Hello discoverers!

Over the Easter long weekend I did some light podcast listening – and by ‘light’ I mean an 80-minute deep dive into the psychology of why most people, most of the time, don’t want things to change. Nice timing, for a holiday built around resurrection. Ha!

The podcast, recommended by a reader, was a conversation between journalist David Roberts and NYU psychologist John Jost about ‘system justification’ – the idea that humans are strongly motivated, often unconsciously, to defend and prop up the social, economic and political arrangements they’re embedded in. Even when those arrangements are working against them.

Roberts makes an obvious but important observation in his intro: when we look at history, what actually demands explanation isn’t rebellion – it’s the absence of it. “What demands explanation is voluntary servitude.”

Jost’s research suggests this isn’t apathy or ignorance. It’s psychology. The status quo offers something alternatives can’t: certainty. Familiarity. A sense of safety and belonging.

“It’s the devil we know. Whereas alternative social arrangements, utopian social systems, et cetera, these things often raise more questions than they answer.”

Challenging the system – even a broken one – means tolerating that uncertainty, risking social exclusion, and potentially making yourself a target.

What surprised me most is that this tendency to justify the status quo hits hardest among those the system treats worst. If the system is legitimate and you’re still not getting ahead, the only conclusion left is that you are the problem, that it is a personal deficiency. This is how systems reproduce themselves through the psychology of the people they’re failing.

There’s a depressing Catch-22 baked into all of this too. The moments when change feels most necessary are exactly the moments when people cling hardest to what they know.

“Thinking about how to improve things is a luxury that we can only really have as a society when we’re feeling like things are pretty good… When there’s a lot of discord, when there’s a lot of uncertainty, when there’s a lot of insecurity or threat, it’s difficult for people to think about alternatives.”

Climate change – which will generate exactly that kind of disruption – is his most troubling example: strong system justifiers “tend to perceive policy solutions aimed at addressing climate change as more threatening to the status quo than they do the threat of climate change itself.”

And yet. Progress does happen. Jost’s view is “two steps forward, one step back”. Change has always managed to fight its way through, often by working with system justification rather than against it. That means the most effective reformers throughout history have rarely positioned themselves as revolutionaries tearing things down – they’ve framed change as the system finally living up to its own stated ideals.

None of this makes the difficulty of change go away – but it does reframe the work: less about having the right arguments, more about creating the conditions under which people can bear to imagine something different.

And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai