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The perception of naivete comes, I think, from a gap in priors. Part of that is that I'm a Christian, so I am committed to a belief in objective morality and ultimate justice. Another part of it is that I am quite convinced that human systems are unavoidably fallible. There are no stable dystopias, nor stable utopias, no thousand year Reichs, no iron laws of history grinding out some inevitable sociological outcome. Everything we make ends, usually sooner than later, and sooner still when other humans are incentivized to hasten that end's arrival.
This seems like a reasonable axiom. Would you mind examining it in a bit more detail, though? Specifically, the term "while evils are sufferable": is the sufferability of evils a universal constant, or does it change over time? Will all men in in all places and all times accept one specific evil and reject another specific evil, or do we observe variance in their tolerance over time? And if we observe variance, what causes this variance?
Certainly. But when we observe past societies, we see that the capacity for coherent meanness ebbs and flows. The state long united divides, and the state long divided unites, no?
I should think that simple history would demonstrate that "sufferability" is not, at least in absolute terms, a constant. We can see this by comparing the conditions animating different revolts over time: the peasants in Wat Tyler's rebellion lived in manifestly different conditions than the frontiersmen who rose in the Whisky Rebellion, even though both uprisings were putatively triggered by taxes that were perceived to be too high, and the decisions of local officials which were perceived to be abusive. We can also see it by comparing the circumstances of protesting/revolting groups and comparing them to other groups similarly situated in time and place who did not engage in such protest/revolt. Thus we can see that, for example, there were several serious slave revolts in the U.S. during the first decade of the 19th century, then again in the 1830s, but otherwise seem to have been very rare, even though those same revolts often resulted in the passage of increasingly strict laws circumscribing what limited freedoms slaves had.
A hard question, but one the best explanations I've seen is de Tocqueville's - revolutions and revolts happen not when people are maximally oppressed, but when things are getting better sufficient for them to develop expectations that then go unmet, and when repressive forces are weak and/or internally conflicted.
@SteveKirk as well, the conversation may be relevant to your interests.
So there's two variables we could propose here: how bad things are perceived to be, and the expected benefit of rebellion. An example of the first would be things like the common pattern of famine or other natural disaster driving a population to rebellion out of sheer desperation, and the second is the examples Tocqueville is pointing to, what we might call rebellions of ambition.
To these, I would suggest as a further variable the nature of the technology available to the rebels and their rulers. Looking at the BLM movement culminating in the Floyd riots, I think smartphones and social media are far more fundamental to how things shook out than how bad things were perceived to be and what benefits were expected. To speak a bit more precisely, it seems to me that innate effects of smartphone and social media technology were the dispositive factor in peoples' perceptions of how bad things were, and what benefits rebellion could deliver.
From this, one might argue that technology itself is a major variable in the rebellion equation. Through enabling communication, technology helps us form consensus on how bad things are, and through augmenting and adding to human capabilities, it has a huge impact on the expected benefit both in terms of the fight and in terms of the plausible prosperity victory might bring. On the other hand, there's the fact that it tends to distribute itself fairly evenly between rulers and ruled, at least in the ways that matter in terms of rebellion. You can't have a functional society where the rulers are running on microchips and the ruled are restricted to cuneiform tablets; the rulers need the ruled to do all the stuff, so they need them to work as efficiently as possible, so it's massively in their interest to share the wealth, so there's generally not huge tech differentials to foment massive instability. Still, what I think I see in the historical record is that major technological innovations do in fact seriously alter the rebellion equation, often permanently. Would you argue otherwise?
...At the risk of becoming a bit elliptical, there's two intuition pumps I can recommend on this subject.
The first one is found on page 22 of this rulebook for an old Live-action roleplaying game. left column, bottom of the page, starting with the word "guidelines:". Assume for the sake of argument that the descriptions that follow were reasonable approximations of physical reality, how would you expect the rebellion calculation to change over time? And let's assume we're talking about the trend described regarding technology as a whole, in the most general sense possible, discounting entirely the specific subject mentioned in this instance.
