More than the sum

One common mistake that should be avoided when discussing social topics is the assumption that society is no more than a collection of individuals and that, therefore, the features of society will reflect individual characteristics and vice-versa.

This type of reductionism leads to the fallacy of composition, by which we assume that something is true of the whole because it is true of some part of the whole, and the fallacy of division by which we assume that something that is true of a thing must also be true of all or some of its parts.

In fact, however, a society is more than the sum of its individual members. This is expressed in the Baha'i principles of the underlying organic unity of mankind, seeing the world as a human body, unity in diversity, etc. It is also seen in the fact that our bodies change their cells every 7 years and yet we age and die, although each individual cell may be young and healthy.

Similarly, society changes its members every 70 years, and yet can maintain the same characteristics for centuries, and then can experience dramatic, profound transformations, almost overnight, although it still has all of the same members as the day before, and none of them underwent major changes in their character.

What has changed in these cases is not the nature of the individual members themselves, but rather the nature of the relationships among them. Likewise, once those relationships have become structured into formal institutions, the individual character of the members can change without significantly modifying the basic character of society.

This is an important point to understand, as it is the underlying reason why it is essential to work simultaneously for both individual transformation AND social transformation in order to achieve a true, lasting impact in any efforts for social change.