The Loss of the Stable State
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 15 November 1970
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This year's Reith lecturer is the influential thinker Donald Schon. Previously a Professor of philosophy at the University of California, he was the director of the Institute for Applied Technology in the National Bureau of Standards, Department of Commerce. He is currently the co-founder and director of the Organization for Social and Technological Innovation (OSTI), a non-profit social research and development firm in Boston.
He delivers his Reith lecture on industrial technology and social change from his series entitled 'Change and the Industrial Society'.
In this lecture entitled 'The Loss of the Stable State', Donald Schon describes how society needs a belief in a calm and constant identity and structure. Exploring times when this stability has been lost, he analyses the human need for the belief of a better time.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. |
| 0:04.1 | This lecture in the series Change and Industrial Society, given by Donald Sean, was originally |
| 0:09.7 | broadcast in 1970. |
| 0:11.9 | I've believed, for as long as I can remember, in an afterlife within my own life, |
| 0:18.9 | a calm, stable state to be reached after a time of troubles. |
| 0:23.6 | When I was a child, that afterlife consisted in being grown up. |
| 0:27.6 | As I've grown older, its content has become more nebulous, but the image of it stubbornly persists. |
| 0:34.6 | The afterlife within my life is a form of belief in what I would like to call the stable state. |
| 0:41.4 | Belief in the stable state is belief in the unchangeability, the constancy of certain central aspects of our lives, |
| 0:49.8 | or belief in the attainability of that kind of constancy. |
| 0:53.4 | It's deep and strong within us. |
| 0:56.5 | We institutionalize it in every social domain. |
| 1:00.6 | We do this in spite of our talk about change, our apparent acceptance of change, our approval |
| 1:08.0 | of dynamism. |
| 1:10.5 | Language about change is for the most part talk about very small change, |
| 1:13.6 | trivial in relation to a massive unquestioned stability, which nevertheless appears formidable to its proponents |
| 1:21.6 | by the same peculiar optic that leads a potato chip company to see a larger bag of potato chips as a new product. |
| 1:30.3 | Moreover, talk about change as often as not a substitute for engaging in it. |
| 1:35.3 | Belief in the stable state is pervasive. |
| 1:38.3 | For example, we believe in certain very stable elements of our own identity. |
| 1:43.3 | This comes out when people talk about their occupations. |
| 1:46.0 | If I ask you who you are, you're up to say I'm a chemist, |
... |
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