“You never change anything by fighting the existing. To change something, build a new model and make the existing obsolete. ”
A friend of a friend is a priest in a progressive area. He is very innovative in his methods to help people in his community who are in need.
In cases of injustice, his attitude is to not fight the system, because that just causes the system to entrench further and -- worse -- it defines what you're doing in terms of the system. The established system controls the terms of the debate.
Instead, he prefers to create his own system, with its own approaches and strategies. If you create a new system that is in integrity with your values, and it produces better results than the old system, then you (and maybe others) will use the better system more often. The new system takes over without a struggle and the old system loses its authority. No battles are needed, only preferences expressed.
It takes more creativity and courage to work this way. You are deliberately stepping outside everyone's boundaries of certainty into the chaos of uncertainty. Yet, it's from that chaos that new, creative thinking arises.
Bringing this down to the level of my obsessions, I see old systems at work in the self-improvement realm with established diets, fitness regimens, productivity, etc. New systems come along -- like the Bullet Journal -- to become established systems in their own right.
I have tended to follow established systems due to the lure of the "sure thing," only to often experience mixed results. I'm glad I did them, because I learned more about the domain and how I operate within those rules. And sometimes, that system produced exactly the results I wanted.
But in other areas, I think I may be better off walking in uncertainty and seeing what new thinking emerges.
