The lessons are not only about leaving the entire civilization, but they also apply on a smaller scale: leaving your friends, your family, your partner, your job. If some people (or faceless organizations) abuse you, it can make more sense to quit and try your luck elsewhere, rather than persevering and believing that “if I only keep showing them how loyal and hard-working I am, one day they will certainly change their mind and recognize my value”. Quoting Madonna, there’s no greater power than the power of good-bye.
(Of course, the law of equal and opposite advice applies: no relationships are perfect, so if you always quit whenever things are less than perfect, you may end up alone and jobless. Different people need different advice.)
Everything in moderation, including charity. You should not become suicide-level charitable. At some moment it is reasonable to admit that the other person is probaby just hurting you on purpose.
And most of all, I find myself wondering what the missing third way is. Presumably one can serve two masters, and exist in both physical and social reality, and Bayesians can win against barbarians; what does it look like to actually defend the Enlightenment and liberal virtues against encroaching illiberalism? That is, could there be a successful open campaign in the daylight that was in favor of reason and nerds?
Yeah, fighting back is not described as an option in Atlas Shrugged, except for the short prison-break sequence. Some protagonists learned to exploit the system. Some made a half-assed attempt to hire a guy to fight for them; didn’t work as expected.
If the lesson is that sometimes you face an unbeatable (at least in short term) enemy, and then you need to rationally admit it, okay. But I suspect that the protagonists were actually incapable of opposing the enemy, even if the situation was less dire. They were fact-oriented, the enemy was people-oriented; when the society turned against them (which they had no way to fight against), all they could do was run; and they were quite lucky that the enemy didn’t actually try to stop them. (Rand’s villains didn’t make some obvious moves the real-world villains would have made, such as protecting the borders, and taking family members of strategically important people hostage.) They relied on social infrastructure they were incapable of maintaining; they were too specialized—good for them as individuals, but bad for them as a group. And they were quite lucky to have a nearby place to go, magically defended.
Instead, I would like to see some, uhm, equivalent of Israel, in the sense of: a place where people who once only had the options like “run” or “get hurt” now have an army that can defend them against other armies. Not necessarily as a geographical location, but kinda like: if you want do defend yourself, don’t do a half-assed job; if your enemies have an army, you need an army, too. If you start an open campaign for Enlightenment… well, it’s quite predictable who will attack you first and what weapons they will use. Do you have a weapon that can fire in the opposite direction? Or even a plan how to build it? Or even people who would support you at building the weapon, instead of trying to appease the enemy, perhaps by sacrificing you? So perhaps the upstream move is to create a network of trustworthy pro-Enlightenment people who are willing to defend each other; and progress from there. (Maybe there already is such group; they probably wouldn’t advertise their existence until their weapons are ready.) Having a literal country would solve the free-rider problem: if you live here, you have to pay taxes and contribute to the mutual defense. Without it, we need to find another solution.
What about a membership system? Like a union or guild? People pay their dues and agree to support the collective actions, and the union uses the funds to hire people to investigate cases and plan strategy etc. Like with insurance, someone too likely to cause trouble might not be allowed in. (This way we prevent the group from quickly being dominated by real witches.)
Yeah, I suspect it would have to be roughly in that direction. Both free-riders and witches are a problem.
Just to make sure we refer to the same thing by “witches”: people who are pro-Enlightenment, but they also (1) are pro-something-else, and they actually mostly get attacked for the other thing, or (2) have a disagreeable personality that gets them into disproportionate amounts of conflicts, so again they kinda get attacked more for their personality than for their beliefs. I mean, both of these are a problem.
This is a potential meta-problem, where the free-rider would excuse their restraint by arguing that the person under attack is a witch. But if there is a formal membership, this kind of accusation would have to be made in advance.
On the other hand, formal membership also has its problems. People will hesitate to join for all kinds of reasons. The enemies could use the member list as a convenient target list—if you have enough firepower, you can take out the entire organization in one go.
So, maybe you could have a group that only includes the people who care most strongly about the issue. They would also defend non-members, which has a free-rider problem, but they could also ask for voluntary financial support from the non-members (which would allow some of them to contribute to the cause without exposing themselves), and perhaps would be partially rewarded by high status in the community.
Shortly, a pro-Enlightenment “think tank” that would plan strategy, write press releases, etc. If the members are employed by the think tank, they cannot be fired by a Twitter mob. (Now they just need a rich sponsor, or a large donor base.) They could also coordinate volunteers: people who are willing to help a specific cause but do not want to make this a full-time job. Perhaps you could have 3-5 employees and dozens of volunteers. They couldn’t prevent someone from getting fired, but could make sure this does not happen without the displeasure of the other side being heard, and ideally without some cost for the perpetrators. (Like, imagine that every time someone gets fired by a Twitter mob, someone from the Twitter mob, and someone who caved to the mob, would face a lawsuit and have their name mentioned in the media.)