The second can be gained by inference from Nick Bostrom's essay The Vulnerable World Hypothesis. Bostrom, being a rationalist and an academic, comes at the question squarely from the perspective of existential risk, and the perspective of the establishment. He's seeking to advise our rulers about which policies they should implement. But if we approach from the perspective of citizens facing merely human tyranny, and if we ignore the specific technology his argument is built around and rather look at technology itself, in its broadest sense, what inferences would you draw from his argument?
I agree that technology - particularly information technology - plays an important role in setting the rebellion equation. In particular, technology plays a big part in setting the amount of revolutionary energy bouncing around a society. However, I wouldn't go so far to say that it's entirely, or even mostly dispositive. In the language of my original question to you, another variable is the strength of the cork keeping that rebellion energy in the metaphorical bottle.
To expand on this, I think that the factors playing into that equation have to include, at a minimum:
I'm pretty sure that each of these factors can be manipulated semi-independently, and that each of them has a significant impact on the likelihood and character of rebellion. Clearly, advances in techological progress of a society do not monotonically increase the likelihood or seriousness of rebellions; there are clear population-level trends in the ethnic, religious, and regional character of contemporary violence that put paid to that theory.
This reply nerd sniped me a bit, but I'll try to push through.
I think the list you gave is accurate, as far as it goes; my criticism would be that it risks getting lost in the details, given that many of the variables don't seem terribly variable, in addition to being difficult to quantify or measure.
1 - ???
2 - I assume that coordination is highly restricted, to the point of stochastic impossibility. This will not change.
3 - I assume that very few to no individuals or small groups are willing to risk adverse consequences. This will not change.
4 - I assume that things are getting observably worse, but gradually. This will not change.
5 - ???
6 - I assume that society is hard, but somewhat fragile. Society has vast capacity for coordinating meanness against the outgroup, but is rife with internal contradictions and corruption that impose a constant drag on productivity and coordination. This will not change.
7 - I assume society is extremely willing to punish rebels. This will not change.
8 - Society is not very competent. It muddles through well-enough on well-defined and familiar problems, but it handles novel, adversarial, and blind-spot problems quite poorly and with a lot of wastage. Like an elder suffering from the onset of dementia, it thrives on routine. This will not change.
9 - Society is not responsive at all to demands of the public. That is to say, to the extent that a public has demands that fall outside the established social consensus, Society ignores or suppresses them. This will not change.
Having left aside points 1 and 5 for the moment, do my assessments of the other seven factors seem accurate to you?
Sorry, it seemed like an interesting discussion :( happy to move it to the new thread if you like!
I mean, my opinion is worth the wind it takes to express it, so ymmv. But no, I don't think your assessments are accurate.
The capacity of individuals to spread ideas, recognize fellow-travelers, and recruit does change drastically in terms of communications technology (the printing press, mass literacy, radio, TV, cellphones, the internet, etc.), technologies of physical movement (railroads, macadamized roads/highways, mass-produced automobiles, cheap commercial air travel), and historical contingency (war mobilizations, migrations, etc.)
I would think it's obvious that the opportunity cost of being willing to do something stupid and potentially dangerous goes up and down with circumstance - particularly how angry the population is, the change in motivating ideologies over time, the alternatives available (e.g. youth unemployment rates), etc.
As to the rate of change, Lenin was correct - "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."
Societies vary wildly in their ability to identify dissidents, let alone coordinate meanness against them. Some societies have the Stasi, others don't. Some have cameras everywhere, others don't. Some use cash, others are all-digital.
Some societies are much harsher against rebels than others; Tsarist Russia, for example, was shockingly lenient, and so is the modern US at least with regard to far-leftist causes in Blue jurisdictions. Makes the success of the Bolshevik revolution a lot less surprising in retrospect.
etc, etc.
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