Violence is Not an Option
maybe on the NASDAQ
Two things happened this past week to remind me of a column I did for the Intergalactic Medicine Show. At first glance, they seem to point in entirely opposite directions.
The people of South Korea flatly and mostly peacefully rejected an attempt by their elected president to declare martial law.
A currently unidentified shooter murdered an insurance CEO on his way in to a shareholder meeting.
But they are both about non-elites pushing back against elites. One situation was violent and one was less so. But to paraphrase a recent movie that touched on some of these same issues in a more intimate way, Violence is always on the menu.
As we’ll see below, violence is not an individual act but a context-driven process.
Sometimes it is the credible threat of violence that brings the elites to the bargaining table. Their risk of losing has to be higher than the risk of bargaining, or the cost of winning outright, otherwise they just double down. Not consciously, necessarily, as ably written up by
in a recent post on what at first looks like a different topic.
Even if you aren’t violent right now, your opponents — being human — probably assume that you might become violent. That may be projection of their own paranoid fantasies, or a reasonable prediction of future potentialities, but as Clark says, it’s not what you actually are but what’s in your opponent’s mind that determines what they will do.
Rich people aren’t evil so much as they are reflexively defensive of their perks and privileges, which they honestly believe they earned. Pointing out that they actually inherited them from their rich parents just pisses them off even more. I include myself; I thought of my upbringing as solidly blue-collar until I went to India, as mentioned last week, and saw poverty on a whole other level.
Reaction to the two events above on Substack has been predictably all over the place, with journalist
reposting a lot of angry memes, while is horrified and journalist / minister / curmudgeon grants absolution to nobody.Nothing absolves the killer of Thompson, but nothing absolves those who run for-profit health care corporations that embrace a business model that destroys and terminates lives in the name of profit.
My favorite take was from
:Yes, these are the people who heal for a living, and they are mocking this guy’s death. “My patients died while those bitches enjoyed 26 million dollars,” said one. There are endless angry comments about Thompson from people who try to stop people from dying. That’s how bad it is.
While I really dislike a lot of these people, none of us should want to live in a country where assassination becomes a method of political expression. It’s hard to see democracy surviving if elected leaders and corporate leaders feel they might be shot at any point. And that’s why we have to actually get our laws working again.
I published a relevant story back in March, in All Tomorrow’s Futures, where the 85-year-old teaching permaculture classes to neighborhood homeschool kids might or might not also be a cyber-terrorist, responsible for some number of deaths similar to United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s. I was certainly not calling for widespread class war / dusting off the guillotine; mostly I just thought the idea of an old lady terrorist was interesting and subversive and funny.
My past thoughts below, as they often did / do, ran from science fiction to politics to lab experiments on animals, explaining where we’re at and how we got here, before trying to boost a number of creative (and nonviolent!) proposals for tactics of social change. Since very few readers have been clicking on links, I’m just re-posting the whole thing here. The footnotes are recent additions or corrections current to this moment in 2024.
PlotBot column 29, May 2018
Some science fiction writers and fans make the disingenuous claim that the field has been too politicized and that is "ruining" a genre that was once purely about imaginative storytelling. The people who say this invariably know nothing about the field of written SF, which has been rocked by political controversies and philosophical division since the 1930s.
The most famous example, other than the Futurians (wiki that term), was when prominent authors took out ads opposing and supporting the Vietnam War (the opposing side included Bradbury, Le Guin, Delany, Ellison, Asimov, Leiber, Roddenberry, and Margaret St. Clair, while the pro side had Heinlein, Niven, Clement, Brackett and Marion Zimmer Bradley). The field has always been political and willing to fight about it.
-local journalist Ian McDowell, on Facebook
That quote paraphrases the opening of the best SF discussion you missed last month. Immediately following the March for Science Triad, I convened a panel of local authors at our downtown public library:
Ian McDowell, more known for horror but with a couple of Asimov’s stories under his belt;
Nicole Kurtz, writer, publisher, and former Forsyth County English teacher;
Vince Barnett, who’s producing an educational SF TV show; and
Stuart Jaffe, author of like 35 books, including a series about a ghostly PI, whom I had never met before but former editor Ed Schubert recommended.
The topic was SF and politics. The panel outnumbered the audience by one. That was a theme for the day, really. Last year’s March for Science drew over a thousand people, and this year’s many fewer, despite months of meetings and organizing and advertising. I know, because I did some small amount of that work.
Why? What was different between the two years? Was it the date? Was it the weather? Were three protests in three months too much to ask of the populace? Were the Orbital Mind Control Lasers suddenly more effective?
