We argue in this paper that we are in the midst of a period in which fundamental global change will be required if societies and many species, perhaps even our own, are to survive. The realities are inescapable, and the potential implications are likely to affect nearly every dimension of human life in the USA and globally. Current trends are discouraging and will be extraordinarily difficult to shift, given global structural realities. It is hard to imagine a time when effective leadership is more necessary or will be more challenging. Our thesis here is that behavioral systems science can contribute in meaningful ways to shaping and sustaining such leadership, leadership required to advance a new progressive movement.Keywords Behavioral systems science . New progressive movement . Cultural analysis Bonly the construction of another society based on total human development can politically and humanly emancipate men and women … and eradicate poverty and inequality^(Ana Elizabete Mota 1 ) Despite unprecedented advances in medicine, technology, transportation, and other facets of society, extreme human suffering persists across the globe, and the inevitability of human progress has been exposed as a myth of modernity (Touraine 1995). Indeed, we BEHAV ANALYST (2016) 39:109-121

Interpersonal violence remains a serious social issue, particularly among street gangs and other groups of armed young people in marginalized urban communities. Much of this violence and gang membership can be understood functionally as responses of resistance—however self‐destructive—to experiences of marginalization and oppression. Given this analysis, one potential approach to violence prevention that has received little attention from researchers and practitioners lies in engaging alienated youth involved in violence in progressive activism and organizing initiatives. Young people have historically played a central role in social movements, and the power of these movements has often drawn in gang members and other street youth and redirected their energies in prosocial directions. This chapter offers an overview of youth activism as a promising approach to violence prevention, drawing on behavioral science, historical examples, current research with gang members in Chicago, and an appraisal of the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement.

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Street gangs first emerged on a broad scale in U.S. cities in the late 19th century in step with industrialization, urbanization, and mass waves of European immigration. Up until the 1960s, the vast majority of gang members in the United States were second- and third-generation European immigrants. Like their Black and Latino successors, these groups routinely engaged in collective violence, which helped push nationwide levels of homicide to a historic peak toward the end of Prohibition. At the same time, White ethnic gangs were integrated into the urban political machines and organized crime syndicates of that era. Moreover, these groups existed within a burgeoning urban industrial economy in which an abundance of low-skilled manufacturing jobs provided readily available opportunities for gang members to transition out of gang life in late adolescence or early adulthood. New Deal policies institutionalizing protections for unions and workers and expanding homeownership opportunities via federal mortgage underwriting, in turn, greatly enhanced economic security for widening sectors of the working class, especially White workers. In short, political patronage, lucrative illegal rackets, a vibrant labor movement, and New Deal labor and housing policies variously punched a ticket to upward mobility for countless White gang members during this period, and, by the mid-1960s, White street gangs had largely disappeared from the urban landscape. During and after World War II, meanwhile, millions of Southern Blacks as well as Mexicans and Puerto Ricans migrated to America’s urban industrial centers. Conversely, millions of Whites left these cities in the postwar decades, an exodus facilitated by federal highway construction and housing policies that promoted racially exclusive suburbanization. Industry largely followed this outmigration in search of cheaper land, more pliable labor, lower taxes, and greater profits, leaving many central cities economically devastated and without an industrial base for their increasingly Black and Latino working class. At the same time, the urban political machines and organized crime groups that had once provided mobility for White ethnic gangs were in dramatic decline as municipal governance was bureaucratized and criminal rackets were supplanted by the development and expansion of legalized gambling and revolving credit markets. It is within this context that contemporary Black and Latino street gangs emerged and have persisted since the 1960s. Unlike their White predecessors, today’s gang members have been largely excluded from the conventional economy at the same time that society has abandoned the welfare state in favor of incarceration as its major strategy for managing inequality. Prison, the illicit drug trade, and persistent economic dislocation are among the fundamental realities shaping life for contemporary gang members. Street gangs, violence, and crime, both historical and contemporary, must be understood against this broader backdrop of societal transformation.