In this article, I invite you to analyze change as that constant intrinsic to life that nevertheless generates resistance that often leads to violence and war.

“The destruction of the world 

is written in all the prophecies,

All the prophecies tell us that man will create his own destruction,

But the centuries and the life that are always renewing themselves,

Have also created a generation of lovers and dreamers,

Men and women who dreamed not of the destruction of the world,

But of the construction of the world,

butterflies and nightingales.”

Gioconda Belli “Hacedores de sueños”Gioconda Belli “Hacedores de sueños”

Change is inherent to life. Natural changes occur in nature without human intervention, such as droughts, floods, earthquakes, and temperature changes. However, humans have greatly modified the Earth through agriculture, mining, urbanization, energy, and infrastructure expansion, resulting in changes in the structure and functioning of natural ecosystems at a very rapid rate compared to the frequency of natural changes. Likewise, human social, political, and economic constructs have been changing throughout history.

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE, REJECTION, FEAR AND/OR DENIAL OF LOSING PRIVILEGES

Although “The only constant in life is change,” as stated by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus since 500 BC, and as reaffirmed in natural sciences since ancient times and more recently in social sciences, when it is stated “everything changes and nothing stays the same,” resistance to change is a common human reaction, an obstacle that arises when modifications are introduced into routines, habits, policies, and can manifest itself as rejection, fear or discomfort because changes challenge behaviors, feelings, thoughts and/or privileges.

Interpreting the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, it is possible to affirm that resistance to change is also located in believing and feeling that the status quo is "solid", understanding by this, the force of tradition, culture, social imaginaries, taboos, as social norms or rules, versus the change or transformation that implies new relationships, new imaginaries, new taboos, new social functions for emerging actors, characterized by seeking an interrelation, even when they are moved by uncertainty.

In turn, AI qualifies change as a constant in the world, in the cosmos, which is complex and hierarchical, with groups that have conflicting interests, and points out that cultural perceptions hide the true nature of the world.

FROM THE ASPIRATION FOR CHANGE, THE STATUS QUO, WHICH IS ALSO DYNAMIC, IS CHALLENGED.

A rough look at history shows us that, just as the status quo has changed, so too have the social actors who resist it.

In regimes born from the depths of modernity, such as colonialism and slavery, it is the ancestral populations who oppose the changes these regimes propose. These ancestral populations, reduced to a labor force denied any dignity, challenge, through resistance and persistence, these new regimes. These regimes, on the one hand, confront subjects (ancestral populations) with radical changes that require them to rethink the concepts, beliefs, and structures that previously gave meaning to their social dynamics, and, on the other, underpin social exclusion as the possible human state.

In the capitalist regime discussed by Felix Guattari in his text "Plan for the Planet: Integrated Global Capitalism and Molecular Revolutions," cited by Redalyc, he highlights the new configurations (changes) it has adopted since the 1970s, which are based on an effective restructuring of power, configuring itself as a new capitalism, which does not replace the old one, but coexists with it, generating capitalisms of different levels within the same global reality.

For Guattari, from these new configurations of capitalism, state functions are produced that are expressed through a network of international organizations that materialize through the media, a control of the market and technologies and that leads to everything depending on the interests of exchange from individual powers, from the whim of the individual subject who concentrates economic, social and political power as privileges that have often dared to qualify as derived from God or from their class and/or family lineage, leaving very few "sacred and inviolable" guidelines. Given that these "changes" reinforce the concentration of economic, political and social power, they generate resistance from broad socially excluded populations.

ACTORS OF VARIOUS SOCIAL RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS ARE CURRENTLY CRYING OUT FOR, DREAMING OF, AND EMBRACING THE HOPE OF CHANGE.

 Women march for change and rights. Source

In the current capitalist era of effective power restructuring, it is the financial, industrial, and privileged sectors that oppose change; in contrast, it is the diverse popular, social, and ethnic dynamics and processes that trigger resistance, responses, and strategies, whether dispersed or unified, to confront, cope with, and survive this context of deregulation, flexibilization, market liberalization, and the systematic deterioration of social dignity, and demand change (González Higuera, Juan Carlos Colmenares Vargas, Viviana Ramírez Sánchez Vargas - Redalyc. 2011. Social Resistance: A Resistance for Peace).

Under the power of continuous, subtle, and immediate control and systematic violence, needs coexist for the configuration of subjects, but above all, for the meaning of life, which are far from mere economic pretensions or commercial prestige. These are diverse social realities—popular, ethnic, environmentalist, feminist, rural, urban, and academic—that express themselves as possibilities for the configuration of new subjects, mentalities, and possibilities of being, configurations of complex and, above all, distinct subjectivities that cry out for, demand, and are makers of change.

In the next article, I will address some examples of these diverse social realities that cry out for change.