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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31954 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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The linked scene is Michael Collins arguing to a crowd that they need to take collective action. They do, fighting back against the Constables who attack Collins and the crowd. Collins himself fights, before being hustled to safety by two others.

They are each acting individually, and Collins' argument is a specific appeal to individual action: "if they shoot me, which specific one of you will step up to take my place?" But that individual action is welded into a common purpose, a common cause, collective action, collective identity. And this process, by which individuals individually choose to act in concert, is the entire basis for his plan. What makes his victory possible is the fact that not only one person will step up to replace him, but many and more.

Coordination defeats individual action. People are stronger together than they are apart. "Irish Democracy" required the Irish, and wasn't going to happen without them. Individuals can attempt something similar, but the potential payoffs are much different. That doesn't make pure individualism a bad idea, but it does make coordination much stronger for a variety of reasons.

In the same way, POWs attempt to form organization with their fellow prisoners, and their captors often make every effort to keep them isolated from each other. the captors would much rather coordinate against individuals than against a group; the prisoners would rather compete group vs group than individual vs group.

I'm not claiming collective action is a general solution, only that individual action isn't either. There are no general solutions. It's a hard problem all the way around.

This is why speed limits are so well respected.

Well said

And the point I'm trying to get at is, what is collective action if not a collection of individual actions?

It's coordinated individual action, the sort of coordination which leads to convictions for seditious conspiracy. If three people attempt such co-ordination, at least two of them are Feds.

Only in a metaphorical sense. One of the undercover cops is a Fed, the other one is State. Otherwise why the need for two?

coordination and cooperation and a recognition of common identity, a "you and I together", I think? Or is this what makes them a "collection"? One can act as an individual without these, and should, but they make one's individual action a lot more effective. I'll freely admit that people, myself unfortunately included, tend to treat these things as though they are necessary for individual action, when they absolutely are not, or that they replace individual action, which they absolutely do not.

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