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Active Inertia
Why do societies perish?
"Our" dysfunctional people, families and communities!
How long will this take? How many of us go through life doing the same old thing over and over again until we discover we are stuck in a rut? We know they are wrong and we intentionally set them up to take advantage of the very people we are sworn to protect and serve. Over looking the obvious? Playing functional out the front side, when the backside is as dysfunctional as it can be, especially where "our" dysfunctional people, families and communities are concerned and unable to pull themselves out. It has happened so long that being dysfunctional has become, not only the norm, but it goes unnoticed and over time has become acceptable behavior. We refuse to recognize and help it, then we kick it off as "a choice"!
Now I know somebody is going to say, "You can not force anybody" or "Every house has a dirty room", but I am here to say, it does not have to be that way, especially as it pertains to attitudes towards human life. Who wants to live in the dirty room? We just do not want to take the extra time nor work to help; we just want credit for the front side, the winner! It is all about the ranking and ratings, but for what purpose? There are certain mistakes that always seem to surface and we fail to understand why? What good is any successful business, when our society is going to hell?
Normally, the term active inertia is attributed to good running businesses that have fallen to the wayside. Donald Sull introduced the term active inertia to represent how a company's reluctance to change can have disastrous consequences. Here's how Don Sull explains his idea: My question is, Have disastrous consequences for who?
In our competitive society, we tend to gravitate towards "the winner" and ignore anything coming afterwards. One would think it would be just the opposite being we have so many more followers behind "the one winner". Our attitude towards "one winner" is so strong that we have severely crippled the rest of our society. If you are not "the winner" then you do not count, well of course, unless they need you.
Active inertia also applies to societies. When life changes, people and societies trapped in active inertia do more of the same and that is disastrous.
When people and societies succumb to active inertia - they respond to disruptive changes in the environment by accelerating activities that worked in the past. Are we really willing to change? Would you have lived differently had you known what the end would be like? Choice! Where there is no vision, the people perish. A good people gone bad!
