Day 15: Observing Problems in Social Structures

Today you will learn what communities to start observing in order to help, why should you seek understanding of these complex social structures and the people within them, and how to go about doing so.

Summary

What are Complex Social Structures?

In the previous lesson we spoke about the different levels of community for which you reside. An excellent way to understand the problems that exist within those communities is to speak with the people of those communities.

When we do so, we are seeking understanding of the social structures for which we exist in, because how do you expect to change the structure if you don't understand:

• How it currently operates
• What chaos it's holding back
• Why it operates the way it does
• And the people who are operating within it

Communities, or social structures, exist to gather individuals around certain values that keep the uncertainty and chaos of the world at bay.

• This allows them to function, overcome challenges, and progress forward as a group of people.
• A social structure's limitations, constraints, arbitrary boundaries, and dreaded rules ensure that there's social harmony and psychological stability between the individuals within that community.

Why seek understanding of Social Structures?

If you try to fix social structures by destroying them, without understanding why the exist, you open the floodgates to uncertainty and chaos, often causing much more harm than good.

As a unintended consequence of observation, you will inevitably come observe other purposeful people at work who can serve as:

• Mentors, showing paths to walk down
• Peers and allies, rallying to your cause when the time as right
• Validation, that you are not crazy when seeing the problems occurring
• Inspiration, to continue to propel you down the path of purpose

How to observe and communicate with people in Social Structures?

Let's discuss the process for which you can start observing and communicating with the people within these social structures.

Step One: Cultivate Compassion & Understanding

• We're building our capacity for empathy, the ability to understand and care about others' feelings. It's not only builds kinder communities. It's usually the force behind people's efforts to make a difference for others.
• Compassion is empathy coupled with the desire to alleviate suffering.
• One of the most effective ways to cultivate compassion is to hear the stories of others of those suffering in these communities.
• You also want to hear the stories of people who have worked to end past atrocities and the ones who are succeeding at doing it today.
• Seek understanding about how your actions may be impacting others.
• Use Perspective Taking: the capacity to identify and take on often conflicting points of view. It gives the ability for you to hold two challenging ideas in your head.
• Use Perspective Getting: the intentional process of seeking out others' perspectives to better understand a personal history, event, situation or an issue.
• By doing these two things, you're gonna recognize and understand multiple perspectives in an increasingly diverse and global society. You'll be able to communicate respectfully across those differences and value and respect diverse beliefs and ways of knowing.

Step Two: Learn About the Issues

• Remember the previous lesson, we want to start small, taking responsibility for our own problems first, and then expanding to our household, neighborhood and smaller communities. And as you build more capacity slowly expand from there to observing some of the larger problems in the world.
• Do internet searches on topics of concern that you have that are in line with your interests and values and consume resources like videos, articles, and podcasts.
• For local problems, check sources like community or government websites.
• For larger global problems, look at things like the sustainable development goals or problem profiles on 80,000 hours.

Step Three: Identify a Problem of Personal Concern

• What problems do you care most about solving and how does that tie in with what you're already good at or what you love to do?
• How do these problems tie in with your existing passions or ones that you're starting to cultivate?

When Identifying a problem of personal concern, there's a few other things that you're gonna want to consider:

• Your efforts may create the most impact if you work on problems that are neglected the most.
• Working on problems that will have the largest scale for you to make an impact, measured by how well you help others to live better lives.
• How solvable the problem actually is.
• Your personal fit. You're going be much more motivated to work on one problem rather than another, and that's extremely important too.

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Activity

First, get out there and start talking to people in the communities you wish to serve.

Second, as you discover problems within these communities, spend time researching and learning about these issues.

Finally, go through the process of identifying a problem that you care about most, that you feel most equipped to solve, and can have the greatest amount of impact for you and those around you.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.