Change in dynamic systems always brings with it opportunities, and, in particular, unsustainable opportunities. These opportunities come from the mismatch between the parts of the system adapted to the new system and the parts which have not yet adapted. And unsustainable things usually give the biggest short-term benefits, which creates an incentive for people to instigate change in order to take advantage of the huge short-term benefits available before the system has adapted.

A simple example can be seen in the inflation or deflation of a currency. Let’s take deflation since it’s less common and less likely to have negative associations. In deflation, money is removed from an economy. The same amount of economic activity can go on as long as the price of everything lowers, and indeed this is what will eventually happen as the people who still have money offer less of it to others for goods and services and out of desperation they take it. The money then flows from the people who have it to the people who don’t, prices tend to lower, and we’re eventually back to where we started but with different numbers. Instead of the average wage being one Florentine per hour, it’s now half a Florentine per hour, and instead of a loaf of bread costing one Florentine it now costs half a Florentine. (Florentine is, I hope, a made-up currency purely for the purpose of illustration. It can be paper or gold or platinum, it doesn’t matter.) So the same amount of labor buys the same amount of bread, but the numbers have changed. We’re back to a stable situation, because a human economy needs (roughly) a certain relationship between the price of labor and the price of bread in order to function. It will go back to that. But what happened along the way? A lot of things, including a lot of suffering, but the relevant part here is a lot of opportunity.

If a person foresees the coming deflation, he will do what he can to save money, knowing that it will go up in value. He will forgo luxury goods and save, while he works extra hours to amass even more money. Then when the deflation hits he finally pays himself back, with all the money he saved buying twice what it would have back when he earned it. His new riches will only last with his savings; eventually he will have to go back to work and there will be the same relationship between his labor and the things he can buy with it as before the inflation. But while it lasts, he’s living high. And people who realize this will have a motivation to try to influence government policy to create deflationary periods. If his country is on a gold standard, he will have a temptation to help revolutionaries who want to sink ships carrying other people’s gold.

(We don’t see deflation nearly as often because far more people appreciate the potential for personal short-term benefit in inflation, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

You see similar opportunities for short-term gain in social changes as you do in economic ones, though because society is more complex and also more subtle than economics, these are often better disguised. Let’s take a simple case, though. Suppose a man in the 1950s desires to insert his penis to the vaginas of many women who, unlike him, are not interested in being promiscuous. The number of promiscuous women is irrelevant to this man since promiscuous women are, by hypothesis, not the object of his desire. If you need a story to make this more plausible, suppose that he is attracted to the feeling of conquest in bedding a woman who is saving herself for marriage, or if that is too old fashioned for you, who only feels sexual attraction within the context of what she beliefs to be a long-term relationship. In stable times, this will not work. His dreams of many such penis-insertions will result in very few actual insertions, and most of those will end up being with women who deceived him while he was trying to deceive them. He may, however, have the opportunity to realize his dream during times of social change.

If the social norms protecting women who are only interested in coitus within the confines of marriage or at least a long-term relationship are shifting, some of these women will rely on the old social protections while they are no longer being afforded and will, because of that, be easily deceived. To give a concrete example, suppose that women no longer tend to stay near family members but instead are exposed to unrelated young men whose reputation they do not know. Let us suppose, for example, that public schooling as been instituted and that automotive transport has brought a large number of people together, and moreover it has become normal for teenagers to use cars to go to places where none of their family are. While people are still getting used to this new normal, some young women may rely on reputation and their family not allowing males of ill intent near them to filter out the males of ill intent, and so a pretty face coupled with charming words may well convince her that she is consummating a marriage with him that they effected (the sacrament of marriage is confected by the couple, not by any priest or officiant) while he has simply lied to her because he is a bad man.

This state of affairs will not last; young women will, fairly quickly, learn to rely on different things to vet males than applied in their old environment. But during this transition, they will have none of these things, and some will be easy prey.

It is interesting to note, though few will care because people are naturally less sympathetic to males and even less so to bad males, that the changing social norms will also result in young women who are eager to be promiscuous having a better shot at this hypothetical male who only desires to insert his genitalia into women who wouldn’t want him if they knew what he was doing. During these hypothetical changes in social norms, he will be far more easily misled into thinking that all women are shrinking violets who object to using sexual intercourse like heroin because that might as well have been the case under the previous social norm and the exceptions were easy to spot.

