I feel like activists are generally seen like this when one disagrees with their cause, and seen as brave people doing an important thing when one agrees with their cause. If one doesn’t have an opinion, could go either way, depending on how much they seem to violate generally-accepted norms and how strongly the person in question feels about those norms.
Interestingly enough, this applies to corporate executives and bureaucracy leaders as well. Many see the world in a very zero-sum way (300 years ago and most of history before that, virtually all top intellectuals in virtually all civilizations saw the universe as a cycle where civilizational progress was a myth and everything was an endless cycle of power being won and lost by people born/raised to be unusually strategically competitive) but fail to realize that, in aggregate, their contempt for cause-having people (“oh, so you think you’re better than me, huh? you think you’re hot shit?”) have turned into opposition to positive-sum folk, itself a cause of sorts, though with an aversion to activism and assembly and anything in that narrow brand of audacious display.
It doesn’t help that most ‘idealistic’ causes throughout human history had a terrible epistemic backing.
Yeah, I think the mainstream view of activism is something like “Activism is important, of course. See the Civil Rights and Suffrage movements. My favorite celebrity is an activist for saving the whales! I just don’t like those mean crazy ones I see on the news.”
That mainstream is like one side of the American political spectrum, now also do the other side. ;)
Seems to me there are three factors to how one perceives an activist, most important first:
Do I support their agenda, or do I oppose it?
If I oppose their agenda, how threatened do I feel by their activism? If I support their agenda, how devastating blow do I think they delivered to my enemies?
How do the activists actually behave? Do they politely express their opinions? Do they destroy public and private property? Do they attack other people?
The problem is that the third point is the least important one. A typical person will excuse any violence on their side as “necessary” (and sometimes also as “cool”). On the other hand, even seemingly peaceful behavior cannot compensate for the fact that “their goals are evil”.
Basically, the third point mostly matters for people who don’t have a dog in this fight. The more radicalized is the society, the fewer such people are.
I feel like activists are generally seen like this when one disagrees with their cause, and seen as brave people doing an important thing when one agrees with their cause. If one doesn’t have an opinion, could go either way, depending on how much they seem to violate generally-accepted norms and how strongly the person in question feels about those norms.
Interestingly enough, this applies to corporate executives and bureaucracy leaders as well. Many see the world in a very zero-sum way (300 years ago and most of history before that, virtually all top intellectuals in virtually all civilizations saw the universe as a cycle where civilizational progress was a myth and everything was an endless cycle of power being won and lost by people born/raised to be unusually strategically competitive) but fail to realize that, in aggregate, their contempt for cause-having people (“oh, so you think you’re better than me, huh? you think you’re hot shit?”) have turned into opposition to positive-sum folk, itself a cause of sorts, though with an aversion to activism and assembly and anything in that narrow brand of audacious display.
It doesn’t help that most ‘idealistic’ causes throughout human history had a terrible epistemic backing.
Yeah, I think the mainstream view of activism is something like “Activism is important, of course. See the Civil Rights and Suffrage movements. My favorite celebrity is an activist for saving the whales! I just don’t like those mean crazy ones I see on the news.”
That mainstream is like one side of the American political spectrum, now also do the other side. ;)
Seems to me there are three factors to how one perceives an activist, most important first:
Do I support their agenda, or do I oppose it?
If I oppose their agenda, how threatened do I feel by their activism? If I support their agenda, how devastating blow do I think they delivered to my enemies?
How do the activists actually behave? Do they politely express their opinions? Do they destroy public and private property? Do they attack other people?
The problem is that the third point is the least important one. A typical person will excuse any violence on their side as “necessary” (and sometimes also as “cool”). On the other hand, even seemingly peaceful behavior cannot compensate for the fact that “their goals are evil”.
Basically, the third point mostly matters for people who don’t have a dog in this fight. The more radicalized is the society, the fewer such people are.