Societal Systems Set

Are systems within society and humanity too set into place for changing circumstances?

What are the causes and effects if set systems continue momentum without adapting?

Within modern day society it seems it may be evident that past systems were set into place for a reasonable purpose, but those systems continued through the changes of society into circumstances which are relevantly different from the initial intended purpose. With circumstances changing gradually within society, caused by technological development, changes in resource availability, and or changes in leadership and inhabitants, it seems sometimes societies methods and habits do not adapt in suit.

Some potential examples of society systems which may have not adapted with the change of circumstances, could be; 

-Schooling systems with unilateral methods of learning and grading, which was initially designed to prepare children to be factory workers.

-The system of lengthy work week hours, initially intended for the husband of a stay-at-home wife in a traditional family, and to make up for lower resource production.

-Daylight savings time, initiated to save energy during WWI

-The imperial measuring system

These are just a few I thought of off the top of my head, but there are likely many other examples all throughout any society and culture. 

These system sets, and plausibly any other that becomes outdated, likely have a common component which is basically fundamental to the concept of them being a “system”. They have a fairly rigid set of guiding rules. Sets of rules can be useful to keep things organized and efficient, but are usually only applicable to fairly specific contexts. Since circumstances within society and life are often so complex, in such a broad range, and changing, the context of outlined rules of the system will often not fit or be most effective for the situation. 

The difficulty to outline rule sets which are effectively applicable to all circumstances may just be the conventional cause of systems being unable to adapt with changing variables of society and humanity. The psychological cause for societies to allow systems to persist out of context may be another topic. But as can likely be seen, the effects of these rigid systems persisting into changing circumstances of society, often result in inefficient and inapplicable methods, relative to the new circumstances. 

The more systems of specified rule sets we allow to continue in society, out of their scope of intended applicability, the more problems are likely to result. In order for our implemented systems to continue to be effective, 1 method could be for the rule-sets to be updated and reevaluated as the environment changes. This can be done with a secondary, overarching, more generalized system consisting of set conditions for the more specific rule-set to change. 

An example of this applied in society may be; the more generalized set of rights and freedoms guiding the more specific laws, within most societies. An example in nature could be; the generalized system of instincts guiding the specified rule-sets of the subconscious. This natural setup of interaction between systems in the workings of nearly any animal has proven to be quite effective in adaptability to changing environments. Instincts have the generalized rule-set to cause the animal to receive positive or negative reinforcement to general reactions which allow survival, and which overarches the more specific reactions of the subconscious. The more specific and changing rule-set of the subconscious, uses the reinforcement combined with perceptual memory to adapt reactions to specific factors within the changing environment. This seems to be an effective set-up, which perhaps we could take into consideration for application of more rule-sets within society.

Overall, systems can be quite useful within context, but perhaps to allow systems to be adaptable to the changing environment of society, we should more often apply more generalized guidelines for systems within, to follow. This setup could be applied to many specific systems within society. But perhaps the most significant and overall useful application for any and all people within any society, would be implementing the overarching generalized guidelines of comprehension. If everyone was taught the general concept of conscious comprehension, this concept of critical thinking of cause and effect could be adaptably applicable for basically any more specified under-arching rulesets or circumstances.