When everyone gets used to the new circumstances, things will return to their previous difficulty, albeit with small modifications for differences in exact circumstance. People will develop new ways of getting to know a person’s reputation, people will treat strangers as unfiltered by people they trust, etc. etc. etc. There will be no lasting benefit, but there can be huge short-term benefits.

(Bear in mind that this example was a change in social circumstances that didn’t alter people’s fundamental preferences. It’s not an example of temporary sterilization. That will still cause changes that can be taken advantage of, but it also alters people’s fundamental preferences and the changes that will be adapted to are in things affected by it but not its direct consequences.)

The example I gave above was of a social change induced by a shift in (transportation) technology, which our hypothetical cad had no real control over. Yet even there, you can imagine, if he was sufficiently far-sighted, how he could champion government funding for roads as well as mandatory public schooling.

In practice, of course, the sorts of advocacy that people can have on social changes tend to be far more limited in effect and tend to look far more like simple bad advice. Loosen up, don’t be such a prude, you only want to treat sex like it’s not a safer form of heroin because the mean Christians are trying to control you, etc. etc. etc. These people are not, in the main, Machiavellian masterminds who are trying to create chaos to take advantage of it before they settle down. Mostly they are fools who think that the good times will last forever. In ten or fifteen years they’ll probably be writing op-eds about how great jumping off the cliff was but you don’t want to take things to their logical conclusion, you just want to keep falling forever because it’s a lot more fun. What they’re trying to do is to get the advantages of the change.

A big part of why they don’t realize that this is what they’re doing is because a lot of people never consider that human beings have two phases: childhood and adulthood. Childhood is a time of change, when human beings are easily molded. People can still change in adulthood, but nowhere nearly as easily. Accordingly, if you institute a social change in all of society, it will take far more hold in the young than in older people. The young will take it to its logical conclusions because they’re not held back by being stuck on adaptations to a previous order.

To give an example (painted with an absurdly broad brush), social norms were changed in the 1970s to where family, friends, and aquaintances no longer protected young women from the sexual advances of bad men. So for a decade or so, bad men could sexually harass women to their heart’s content and it was a cad’s paradise. But then young women who were raised without the expectation of social connections helping them adapted to the circumstance and sought the protection of law, and we had the crime of sexual harassment, as well as all sorts of corporate policies against it. And things went back to more-or-less normal.

As a brief aside, it is amusing to see people who grew up at just the right time think that the 1970s were representative of how society worked throughout all of human history up until some people agitated for legal protections. These people have clearly never watched movies from before the 1970s! Back then, important customers could get thrown out of an office for making advances on a secretary in terms sufficiently veiled that they’d never get past the initial stages of filing a sexual harassment lawsuit. Heaven help an employee who was sexually aggressive with fellow employees! This weird historical myopia is a subject for another day, but it is funny how people have managed to continuously think of their grandparents as downtrodden slaves and themselves as the first generation to be free for several generations in a row.

Anyway, the amnesiac attitude towards the developmental stages of human beings is often behind quite a bit of agitation for social change; the people doing the agitating only ever think about what things will be like when people set in the old ways partially change over, and are always shocked at what people who grow up with the changes do in order to lead human lives within the new order.

Admittedly, part of that is that people rarely adapt to change well within a single generation. They go to excess on some things and utterly miss out on others. It takes time to refine complex systems. The people having to do the adapting often suffer for it, too. Adults have fewer needs because their lives are already largely set; children have a ton of work to do in setting up their lives and will often do less of it due to the uncertainty of tumultuous times. The adults who advocate for social change thus reap more of the rewards and pay fewer of the costs, then blame the new generation for not doing as well as them. It’s a bit cheeky to burn the furniture then complain that people don’t sit down, but then most people are not philosophers.

One final note I should add is that none of the above means that social change is always and everywhere bad. Much of it is inevitable with a changing environment (such as is caused by developments in technology). Some of it is needed merely in order to fix the mistakes of the past. Indeed, as the paradox of Chesterton’s post states, you need constant change merely to be conservative. As he so rightly said, if you leave a white post alone, it will, in short order, become a dirty grey post. Only by continually repainting it white will you and future generations have a white post.

Change there must be, but it’s often best to limit it to fixing mistakes. And have a thought for the people who have to grow up in the new system because they won’t have the advantages of having grown up in the old one. Only their descendants will have that advantage, and only if the people who have to grow up in the new system don’t change it again.