The lessons are not only about leaving the entire civilization, but they also apply on a smaller scale: leaving your friends, your family, your partner, your job. If some people (or faceless organizations) abuse you, it can make more sense to quit and try your luck elsewhere, rather than persevering and believing that “if I only keep showing them how loyal and hard-working I am, one day they will certainly change their mind and recognize my value”. Quoting Madonna, there’s no greater power than the power of good-bye.
(Of course, the law of equal and opposite advice applies: no relationships are perfect, so if you always quit whenever things are less than perfect, you may end up alone and jobless. Different people need different advice.)
Everything in moderation, including charity. You should not become suicide-level charitable. At some moment it is reasonable to admit that the other person is probaby just hurting you on purpose.
Yeah, fighting back is not described as an option in Atlas Shrugged, except for the short prison-break sequence. Some protagonists learned to exploit the system. Some made a half-assed attempt to hire a guy to fight for them; didn’t work as expected.
If the lesson is that sometimes you face an unbeatable (at least in short term) enemy, and then you need to rationally admit it, okay. But I suspect that the protagonists were actually incapable of opposing the enemy, even if the situation was less dire. They were fact-oriented, the enemy was people-oriented; when the society turned against them (which they had no way to fight against), all they could do was run; and they were quite lucky that the enemy didn’t actually try to stop them. (Rand’s villains didn’t make some obvious moves the real-world villains would have made, such as protecting the borders, and taking family members of strategically important people hostage.) They relied on social infrastructure they were incapable of maintaining; they were too specialized—good for them as individuals, but bad for them as a group. And they were quite lucky to have a nearby place to go, magically defended.
Instead, I would like to see some, uhm, equivalent of Israel, in the sense of: a place where people who once only had the options like “run” or “get hurt” now have an army that can defend them against other armies. Not necessarily as a geographical location, but kinda like: if you want do defend yourself, don’t do a half-assed job; if your enemies have an army, you need an army, too. If you start an open campaign for Enlightenment… well, it’s quite predictable who will attack you first and what weapons they will use. Do you have a weapon that can fire in the opposite direction? Or even a plan how to build it? Or even people who would support you at building the weapon, instead of trying to appease the enemy, perhaps by sacrificing you? So perhaps the upstream move is to create a network of trustworthy pro-Enlightenment people who are willing to defend each other; and progress from there. (Maybe there already is such group; they probably wouldn’t advertise their existence until their weapons are ready.) Having a literal country would solve the free-rider problem: if you live here, you have to pay taxes and contribute to the mutual defense. Without it, we need to find another solution.
What about a membership system? Like a union or guild? People pay their dues and agree to support the collective actions, and the union uses the funds to hire people to investigate cases and plan strategy etc. Like with insurance, someone too likely to cause trouble might not be allowed in. (This way we prevent the group from quickly being dominated by real witches.)
Yeah, I suspect it would have to be roughly in that direction. Both free-riders and witches are a problem.
Just to make sure we refer to the same thing by “witches”: people who are pro-Enlightenment, but they also (1) are pro-something-else, and they actually mostly get attacked for the other thing, or (2) have a disagreeable personality that gets them into disproportionate amounts of conflicts, so again they kinda get attacked more for their personality than for their beliefs. I mean, both of these are a problem.
This is a potential meta-problem, where the free-rider would excuse their restraint by arguing that the person under attack is a witch. But if there is a formal membership, this kind of accusation would have to be made in advance.
On the other hand, formal membership also has its problems. People will hesitate to join for all kinds of reasons. The enemies could use the member list as a convenient target list—if you have enough firepower, you can take out the entire organization in one go.
So, maybe you could have a group that only includes the people who care most strongly about the issue. They would also defend non-members, which has a free-rider problem, but they could also ask for voluntary financial support from the non-members (which would allow some of them to contribute to the cause without exposing themselves), and perhaps would be partially rewarded by high status in the community.
Shortly, a pro-Enlightenment “think tank” that would plan strategy, write press releases, etc. If the members are employed by the think tank, they cannot be fired by a Twitter mob. (Now they just need a rich sponsor, or a large donor base.) They could also coordinate volunteers: people who are willing to help a specific cause but do not want to make this a full-time job. Perhaps you could have 3-5 employees and dozens of volunteers. They couldn’t prevent someone from getting fired, but could make sure this does not happen without the displeasure of the other side being heard, and ideally without some cost for the perpetrators. (Like, imagine that every time someone gets fired by a Twitter mob, someone from the Twitter mob, and someone who caved to the mob, would face a lawsuit and have their name mentioned in the media.)