The World Needs Less Activists

"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution." ~ Hannah Arendt

Somewhat of a facetious framing, if we regard people taking to the streets and taking direct action as a symptom of societal failure, then it follows that the world needs less activists.

And I should probably define what I'm talking about when I describe an 'activist' which I would think of as a private citizen (as opposed to 'public servant, public officer') who campaigns to bring about political or social change.

Pretty close to the dictionary definition, just the dictionary says 'person' which could technically include someone who runs for public office.

In my mind, so this is my perception, opinion etc. I'd go further to say activism is akin in some ways to lobbying, if one is not a subset of the other, but lobbying where say a corporation or industry group finance professionals to lobby public servants for disproportionate representation. Activism is similar in terms of it's an attempt to get disproportionate representation - perhaps most charitably in modern contexts it may be seen as an attempt to rebalance to proportionate representation given the influence of lobbying.

But yes, if a small ethnic group of first generation Freedonians and sympathizers representing less than 1% of the population take to the streets of Canberra to protest the annexation of their homeland by neighbouring Sylvania hoping to solicit a change in Australian foreign policy; this is a population attempting to obtain an outsize effect, one that they couldn't obtain through an act like voting in a federal election.

And, I'm perfectly fine with this form of activism. There's a principle from John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty' called 'the tyranny of the majority' because minorities - down to the individual need to be protected within a democracy. An example of activism that by my persuasion is justified is protesting the treatment of asylum seekers in Australia, where policies and successive elections of the Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison Governments as well as the High Court of Australia has confirmed, by majority, the constitutionality of indefinite mandatory detention of non-citizens, it indicates that immigration policy is not unpopular enough to impact the electorate nor protected by the constitution. Bringing me to:

Because if we're going to resist our leaders we have to say, "On the basis of this set of facts, this is the state of affairs; it's intolerable; therefore we resist." If there are no facts we can't resist, it becomes impossible. ~ Timothy Snyder

So you need things to build a case for activism, and my chief problem with activism is that of quality control. 

Here is a premise that one may feel free to challenge - Someone can act against their own interests. 

Examples I might offer would be somebody talking to the police in a police interview, somebody gambling, somebody voting for a candidate who's policies if implemented would harm them, and advocates generating antipathy in their target audience.

There was much talk, by my recollection about Trump's election emboldening racists. I heard the most about this between the election victory and the Charlottesville protests so beginning of his term. It didn't click for me until the 2020 election time period, that it was equally true to say that the Trump presidency emboldened groups like Antifa and BLM. One plausable retort would be that Trump emboldened white supremacists and white nationalists while frightening groups like Antifa and BLM. I suspect that's neither here nor there because under the Obama/Biden administrations could then be said to embolden Antifa and BLM and frighten white supremacist and white nationalist groups. It's not like one becomes justified based on the present emotional state. How activists feel in fact, has no baring on their legitimacy. Bringing us back to "On the basis of this set of facts, this is the state of affairs; it's intolerable; therefore we resist."

Imagine if you will now, activism as a business model where your core performance measure is activity, which can be measured by membership numbers, event turnout and event frequency, stuff like that. I can envision much like the owner of a 100 year lease and mining license for coal reserves, equivalent behavior from activist organizations.

1. "On the basis of this set of facts..." if the facts don't agree with the organizational mission, be you a mining magnate, a white supremacists or a more noble activist group, these facts have to be attacked in the interest of the survival, growth and influence of the organization.

2. "...this is the state of affairs;.." I could have grouped this with the proceeding, but one could actually grab a set of facts, like facts about inequality, and provided that set of facts are limited to a present snapshot rather than a time series, an organization can use facts to manufacture a narrative that is not in fact, the state of affairs. It could also drive a process of reinterpretation - should another more universally pressing issue present itself eg. climate change, a global pandemic, an activist organisation with a specialised mission is incentivized to attach itself to that more pressing issue, ie. reinterpreting the state of affairs through the lens of the organizational mission.

