Many people today believe change and progress to be identical. Changemakers are viewed as inherently positive forces. Children are encouraged to change the world, with the assumption that the change will be guaranteed to be positive. This cannot be further from the truth. Most Americans believe that at least one of the last two presidents brought about extremely negative change. For almost a decade now, one side or the other has been sounding the alarm that the president or the presidential candidate will kill the country somehow. Point is, it’s very obvious that change is not necessarily positive, against our common misconceptions.

A detail I find notable in this example is that we do not blindly believe any change will automatically yield positive results; however, we seem to have deluded ourselves into thinking that the changes that cause negative results are changes at all. I’m not quite sure why that is, but it’s an interesting phenomenon. Worth thinking about it.

The ancient philosophers viewed change differently, especially when it came to statecraft. To them, any change would necessarily be a downgrade from the original. It would be fundamentally impossible to improve a government, and you would have to get it right the first time or never get it right. History tells us that this also is not correct. Plenty of governments and constitutions have changed for the better. I would venture to say that the change of abolishing slavery was certainly a positive one. So, change has the potential to be positive.

All this is to say that change and progress are not correlated. Change can have both positive and negative effects. Great success and great disaster stem from the same thing —change. Progression and regression are two opposites, yet come from the same starting point. It’s an obvious thing, but sometimes it’s the obvious that escapes our notice. To me, the real question is whether or not stagnation is positive. Is it good to retain the status quo? Changing the status quo can yield either positive or negative results, but what happens if you don’t change at all?