Somewhere in the System

There were only a few paths in life to choose from. For me, I realized early that I did not want to spend my time pursuing a life that is mostly shaped by cultural norms; my driving factor, if I am honest about it, was that I wanted to be part of something larger than myself, to witness change, or at least be standing nearby when it happened. I recognize how that sounds, and I do not care. As I had already spent years avoiding a career and the traditional, systematic steps one is supposed to take to be considered successful, I just wanted to feel that the work meant something. But that is a story for another margin.

By the end of 2020, I dedicated most of my time to social work; we tried to revive a cinema culture that was mostly erased during the Gaddafi era, we screened films in cities that had not seen one in over forty years, shared stories from parts of Libya that would have gone unseen otherwise, organized training, and mentored emerging filmmakers to produce their own films. Naturally, we thought that after a few years, we would see people carrying the work, screening films within their own neighborhoods, producing their own films, or at least showing acceptance of this culture. Instead, we noticed more restrictions from the authorities and lower attendance at workshops. The economic situation can explain this, as people would naturally prioritize what keeps them fed, and film culture is not that.

I also think the economy is just the surface; the one thing I did not want to mention at first was that people had stopped expecting anything to change. When you spend years asking and hoping, but the situation remains the same, you would eventually stop asking for your rights and start asking for electricity and gas instead, and most things beyond that become luxuries. I understand the logic here; you cannot build a film culture on top of that, but the question that stayed with me was not about the attendance numbers, but rather, it was more about the shape of the effort itself.

Sometimes you know something, but you are unable to touch on it. The idea of a closed loop kept circling, and I could not explain it. Then I stumbled on system justification theory, the work of John Jost and Mahzarin Banaji. It shows that humans are motivated to see the system they live under as fair and natural, even when it works against them. It is a psychological need to reduce uncertainty and feel that a solid ground is beneath you. Accepting that the structure you depend on is broken is more threatening than the injustice. This leads to even defending the failing system itself.

And then there was Kahneman and Tversky's work on loss aversion, which found that the pain of losing something is roughly twice as severe as the pleasure of gaining something of equal value. That humans choose a familiar problem over an unknown possibility because the familiar feels less dangerous. I had always noticed this tendency, and now that I know what it is, it does not make it any easier, and what really unsettled me was following the thought further than I wanted to. I want to be careful here, because what I did next was not really reasoning. It was closer to trying the ideas on to see what shape they made together.

When humans are wired to defend the systems they live in, and the pain of change outweighs the pain of staying, it means a deviant idea entering that environment does not stay new for long. It gets softened by the people around it, reshaped by the norms it was trying to challenge, and eventually it either disappears or becomes something the system can tolerate without actually changing. People watch the screening and participate in a discussion. Then everyone goes home, but nothing changes; the structure that made independent filmmaking nearly impossible in the first place remains exactly where it was.

This is where the logic started to close in on me. Our awareness is shaped by the environment, and I am a product of said environment, which means when I challenge it, am I really challenging it? Or is the environment talking to itself through me? When an individual is part of the system, is individual resistance really resistance, or is it just the system producing its own friction? The image is not mine, but it describes this very accurately: the way a body produces a fever. The fever feels like it is fighting the illness, but it is the body doing both.

I could not find a clean way out of that thought. I argued with a friend about whether change could come from the powers that be. If change does not come from individuals, maybe enforcing new rules from above could break the loop. But that argument is also tired. A government unable to reflect the collective thought of its people cannot lead in the first place, as it only exists to mirror what is already there. Regulations trying to force something the population has not internalized become noise that fades.

All of this kept pushing me toward a conclusion I did not want to reach; if change is not possible from within nor from above, then change comes only when an external shock the system cannot absorb forces it. That felt like giving up. It felt like saying nothing you do matters until some invisible threshold is reached, and you will not know when that is, and your effort has no relationship to whether it happens.

I sat with that longer than I would like to admit, and what I got wrong was the word “closed,” as I kept asking whether the system is a closed loop, as though that was a yes or no question. In fact, no system is fully closed; inputs always enter, such as migration, tech, economic shocks, contact with other cultures, and even something as small as a film screening in a city that has not seen one in forty years.

I have heard a version of this before, but at the time, I did not fully understand what it meant. Early on, I told a dear friend of mine that it would be easier to do this work from outside the country, where we could facilitate the screenings online, or to advocate for the culture while not being present on the ground, as this felt safer and would give me more freedom in doing the work. She replied that it was the opposite, that those who can make the change are the ones inside. I did not think much of that for years, and I think she was right; you do not need to stand outside the system to change it. I now believe that you only have to carry something into it that has not been there and hold it long enough for someone else to pick it up.

Some of what we did was picked up differently from what I had pictured. I would hear later that some local organizations were folding films into their programs and sharing written stories with the same structure we had been using, as this culture barely existed before we started. I would not say we take the credit, as most of it I cannot trace back to anything we did, and that is sort of the point. For it to leave my hands and keep moving.

During the writing of this essay, I read about Damon Centola’s work at the University of Pennsylvania, where he tested something that has been a theory for decades but never confirmed. The point at which a committed minority can flip an established norm, and what is interesting about his findings, is that the threshold is around 25 percent. A consistent and committed minority can tip the norm for everyone. Of course, there are variables to this rule. In a place where people’s neural pathways are shaped by decades of repetition, the threshold is higher, and the system will keep resisting.

So individuals are not outside the system, nor are they powerless inside it; they are amplifiers of the things that leak in. You only have to carry something into it that has not been there and hold it long enough for someone else to pick it up. This reminds me of an anime called On the Movements of the Earth, which lives in this idea, where something is carried forward across people who never met, each holding it a little longer than it was safe to.

I do not know if the work we did will amount to the kind of change I once imagined, but now I have realized that the work is neither absorbed nor gone; it is probably sitting somewhere in the system. Whether any of it matters today, I honestly cannot tell, but together with efforts from people I will never meet, it seems to accumulate toward an immeasurable threshold.

I have spent most of this essay looking for an answer that would tell me whether the work mattered, and I do not think that answer exists; I do not find this comforting, but maybe that is what I have been resisting all along. Sometimes the truth is enough to keep going.

A question I did not answer here, because it deserves its own margin: how much of what a society calls consensus is actually agreement, and how much is just the silence of people who are afraid to be the first to speak?