3. "...it's intolerable;..." tolerability, I imagine, is particularly key for activist organizations, even ones such as climate change skepticism. I recall seeing this as an argument to 'vote' "no" in the marriage equality survey held by the Turnbull government in Australia in 2017 - that once the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual communities obtained the right to marry, they would lose motivation/solidarity to be activists for other issues. So in a business framework like 'SWOT' a threat to an activist organization's activity levels is actually the situation becoming tolerable, demands being met, progress being made etc. Demands being met would indicate the fulfillment of the activist mission, reason to pack up and go home. If the activist org measures success by growth, rather than growth as a path to eventual success (fulfillment of mission and conclusion); then you will see activists claiming a situation is getting worse rather than better.

4. "...therefore we resist." so say you live in a set of circumstances where factually speaking things are gradually improving at a fairly constant rate. We now enter a gamble where time will deliver everything we want, but it's possible that through political or social change we could a) reduce the time of delivery, b) increase the time of delivery c) lose the delivery and make everything worse.

 Here then, is where I have a major problem with activism's quality control. I'm not so sure activism isn't a business, and that it isn't big business, even though most activists participation is unpaid. Like a social media influencer, activists function as an assett base or market power for the organizers or figureheads. The number of followers becomes a currency.

An important difference though, is that if a bunch of people were to voluntarily send me $10, and I gained the influence in society that a rich person has, my influence would be secured by my physical possession of currency, not the people who sent it to me. Whereas an organization claiming to represent me - like a spokesperson for an activist organization has demonstrated one thing - that a person will turn up somewhere at sometime. 

There's a test that can be conducted, and in some cases I'm told, has been; where you walk up to someone at a protest or whatever and quiz them in order to ascertain their understanding of the issue they are protesting, even their understanding of the organization whose banner they march under.

I cannot imagine for example, a protest more easily dismissed, than the climate strike by primary school students, though I wholeheartedly agree with it. I can recall being a secondary student, and even a primary school student. I am subsequently, not inclined to believe students organize protests so much as are organized to protest. Or rather, in the case of students, the larger the turnout the less credulous I am that they are moved by conviction rather than esteem. There's also my impression that those most likely to be informed by the facts are likely to be the most reluctant to miss any more school than the strict minimum.

"Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people." ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

So let's get radical now, something that has become not just increasingly acceptable, but increasingly fashionable. Just to be clear, after sticking my tongue in my cheek, the aim of society has to be: 

to function. 

A revolution is an admission of failure, an extreme measure that has a very high risk of not being a remedy. My intuition, (something very unscientific) is that interpreting a revolution as a kind of reorginizing of society - the criteria to be met for a revolution is: things cannot get worse. So we aren't taking a risk, because it is all uphill if we lose the current system. We may as well experiment with new powers, take a gamble on this passionate man on a horse. Particularly in light of the disastrous history of revolutions. 

Contemplate in general how beyond repair a situation has to be to scrap everything and start from scratch. How bad does the sauce have to be to decide more salt or more water isn't the remedy, but tossing the pot and starting from scratch? The humble and modest project of reorganizing society entirely. 

The question that needs asking is 'how much of the society functions?' 

There is a clear difference between a demand like 'Move the 0-net emissions target from 2050 to 2030!' and 'Destroy Capitalism' one requires reform, the other requires revolution.

There is also massive disparities between how outsize the activist influence would be in the instance of success. Revolutionaries get their way over 100% of people, individuals cannot have a more outsize effect on politics and society. 

Soviet membership was initially freely elected, but many members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, anarchists, and other leftists created opposition to the Bolsheviks through the Soviets themselves. The elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly took place 25 November 1917. The Bolsheviks gained 25% of the vote. When it became clear that the Bolsheviks had little support outside of the industrialized areas of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, they simply barred non-Bolsheviks from membership in the Soviets. The Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly in January 1918.

So I am not sure if I know the answer to the empirical question of how often it is the case, but revolutionaries strike me as implicitly or explicitly knowing what is best for everyone.

That 'knowledge' badly needs quality control. Particularly if you'll let anyone wander up on the day and march with you, hold a banner. 

For example, it may seem intuitive that if there is massive inequality with 1% accruing 80% of the wealth or something then the system is broken. I'd almost certainly agree, over the long term-inter-generational picture. 

However, it can be counterintuitive how outsize the effects of an initial small inequality can be. Behavioral Economist Dan Ariely in this google talk which I will summarize here. You have 101 women and 100 men and each receive $10, rule 1: if at the end of the game you have any money you get to keep it IF you are paired with a person of the opposite gender. rule 2: you can buy people, by offering some of your $10 to someone else's partner to ditch them and join you. rule 3: if someone buys you for $1, and then someone else buys you for $2, you have to return the $1 to the person who bought you in order to get the $2. 

