This is a problem I’ve been wrestling with for some time. The recent invasion of Ukraine brought it back to the forefront of my mind, but so far I haven’t found concrete actions an individual can take.
At the moment, it seems to me that the key to keeping authoritarianism at bay is repairing and strengthening institutions because my assumption is that a well-functioning collection of institutions (aka. a state) is what prevents people from turning to bloody revolution. In other words, if people trust the government to get their needs met, they will not wish to overturn it.
There are many forces destroying institutions. Many are internal, such as corruption and bureaucratic cost disease. These things decrease the trust in institutions, making people upset and pushing them toward fixing issues on their own. At best, this means self-help groups, but at worst, this turns into armed militias. There are external forces as well, ranging from nature (disasters, pandemics, etc.) to other states (propaganda, blockades, etc.--depending which country you live in).
I recently read an article about how Estonia is strengthening its defenses against Russian hybrid warfare. It boils down to how hybrid warfare damages social contracts (formal/informal, small/large institutions), decreasing the legitimacy of the government and of democracy itself, potentially weakening Estonia’s reaction against a Crimea-like land grab. It set my mind thinking about how it should be possible to apply reverse-hybrid warfare to instead strengthen the social contracts that hold society together.
But it seems like all of this is large scale, long term work, and nothing an individual can get going in a month or six.
Like I said, I don’t have concrete ideas for individual actions, but this line of inquiry has pointed me in some direction as opposed to wandering randomly. It has also made visible to me concrete examples of things that damage liberal democracy, such as the tweet you posted, perhaps helping me take on a more defensive posture.
If you live in a free society—not just technically following the letter of the law, but where most people will really not punish you in any way for having any kind of opinion—you can benefit socially from having “edgy” opinions. You get social rewards from people in the same subculture, without any costs imposed from outside. The society becomes the CooperateBot, and you can get lot of value by defecting against it. At least until a critical number of people starts following the same strategy, and then the system may suddenly fall apart.
Not sure if this has a solution, but even if there is one, it is probably too difficult for most people to follow. My first guess would be to increase intolerance proportionally to the benefits the “edgy” people get from rewarding each other… but that is difficult to estimate, difficult to do precisely, and most importantly does not distinguish between people who get social benefits from creating negative externalities (Nazis getting loyal Nazi friends) and people who simply get social benefits doing something neutral (chess players finding friends among chess players).
The only thing I can recommend is to notice when someone is trying to make you a CooperateBot. On the other hand, this is how intolerant people may genuinely feel when they hear about the idea of tolerance.
Funny, I just started reading The Open Society and Its Enemies to find some answers or at least threads to pull on.
One point that struct me, right in the introduction, is Popper saying that totalitarianism appeals to people because it absolves them of individual responsibility, a responsibility that we, humans, gained (became burdened by) because civilizational progress pull us out of tribes.
I understand your suggestion as being in line with this theme of personal responsibility—you cannot become any sort of -Bot and instead you have to evaluate every interaction separately and decide whether you want to cooperate or defect.
Also, I wonder if this problem exists in the type of uniform society we have now, but would become largely irrelevant in the type of society that Scott describes in Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism. If you lived on your own island full of edgy people like yourself, then the benefits of being edgy would cancel out as you wouldn’t have a larger society to defect against.
I know that right now this is just a theoretical exercise, but sometimes it does feel like society is fragmenting into smaller and smaller subcultures through a process fueled by globalization.
If no one had to suffer the consequences of other people’s bad decisions, there would be less need to worry about other people’s stupidity. Like, you could still feel sorry for them, but usually you would just shrug and tell them that if it starts hurting too much, they are free to change their minds.
This is a problem I’ve been wrestling with for some time. The recent invasion of Ukraine brought it back to the forefront of my mind, but so far I haven’t found concrete actions an individual can take.
At the moment, it seems to me that the key to keeping authoritarianism at bay is repairing and strengthening institutions because my assumption is that a well-functioning collection of institutions (aka. a state) is what prevents people from turning to bloody revolution. In other words, if people trust the government to get their needs met, they will not wish to overturn it.
There are many forces destroying institutions. Many are internal, such as corruption and bureaucratic cost disease. These things decrease the trust in institutions, making people upset and pushing them toward fixing issues on their own. At best, this means self-help groups, but at worst, this turns into armed militias. There are external forces as well, ranging from nature (disasters, pandemics, etc.) to other states (propaganda, blockades, etc.--depending which country you live in).
I recently read an article about how Estonia is strengthening its defenses against Russian hybrid warfare. It boils down to how hybrid warfare damages social contracts (formal/informal, small/large institutions), decreasing the legitimacy of the government and of democracy itself, potentially weakening Estonia’s reaction against a Crimea-like land grab. It set my mind thinking about how it should be possible to apply reverse-hybrid warfare to instead strengthen the social contracts that hold society together.
But it seems like all of this is large scale, long term work, and nothing an individual can get going in a month or six.
Like I said, I don’t have concrete ideas for individual actions, but this line of inquiry has pointed me in some direction as opposed to wandering randomly. It has also made visible to me concrete examples of things that damage liberal democracy, such as the tweet you posted, perhaps helping me take on a more defensive posture.
Related: rational irrationality and paradox of tolerance.
If you live in a free society—not just technically following the letter of the law, but where most people will really not punish you in any way for having any kind of opinion—you can benefit socially from having “edgy” opinions. You get social rewards from people in the same subculture, without any costs imposed from outside. The society becomes the CooperateBot, and you can get lot of value by defecting against it. At least until a critical number of people starts following the same strategy, and then the system may suddenly fall apart.
Not sure if this has a solution, but even if there is one, it is probably too difficult for most people to follow. My first guess would be to increase intolerance proportionally to the benefits the “edgy” people get from rewarding each other… but that is difficult to estimate, difficult to do precisely, and most importantly does not distinguish between people who get social benefits from creating negative externalities (Nazis getting loyal Nazi friends) and people who simply get social benefits doing something neutral (chess players finding friends among chess players).
The only thing I can recommend is to notice when someone is trying to make you a CooperateBot. On the other hand, this is how intolerant people may genuinely feel when they hear about the idea of tolerance.
Funny, I just started reading The Open Society and Its Enemies to find some answers or at least threads to pull on.
One point that struct me, right in the introduction, is Popper saying that totalitarianism appeals to people because it absolves them of individual responsibility, a responsibility that we, humans, gained (became burdened by) because civilizational progress pull us out of tribes.
I understand your suggestion as being in line with this theme of personal responsibility—you cannot become any sort of -Bot and instead you have to evaluate every interaction separately and decide whether you want to cooperate or defect.
Also, I wonder if this problem exists in the type of uniform society we have now, but would become largely irrelevant in the type of society that Scott describes in Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism. If you lived on your own island full of edgy people like yourself, then the benefits of being edgy would cancel out as you wouldn’t have a larger society to defect against.
I know that right now this is just a theoretical exercise, but sometimes it does feel like society is fragmenting into smaller and smaller subcultures through a process fueled by globalization.
If no one had to suffer the consequences of other people’s bad decisions, there would be less need to worry about other people’s stupidity. Like, you could still feel sorry for them, but usually you would just shrug and tell them that if it starts hurting too much, they are free to change their minds.