System Change

To make diagnosis something ‘empowering’, the first step is to completely break it apart and acknowledge all of its potential different and conflicting functions. Diagnosis can give you access to community, or cut you off from community. It can give you access to benefits, or it can bar you from income through employment. It could get you your

PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM

(in increasing order of effectiveness)

12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).


13. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.


14. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).


15. The lengths of delays, relative to the

“leverage points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.

Awareness’ is an unambitious political end-goal for a few reasons. Firstly: awareness of what? The information circulated in ‘awareness’ narratives often uncritically props up neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism supports the privatisation of major businesses, cuts to state welfare, and an emphasis on ‘individual responsibility