Ananke Rules

Crisis, Not Conviction, Drives Change

There are not many things I would say I truly believe in. My skepticism – one I hope is healthy –prevents me from granting belief to an idea, claim, or assertion without sufficient evidence to elevate it into the category of knowledge. Belief, for me, implies a degree of certainty the world rarely affords. Reality is complex, contingent, and often resistant to clean conclusions.

Yet complexity does not grant us the luxury of inaction. If, as the growing evidence suggests, the clock for civilization’s existence is ticking down, what can motivate us to act? What can break through civilization’s own self-constructed barriers and generate the radical changes required for human sustainability?

History suggests a sobering answer: necessity, born of crisis.

Suffering and the fear of further suffering are among the most powerful of human motivators. In ancient Greece, necessity was personified as Ananke, a primordial goddess said to be more powerful than Zeus himself. No god dared defy her. She embodied inevitability, change that could not be avoided, constraint that could not be negotiated away.

Millennia later, the economist Milton Friedman – a neoliberal of great status among the pantheon of renowned economists – expressed a parallel insight. “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change,” he said. “When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”

The historical record bears this out. Large-scale social and cultural transformations have almost always been propelled by necessity under pressure, indeed, often in the face of crisis. Scholars still debate what initiated the agricultural revolution. Farming arose independently in multiple regions, shaped by local climates, ecosystems, population pressures, migrations, and gradual experimentation with domesticated plants and animals.

Yet despite these varied causes, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that necessity was decisive. People were likely pushed out of relatively egalitarian, abundant, foraging lifestyles into the harder, more stratified world of agriculture because circumstances left them little choice.

Long before that, necessity almost certainly drove humanity’s migrations out of Africa –propelled by shifting climates, resource scarcity, and population pressures – into unfamiliar and often hostile landscapes.[i]

The same logic applies to many of humanity’s foundational innovations: clothing and shelter, boats and nets, irrigation systems, food storage vessels, fire, and the domestication of plants and animals. These were not luxuries adopted out of curiosity alone. They were survival strategies forged under stress and constraint.

The industrial revolution, too, was catalyzed by necessity. It emerged in part from the need to pump water out of deepening coal mines—mines that had become essential only after Europe’s forests were largely depleted.

The Green Revolution arose amid widespread fear of famine and deforestation. Wars, repeatedly and tragically, have driven rapid advances in both destructive and defensive technologies.

And the American mobilization during World War II remains a striking example of how quickly societies can reorganize themselves when people believe their backs are against the wall.

More recently, public health crises have provided stark illustrations of how perceived vulnerability alters behavior. Since its emergence in 1981, AIDS—caused by the HIV virus—has killed some forty million people worldwide, including about 1.2 million Americans. In the United States, over sixty percent of those deaths occurred among gay and bisexual men.

Unsurprisingly, studies show that sexual behavior changed most dramatically within the communities most affected. In cities like San Francisco and New York – epicenters of the epidemic – rates of abstinence and condom use rose sharply through the 1980s, while the number of sexual partners declined. By contrast, behavioral changes were far less pronounced among heterosexual populations and in regions where AIDS was less prevalent.

The global response to COVID-19 was even more rapid and expansive, largely because vulnerability was broadly shared. The SARS-CoV-2 virus did not respect social categories, borders, or identities. Within months of its discovery in China, more than four billion people worldwide were living under some form of lockdown, and over a billion confined themselves largely to their homes. Governments closed schools, workplaces, places of worship, theaters, and restaurants. Roughly ninety percent of the world’s population lived in countries that restricted international travel, and nearly three billion people resided in nations that fully closed their borders to non-residents.

Mask-wearing became widespread wherever it was socially and economically feasible, including in hyper-individualistic societies like the United States. Scientific mobilization was unprecedented. Within a year, more than a dozen vaccines had been developed, tested, and approved. Within two years, over two dozen were in use worldwide. Within three years, seventy percent of the global population had received at least one dose, and more than thirteen billion doses had been administered. The scale and speed of this response were extraordinary—and they were driven largely by fear of an invisible but lethal threat.

The pattern is clear, even if it is uncomfortable to acknowledge. Humanity rarely changes course in response to abstract arguments, moral appeals, or distant warnings. We change when necessity closes in: when suffering becomes immediate, when risk feels personal, when the cost of inaction exceeds the pain of transformation.

This does not mean ideas are unimportant. On the contrary, crises merely open the door. What determines whether we step through wisely or disastrously are other factors, such as the ideas already within reach, the level of our consciousness, and the extent of social cohesiveness.

If a future defined by ecological constraint and social strain is approaching – and the evidence suggests it is – then our task is to ensure that when necessity asserts itself, we have developed our ideas, consciousness, and social cohesion in ways that are equal to the moment.

[i] Their migrations were likely actually a complex of many motions (including the pull of verdant lands outside Africa) that added up, in the large scale, to the great migration paths through the “Old World” and eventually into the “New World.”