The beginning conditions of the game 101 women command $1,010 and the men command $1,000. At the end of the game where all partner switching stops, the outcome mathematically is that the women's cash received will be $100 (with $10 returned by an uncoupled woman) and the men will have $1,900. This is all driven by one initially unpartnered individuals attempt to maximize their return under the rules of the game. The important thing to stress is that this is a game, much like the pirate game, the Monty Hall Problem, the prisoners dilemma etc. where often it has to be specified that the participants are 'rational' - I can easily imagine trying to practically demonstrate the above partner matching/buying game where either a) the initial unmatched person construes the situation as hopeless and gives up without buying a partner. or b) some dudes attempt to buy 'hotter' partners than their initial pairing, missing the point of the game (to make money) assuming at the end of the game they'll go on a date or something.

The point being, these games are controlled, isolated descriptions of real world phenomena, where resources are limited and we are faced with an uncomfortable paradox, articulated for me by Mark Blyth:

Whoever has the power to enforce property rights, has by definition the power to take your property away.

This I suspect is why, when the radical project of reorganizing an unfair uneven society into a more equal one the 'cure' has been worse than the disease.

Warfare cannot be the only institution that permits an individual to be wrong. When I say the world needs less activists, I could draw a distinction between those trying to redress political disenfranchisement - eg. we don't have the cash reserves of the industry group lobbyists, so we need to make noise and draw attention and sway public opinion. From those that entertain a radical mindset of 'well I'm not getting my way, I'm not popular enough, therefore we need to get rid of the system.' 

The latter group helps delegitimize the former. 

There's also the scary positive feedback loop, where to sway public opinion activists need to command attention. Activists aren't just competing against every other news story of the day, but against other causes for attention. There are to the limits of my learning and imagination, only two broad strategy groups: penetration (more/better) and differentiation (different), and if your cause can't attract more protestors, then you have to set yourself apart by being more creative (rare, hard to repeat), or more violent (increasingly common).

The positive feedback loop comes in because more violent protests justify stronger police presence and expanded police powers, which in turn seemingly justify more violent protests and so forth. The big cost is that I suspect, violent protests while successfully commanding more attention, also are more polarizing - they generate both more attention and antipathy - whether the violence is disproportionately on the filth's side or on the protestors side. 

Bringing us all the way back to competence. Looking to the example of some of recent history's best activists Women's Suffrage movements, Gandhi, and the Gandhi inspired Martin Luther King where a core aspect of their quality control was peaceful protest strategically important for maintaining a moral high ground and public sympathy, particularly I presume, when facing opposition that is claiming the moral high ground.

If a violent act, like punching or spitting on an officer of the law, destroying public or private property receives disproportionate attention to the proportion of total participants in the protest that commit that act - eg. someone throws a stone at a cop, so the media story goes from 'thousands marched in the streets protesting...' to 'a protest turned violent today as activists clashed with riot police...' then having the wrong activists show up to your protest is a failure by organizers to exert quality control. 

Something I intuit, as getting harder and harder in the modern era, where organizing a protests has become easier (set up a facebook event) and organizing activists (having a chain of command, commitment to non-violence) has become harder, this is the major area in which the world needs less activists.

A protest needs to be scrubbed of anyone who wants a nice human smokescreen to take the opportunity to punch cops. I would also argue, a protest ideally would be scrubbed of any participants who cannot intelligibly articulate the cause they are protesting. 

So I do mean the world needs less activists in an academic/philosophical sense, where actually addressing public dissatisfaction through real policy change and reform creates more tolerable situations. But also in a quite literal sense of less activists manufacturing intolerable situations in the pursuit of growth, and more competence... where any particular cause only demands so much activism, and often the supply is in excess. It is perhaps worth looking to the lobbying model, or often the most successful forms of activism which involve raising funds to pay for legal expertise. 

Champion warfare did not historically exist, but I would certainly believe that champion activism exists and is highly effective. Of course, selection of a champion may require the highest quality control of all, and if activists build the platform on which a champion stands, well then back to square fucking one I guess.