Eccentric and crank
In this episode, we explore a practical dilemma faced by anyone involved in creating significant change
Imagine this: that you want to get things moving. There’s a lot of mass to move. And the only mechanism that you have, to make that movement happen, is all focussed around a single central point. Trying to make change happen at the centre itself is an almost impossible task - indeed, at the exact centre, it would require a literally infinite amount of energy to make anything move at all. If there’s not much energy to be had, the only way to make it move is to apply leverage: to be well away from the centre, and yet also connected to the centre, and then apply the energy from there.
Literally, to be eccentric, with a crank.
That’s how it works with a bicycle, anyway.
But it often works the same way with social-change too.
Though there are also some interesting extra complications there that can make it much, much harder to get it to work at all…
Imagine this: that you want to get things moving, at work, in an industry, a professional discipline, a church, a social context of some kind. There’s a whole lot of people, a lot of mass to move. And the only mechanism that you have, to make that movement happen, is all focussed around a central point, a single place or idea. Trying to make change happen at the centre itself is an almost impossible task - indeed, at the exact centre, it would require a literally infinite of energy to make anything move at all. If there’s not much energy to be had, the only way to make it move is to apply leverage: to be well away from the centre, and yet also connected to the centre, and then apply the energy from there.
Literally, to be eccentric, with a crank.
So far, the analogy holds. So far, so good, sort-of.
But then it all breaks down.
On a bicycle, that centre is just the turning-point of a shaft. There actually isn’t all that much mass there: the only challenge is find some suitable point that’s suitably off-centre from which apply leverage, then set up a crank to connect the two points together, and take it from there.
Yet with social-change, there’s still those same issues of leverage, and the need for distance, and for connection back to the centre to create that leverage and all that; but there’s also another whole challenge to deal with, in that that mass at the centre creates its own gravity. And that’s where the problems really begin…
At the start, it’s just people and ideas and purposes drifting around in the void, like different, discrete, maybe-distinct bits of dust, occasionally bumping into each other in a kind of blurry Brownian-motion way. No-one is eccentric as such - or maybe everyone is? - because there’s no real single centre to be ex-centric from. And no real connection, either - so nothing to leverage from, about which to be a crank.
Slowly, slowly, though, all that bumping into each creates a kind of accretion - ideas and people become close enough to each other to start to stick together. The beginnings of something more like an early-stage asteroid, perhaps, held together by the smallest, most tenuous hints of gravity - unless some comet of an idea comes whooshing past and pulls it all apart again. But yes, there is at least a sort-of-just-about-not-quite-a-centre, just about big enough for its gravity to pull others in and force them to be part of that sameness.
That accretion continues and continues, dragging more and more little bits and not-so-little bits into itself until it becomes more like a kind of planet, a single all-demanding ‘big-idea’. Other ideas will occasionally crash into it, perhaps leaving a suitably-sized dent but otherwise being absorbed into it anyway. (Take a look at the surface of the Moon sometime: the same also happened here, but it’s just that much less visible as each impact has been slowly eroded away.) Sometimes smaller subsidiary-ideas are blasted off from the surface in those collisions, or other ideas come past and get caught by the attraction; yet in either case can still keep their distance enough, and still keep moving fast enough, to retain enough of their own identity and distinctiveness to avoid being swallowed up by the centre. A related idea, forever orbiting like a moon or satellite of that central idea or organisation, just separate enough to be always eccentric yet without enough connection to create any real leverage for any real change. We’ll see a lot of that kind of thing happening in business-ideas and elsewhere, of course.
If we scale that up a few times, enough mass accumulates there for the idea to start consuming itself in the shiny self-satisfied self-adoration of a sun or star, forcing entire other worlds into subservience, forever trapped in feudal fealty. Everyone else needs to be far enough away from that centre to avoid getting burned; other self-appointed stars also form their own fiefdoms and solar-systems, each their own cluster of evermore-entrapped planets of loosely-related ideas; and then onward to whole galaxies of solar-systems, each circling around some arbitrary central star. A hegemony of ideas and more - The Truth, The Only Truth, it says, no other ideas allowed. The myths of monarchy and the nation-state are often like that; a lot of religions, too. They can sort-of-coexist with others of that kind only by being so far apart from each other that they don’t need to interact at all, other than via those strange interstitial, interspatial, almost intergalactic ideas that are so hyper-eccentric from everything else that they wander around in the vast spaces of the great in-between, to arrive and go again almost without warning, leaving behind only a sense of ever-incomprehensible and near-ineffable weirdness and wonder.
Eventually a star of an idea becomes so self-consuming that it will even destroy itself. Sometimes it will do so in so wild an explosion that it not only destroys itself, but all of its attendant related-ideas, and often much more, immolating everything around itself in one final blaze of pointlessly-impotent fury. A cult will often end that way, for example.
The other way that it ends is that the idea or ideology or whatever will become so vast, so dominating, so self-certain and self-obsessed, that it collapses in on itself under the sheer weight of its own self-importance, becoming an all-consuming black-hole that drags entire star-systems of good-ideas and good-intentions relentlessly into its ever-more-voracious maw. Once that kind of oversized late-stage idea reaches that state, no-one wins, no-one survives. Possessionism is at that point by now, for example: already close to a black hole, its proponents still stuck in its centre, consuming everything, consuming us all. Not A Good Idea…
Okay, so what does all of this tell us about eccentric and crank, and this whole business of ideas and the like, and ways of changing ideas - particularly those old ideas that don’t work well any more, and that could cause us a lot of damage?
The first thing we get from this is that there’s probably no way to change those damaging ideas from within: we’d just get sucked into the centre by the idea’s own gravity, and get crushed into conformity with it down there.
To have any chance to change anything, we need to be well out from the centre: literally, to be eccentric. It’s only by being out on the edge that we’d be able to see what needs to change. But being that kind of eccentric is most definitely not enough: we’d just get dismissed, derided, denigrated as, yeah, ‘an eccentric’. We wouldn’t have any leverage: no matter how good or important our work might be, no-one would take us seriously. In which case, being an eccentric is important, but it’s not enough on its own.
At the other end, we need leverage, right down into the centre. To do that, we need a crank - and, crucially, someone who somehow is right there at the centre, and who can connect their end of the crank right into the middle of everything, to where leverage could be applied. Again, though, the crank is no use on its own, because it needs something at the outer end, away from the centre, to apply the energy to make the crank move.
So to make change happen, when change supposedly ‘isn’t allowed’, we need all three of those things to be in place, working together as one: the ‘man in the middle’, the eccentric out on the edge, and the crank that connects between them and provides the means for leverage. Finding the right ‘man in the middle’ is often not that hard: those who live down there often know all too well that things are wrong, but don’t know what to do to make it right. The hard part is more often to find the right kind of eccentric and crank - but find them we must, if the changes we need are to work well for all.