Characteristics of Change

Madame:

Famines are a mixed bag.  Often, societies RECOVER from famines but are not much changed by them.  Revolutions, for their part, are in one sense both caused by gradual or immediate changes (or even just the deepening of inequity and injustice), and in another sense, the cause of further immediate change.

Yes, I mean, for example: depressions, large total wars, deep oppressions, etc.  Great change, due to the manner of human personal and social psychology, usually require them, and such “remakings” are made possible and often necessary by those great disruptions.  For example, the Great Depression brought many politically engineered changes in a country set up to be obstructive to much politically engineered change.  And WW2 both accelerated and broadened those changes.

However, catastrophic propellants are not required for ALL change.  Movements can arise in gradual response to inequities and injustice.  Populism in response to the Gilded Age’s inequality and corruption, the Civil Rights Movement’s response to segregation and oppression, etc. are examples.  The changes they bring are moderated in strength and usually stretched out over time, but they too can have an effect.  They are harder to predict because human psychology is more variable about them.

Your question about leaving the “store” untended and elite further grabbing is an interesting one and bears monitoring.  What is also interesting is that many of the younger plutocratic multimillionaires and billionaires are less enamored with their wealth than their older counterparts, and although they carry many of the same traits of defensiveness about their wealth, they are full of ideas about how to use that wealth to further their visions of societal (often world societal) good.  Of course, many progressives and conservatives disagree with those visions, but that is another discussion.

Those sites you mentioned are also interesting.  If they merely allow the young to ADAPT to the changes instituted by the wealthy and the greedy, they will be less impactful.  However, if they become elements of true change, well!  So, it will be very important to monitor the answer to the question in the title of your post!

I see I have filled my five paragraph guideline.  Which means I won’t be inserting a new topic.  Yet! :)