Evolutionary Struggle in World Industry

Abstract

CHANGE is often a threatening phenomenon. Adjusting to change — whatever its causes — is a trying process which often taxes one’s reserves of energy and fortitude. Where change has also resulted in the weakening of an individual’s strength or of his willingness to resist and adapt to whatever new conditions prevail, adjustment will be rendered even more difficult. Sapped of stamina, fearful of the new forces that are being encountered and inexperienced in what may or may not succeed in dealing with them, a threatened individual or species must either summon the courage to adjust and evolve or run the risk of becoming a ‘footnote’ to history.

‘Owing to this struggle [for life], variations, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if they be in any degree profitable to the individuals of a species, in their infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to their physical conditions of life, will tend to the preservation of such individuals and will generally be inherited by the offspring … As new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most’

— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859)

‘It is my impression that no one really likes the new. We are afraid of it … Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding … In the case of drastic change the uneasiness is of course deeper and more lasting. We can never be really prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs inordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling’

— Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change (1964)