On the price printed on the ticket
“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it.”
Baldwin is writing about a society resisting desegregation, and the sentence explains the resistance without excusing it. People are not only defending their advantages; they are defending the map they navigate by.
Applied to a person it is equally unsentimental. Wanting to change and wanting the world to stay recognisable are the same wish in most of us, and only one of them can be had. The reluctance is not weakness. It is an accurate estimate of the cost.