This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The history of Progressivism argues otherwise. Moderate goals are for moderate people. Extremists make history.
Extremists die in ditches. The strong, the canny and the lucky make history.
The number of extremists that have achieved success and changed the world are far outnumbered by those that achieve nothing and usually end up lining the inside of a mass grave. The Paris Commune did not fail due to a lack of extreme beliefs, it failed because extremists are by their very nature terrible at making the kind of compromises you need to make in order to advance your goals.
Or, in this case, face a dearth of choices when it comes to mass-market beer in non-metro areas?
More options
Context Copy link
And yet of the people who have made significant and immediate changes to the world, extremists significantly outperform their percentage of the population, which is the correct way to assess the question. Strength, cunning and luck are of course of overwhelming importance as well, but all three together do not change the world if the person possessing them is quite comfortable with the way things are.
I suppose the synthesis here is "extremists tend to make history by subjecting themselves to a high attrition rate and building their legacies on piles of corpses--whether theirs or their enemies'."
EDIT: As to the overall discussion of moderate change vs. extremist drives, I think we rarely do see modest goals being strived for and accomplished, whether that's because they're so modest as to be virtually-inconsequential (like, say, de-bloating some middleware for a specific IT solution or spending a few hundred thousand on a beautifying project for a city square), we just fail to notice them when they do happen (e.g. important bills for digital speech and copyright getting passed without much media outcry), or because some "modest" goals are actually not-so-modest and require outsized amounts of effort to achieve (like, say, housing reform). And if you have to shoot for the stars just to land on the Moon, why not pledge to reach the edge of the Universe while you're taking off the limiters?
More options
Context Copy link
In other news, new research finds that people most likely to complete marathons are those that wish to run marathons. In all seriousness, this isn't an argument in favour of extremism. Of course extremists are the most likely to achieve extreme goals, the only alternative candidates are those whose hands are forced by circumstance and those who unintentionally stumble into it.
This is again true, but also not particularly useful. If you have all the virtures of someone capable of shaping the world around you to your liking and you happen to like things the way they are, then you're going to deploy your virtues in pursuit of that end rather than in direct opposition to it.
It seems to me that the point you're driving at, is the importance of strength of will, or of conviction to your goals. This is definitely a quality common among extremists and it is an important part of managing to stick with difficult goals like shaping the world to match your vision, but your odds of success are a lot better if you also happen to have those other virtues as well. The idea that strength of will alone is enough to achieve your goals seems historically fairly common among those who are at a severe disadvantage in other areas, but cannot accept their disadvantageous position. Imperial Japan springs to mind as an immediate example and look how well that worked out for them.
Loop it back to Anheuser-Busch.
The reason Anheuser-Busch being boycotted is that they got dragged into the culture war. The reason they got dragged into the culture war is that an infinitesimally-small fraction of the population adopted extreme values, and have dedicated significant portions of their lives pursuing what would have, five or six years ago, been seen as an absurdly quixotic quest to fundamentally rewrite significant portions of our social reality, based on a manifestly self-contradictory ideology that turns self-mutilation into a sacrament.
These people are winning. They have taken massive strides toward achieving a goal that was not within a million miles of realistic. They have achieved a level of social dominance such that people who disagree with their ideology in public do so at the risk of their friendships and jobs, a level that frequently gives them social cover on behavior others would be crucified for.
This ad happened because extremists persevered in their extremism. Had they set reasonable goals, none of this would be happening.
The boycott, likewise, is a product of extremism. Taking 10% off the valuation of one of the larger corporations in the world is not a reasonable response to offense over a social media stunt. There's a million reasonable arguments for why this is silliness, and people should move on with their own business, touch grass, get a life, stop being mad at people on the internet. They could do that, A-B's stock would recover, the sun would rise tomorrow... and the thing that enraged them would continue to spread. While they act reasonably, extremists on the other side do not.
The boycott has not worked as well as it has because the people engaging in it have a reasonable goal. It is working because they have an unreasonable goal, an extreme goal: to punish a multinational corporation for siding with their enemies, to hurt that corporation as bad as they possibly can. Peer-to-peer, headless, truly grassroots activism is very hard in the best of circumstances, which this is not; any attempt at a boycott has to overcome a myriad of truly fearsome obstacles, and it is the unreasonableness of the goal that provides much of the motive energy. No one is going to switch their beer order in order to secure a "reasonable" goal, like a meaningless PR-speak non-apology on twitter. They are going to change their beer order because they think it might make a difference, and that means the outcome needs to be significant. The goal is not to get AB to apologize for what they did, but to ensure that neither A-B nor their competitors ever do it again.
There is every incentive to adopt an extreme goal: It motivates the grassroots, makes their hopes plausible, gives them a clear goal, an unambiguous goal, a distant goal to strive for, rather than prematurely declaring victory and giving up. Making the goal reasonable achieves little to nothing; there's no organization to preserve here, no resources to allocate, no credibility to be lost. A-B will probably not go bankrupt, but failing to make that happen will not cause a drop in fervor to the grassroots, since no one is actually expecting that to happen. It's not a "reasonable" goal, is it? On the other hand, if it did happen, that would be a win for the record books, and it certainly won't happen if they try for anything less. So why not swing for the fences?
John Brown didn't, in the end, try to organize a sewing circle. What he did was to make a serious attempt at personally murdering half a country. In doing so, he probably had a greater influence on achieving unrivaled supremacy for his values and on shaping the next two centuries than any other single human, and by a wide margin.
They may switch their beer order because they are personally offended, with reducing the beer company's profits being a side effect rather than a goal. You didn't rule this out.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's one heck of a ditch Stalin has. Mao too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link