How Image Makes Successful New Year’s Resolutions and Drives Social Change

Welcome to the New Year.  A time of big resolutions; or, as my colleague Pam’s seven-year-old daughter once said: revolutions.  Every event has a word.  The word for New Year’s is change.  We’re going to change the way we eat, exercise, play with the kids, talk to our bosses. Last year might not have been so great, but now with the New Year things are going to change.

Cognitive psychology has a certain viewpoint about change, and one that we work with a lot here. To change requires changing the image we hold of a situation. Image is our blueprint.  If we resolve to change the way we eat, that sentence is likely born from an image we hold in our mind’s eye of our self over-holidayed, over-eaten, sluggish and yearning for Pepto Bismol. The image we see when we resolve to change the way we eat might be a vibrant, energetic, fit-back-into-the-good-jeans self that has a regular workout routine and loves salad. Image is individual – someone else might have an image of a sloth vs. leopard in that same scenario – and image is also collective. We have an image of what it means to be an American. We also have images of what education looks like.  Or safety.

I am writing this column because I just received an email from a friend who recently relocated to Mexico. A Mexican national, she wrote that she is upset with the appearance of the military in her small town.  This is not, she said, her image of Mexico. She is, however, resolved to change that image.

Changing image means social change. My friend has found the answer – being able to imagine a different reality.  We can never go anywhere unless we have an image of where we are going.  We can’t build a house, unless we have an image of what the built house will look like.  We can’t change governments, or societal constructs, unless we have an image of what it is going to change to.

Today there is a lot of disgruntled sentiment toward Obama.  The word we hear a lot is “disappointed”. Part of the problem with Obama is that his image for his campaign was Hope – a very abstract idea whose actual image lived within the minds of everyone who heard it.  One person’s image of hope may have been health care reform, another’s a more stringent environmental stance, another the easing of racial tensions, while another may have had an image that more jobs would be available for him to apply for in his small home town.  Because the image of the campaign was abstract it was brilliant in winning votes – everyone hopes for something, so plugging into the image was easy.  However, for that same reason the realization of that campaign into an administration has failed – Obama can’t, ever, fulfill on each of the individual images of hope.

There’s a second reason hope as an image failed.  Obama’s image of hope was an image for a campaign, not an image for America.  Hope is a dangling word – it’s an idea unexpressed.  In contrast, when Martin Luther King, Jr. stood in Washington he gave us the old image – the African American as slave – and the changed image: the African American as constitutionally designated, legitimate member of society.  Yes he spoke about rights, but he didn’t do it on the basis of an abstract ideal.  Instead, he re-drew the image of African Americans tangibly, so that every American could picture them as part of the same nation, the same communities. Further, he grouped us all as equally God’s children – an image of unity and equality.

Changing the image on large social scales has been done many times before King – it is how every major shift in society has occurred, for better or worse.  While King changed the image of the black man in America, Ghandi changed the image of oppressor in India. Descartes changed the image we have of the human being, Darwin changed our image of God.

In 2011 we’re going to see a lot of changing images. One of the most prominent is privacy, and you might not be thinking about privacy as I am. In my next post I’ll talk about how privacy is a changing image from the individual to the universal and what it means for how our society is organized.  In 2011 it’s not about whether we have privacy or not, but what our image of it is.