I’ve written before about how the field of history tends towards after-the-fact arguments and explanations rather than predictions that can be tested against experimental data. Micah White, one of the organizers of the Occupy movement1, takes a step towards a science of historical prediction by laying out his own theory of social change in The End of Protest. He lays out a whole series of them, actually, conveniently summarized in a two-dimensional comparative graph.
If that intrigues you, check out the book. Here I want to focus on White’s contention that protests are a form of display, street-theater that makes activists feel good but accomplishes nothing, because the wealthy elites who control the government are simply not afraid of peaceful protests the way they were during the 1960s, when it seemed more likely that groups of protesters would inevitably morph into violent mobs if not dealt with in one way or another.23
This assumption by the elites is a result of game theory, which was all the rage during the Cold War. The basic idea is to treat elites and protesters as single entities, locked into a two-person dominance competition, where there can only be one winner. On each round, a player can choose only one of three responses:
Escalate the display (dominate);
Do nothing; or
De-escalate the display (submit).
If both de-escalate, that could be something like a compromise.
A dog barking, or a cat arching its back and hissing, are examples of cheap warnings which could escalate to a more risky attack. Humans can of course extend those rituals indefinitely, using finer and finer gradations of signaling. Imagine a pair of kids on the playground staring each other down, then calling each other names, then cursing, then yelling, then pushing, then throwing a punch. If things get completely out of hand, there could be a transition to violence as biologists define it.
This would mean focusing damage on soft, vulnerable parts of the body like the eyes or the throat, which might be the normal targets of a predator hunting another species, but which are unusual in combats between members of the same species. Human adults are more likely to resort to weapons in these situations, which can short-circuit the slow escalation process in extremely deadly ways.
This process of escalation towards pathological violence, as opposed to normal bounded aggression, has been extensively researched in non-human animals, as model systems for human behavior. As you might expect, a behavior as important as combat is a rat’s nest of hormonal and neuronal checks and balances. There are contributions from genetics, from toxin exposure, from personal history, and from social and cultural context.
Micah White, writing about revolutions in human societies, which he defines broadly as the “substitution of one legal system for another legal system,” does not explicitly mention game theory, or use the word escalation, but he does reference a famously controversial book in which a prominent sociologist named Gamson concluded that, based on his survey of 53 situations of political conflict, violence (defined much more broadly as any physical aggression) seemed to be one of the revolutionary’s more effective tools. This was not a popular finding amongst nonviolent activists.
Today the politicians in charge can be much more confident that the protesters will break for a nice lunch downtown and head on home at the end of the day. Only extended protests like Occupy, or possibly the upcoming Poor People’s Campaign, even merit choreographed arrests. In another strikingly unpopular conclusion, White takes this to mean that street theater has lost its effectiveness, like a virus that becomes less deadly in order to infect more people, and that new tactics are necessary to break through the noise.
On his website, he has proposed shorting the stocks of misbehaving companies through the use of options contracts, allowing activists to fund their campaigns and hurt their enemies at the same time, much like Al-Quaeda is suspected to have done by shorting airline stocks immediately before 9/11.
What would activists use this money for? Why, app development, of course, just like any other social entrepreneurs of the early 21st.
My identity and voter registration was already verified by Ballot. And because Ballot supplied signature collectors with my location — similar to how Uber summons me a driver — the process was smooth and cost efficient.
Collectors that used to harangue people on the streets, now busily dart from activist to activist throughout the city. They now earn a nice income collecting signatures for an ideological rainbow of proposals.
It wasn't long before everyone was talking about, and using, Ballot. Especially when we collectively gasped when hundreds of thousands of signatures were collected for explicitly revolutionary constitutional amendments that were frighteningly democratic.
And possibly the development of a new cryptocurrency.
Then one day authorities grew tired of the Demos gatherings and forcefully removed us from Gezi...
And that is when the flippening happened.
Activists abroad had been watching the livestream and when they saw our movement getting suppressed they started buying Demoscoins on decentralized exchanges as a way to support the movement's early adopters.
The more intense the repression, the more revolutionary their actions, the more valuable Demoscoin became. Early founders now had a warchest: just by selling a few hundred coins on anonymous exchanges they raised millions of dollars to fund the revolution.
Those are both pretty blasé, as pieces of flash fiction. I’m sure any professional SF author reading this could do better. But the guy’s got ideas. As an idea guy myself, I respect that.
In my favorite recent Little Free Library find, Life with Representation, another pair of idea guys proposed doing away with national elections and instead choosing Congress-people by lottery, the same way we nominate jurors today, as a way of eliminating conflicts of interest over campaign donations. After being chosen, the Congress-to-be would have two years to educate themselves on the problems and potentials of their districts, and on the rules of lawmaking. Then they would serve for two years, and spend their final two years educating the next cohort. The book came out in 2010, and by the time their website CongressOfAmericans.org disappeared in 2016, they were talking about their proposed assembly as merely advising and pressuring the current elected Congress, not replacing it. Sad.
