to our own particular situation, like having more money, power, and status, and consequential material changes.

Humans—like all animals—are habitual and instinctive, and resistant to change. We cannot really change our instincts, but we could—in theory—change our habits. More realistically, new generations can learn new habits. However, even that is resisted, as we expect our offspring to grow into reproductions of ourselves, with only superficial differences. Our habits are too closely tied to our values. We believe that our values are objective and eternal. So why wouldn’t we expect our descendants to have the same ones?

Our values are neither objective nor eternal. But they are deeply ingrained by years of encouragement and reinforcement. We modify our environment to fulfill our expectations, and such confirmation only strengthens our biases.

Bias is both helpful and harmful. In any event, it makes us resistant to change. Sometimes such resistance is beneficial. Other times—such as when the world is changing rapidly and dramatically—it can be very bad. It can ensure suffering for individuals, and even spell doom for civilizations. The latter is also very bad for the individuals, including those who tried to disabuse the biases of their fellows, to no avail.

It sucks to be enlightened when you have no power of persuasion.