Why not do an anthology of stories around this last idea? The West Wing taught Americans more about our government than anything since Schoolhouse Rock. I call dibs on the redneck neuroscientist member of the Randomly Selected Congress.
Randall Hayes, the fictional Senator from KY, has very little idea what a Minority Whip actually does, but he thinks they should probably change the name of that office.
REFERENCES / FURTHER READING
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/discussion.php?id=erpi1wx3zyiq0ecwutkddnng
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.537.3680&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Fascinating discussion of warlord-centered “markets of violence.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurians
https://everything2.com/title/Orbital+mind+control+lasers
Steve Jackson’s Illuminati: New World Order is a great little game, if you’ve never played it.
https://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=200907301160.how_the_mind-control_lasers_work
“Serving the paranoid since 1997.” How have I never seen this?
https://www.economist.com/news/essays/21596796-democracy-was-most-successful-political-idea-20th-century-why-has-it-run-trouble-and-what-can-be-do
A vivid description of the current situation. Data collection is a good step, but it helps to have explicit hypotheses that can be thrown out when they don’t work. Ideologies are not hypotheses.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/magazine/16Bruce-t.html
A really good general explanation. Interestingly, it says that 40% of all political science papers in a leading journal now use modeling, so in a hundred years I may have to find something else to complain about.
White, M. (2016). The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution. Knopf Canada.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-theory/
Longer and more technical than the NYT magazine article above.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/get-psyched/201301/the-weapons-effect
Strangely, the mere presence of a weapon can increase various forms of aggression, even if it is not in direct use.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2854525/
See especially Figure 2 for an explanation of the behavioral pathway.
https://www.wired.com/story/how-ai-driven-insurance-could-reduce-gun-violence/
“But insurers are very good at estimating the risks and liabilities of individual choices; insurance could capture the externalities of gun violence in a smarter, more responsive fashion.”
“Here’s the proposed compromise: States should require gun owners to be licensed and pay insurance, just as car owners must be licensed and insured today.”
https://archive.org/details/strategyofsocial0000gams_d3m9
Gamson, W.A. (1990). The Strategy of Social Protest, 2nd edition. Wadsworth Publishing, Belmont, CA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_movement_impact_theory
And some writers interpret the book differently than Micah White does.
http://www.unice.fr/sg/authors/bios/Gamson,%202013,%201046878113503301.pdf
Gamson is an interesting guy, who’s invented multiple teaching RPGs, as well as helping kickstart the fantasy sports industry. We’ll come back to him at some point.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/02/activist-russia-protest-occupy-black-lives-matter
Micah White’s reflections on being approached by Russian intelligence.
https://www.micahmwhite.com/options/
https://independentaustralia.net/article-display/911-terrorists-made-millions-on-the-stock-market,3738
Not proven, suspected. Snopes says no.
https://www.micahmwhite.com/ballot
https://www.micahmwhite.com/demoscoin
https://qz.com/578544/social-movements-will-put-an-end-to-war-as-we-know-it/
https://archive.org/details/lifewithrepresen0000till
Tilleman, R., and Johnson, J. (2010). Life With Representation: The Promise of Real Democracy in the 21st Century.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150814041106/http://congressofamericans.org/main.htm
I love The Wayback Machine.
Who apparently won a Roddenberry Fellowship, which I had never heard of until just now.
The Roddenberry Fellowship is rooted in Gene Roddenberry’s belief that we must not just “accept differences between ourselves and our ideas, but enthusiastically welcome and enjoy them.” What could be possible if we embrace our differences? If disagreements were seen as a beginning instead of the end? If all people were “enthusiastically welcomed” and allowed to thrive?
When Are Social Protests Effective? Paywalled review article from Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
“We apply our framework to organize the literature, and in doing so find a pattern that suggests that normative nonviolent forms of action may be most effective in mobilizing sympathetic target audiences, and more extreme disruptive action may be effective at motivating policy concessions from resistant target audiences.”
This slightly older article, specifically on the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020,
“Protests were not associated with reductions in prejudice, but were associated with increases in support for police reform. Specifically, a mix of nonviolent and violent protests was associated with an increase in police-reform support among conservatives living in liberal areas.”
As usual, ML Clark goes deeper than me on the Brian Thompson murder.
"The timing of this reversal further reinforced a broadly shared conviction that Big Business now required the threat of violence from random actors to rethink its policies. Nothing less in this economic climate would do the trick."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-152851779