Dec
19
Rise of the Motivated Minority
A couple weeks ago, I cited a section of The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro, in which he gave an account of how the Left has gradually suppressed most Americans’ speech via things like the Cordiality Principle and “microaggressions”. In the next section (which I cite below), Shapiro described how a relatively small, radical minority has brought the major institutions of America to their knees.
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“[T]he culture of authoritarian leftism has now hijacked nearly all of Americans’ major institutions and cultural touchstones.
Universities, once bastions of free thought, are now philosophical one-party systems dedicated to the promulgation of authoritarian leftism. Corporations, petrified of legal liability — or at least hoping to avoid accusations of insensitivity or bigotry — have caved to this culture. They have enforced a culture of silence in which tens of millions of employees fear speaking their minds for fear of retaliation. Social media have banned people who refuse to abide by social justice dictates, and social mobs, egged on by eager activists in the media, mobilize daily to target the un-woke. Culturally apolitical spaces ranging from sports to entertainment have been mobilized on behalf of the Left, weaponized in pursuit of the cultural revolution.
How did this happen? How did colleges, supposedly protectors of open inquiry and free speech, turn into the bleeding edge of censorship and ideological compulsion? How did the media, supposedly committed to the business of facts and First Amendment freedoms, fall prey to the iron grip of the woke? How did corporations, oriented toward apolitical profit making, turn away from the vast majority of their audience and toward pleasing a vocal but small minority?
The answer lies in a process that author Nassim Nicholas Taleb labels “renormalization.” This process allows a motivated minority to cow a larger, largely uninterested majority into going along to get along. Taleb gives a simple example: a family of four, including one daughter who eats only organic. Mom now has a choice: she can cook two meals, one for the non-organic family members and one for her daughter, or she can cook one meal with only organic ingredients. She decided to cook only one meal. This is renormalization of the family unit, which has converted from majority non-organic to universally organic. Now, says Taleb, have the family attend a barbecue attended by three other families. The host has to make the same choice mom did — and the host chooses to cook organic for everyone. This process of renormalization — the new normal — continues until broader and broader numbers have been moved by one intransigent person.
The process applies in politics as in life. “You think that because some extreme right- or left-wing party has, say, the support of ten percent of the population,” Taleb writes, “their candidate will get ten percent of the votes. No: these baseline voters should be classified as ‘inflexible’ and will always vote for their faction. But some of the flexible voters can also vote for the extreme faction…. These people are the ones to watch out for, as they may swell the number of votes for the extreme party.”
It’s not enough, though, to have a lone stubborn person. You need a tipping point — a certain number of people within a whole in order to create a renormalization cascade. While each minor demand made of the broad majority might seem reasonable, or at least low-cost, over a long enough period of time, people fight back. It’s one thing to hold one block party with organic ingredients. It’s another to demand, day after day, that everybody in the neighborhood turn in their hamburgers for organic tofu. At a certain point, a long train of minor demands amounts to a major imposition. Even the American Founding Fathers were willing to tolerate a “long train of usurpations and abuses” for a while. Only after it dawned on them that those demands pursued “invariably the same Object, evinc[ing] a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism,” did they declare independence.
The process of renormalization can only go so far unless a tipping point is reached. That tipping point, however, does not require a majority. Not even close. If all the intransigent actors get together, a core can be formed, which triggers the tipping point. Physicist Serge Galam has posited that in some cases, only about 20 percent of a population is needed to support an extreme view in order to cause radical renormalization. One way of creating such an intransigent minority coalition: the activation of what Galam has called “frozen prejudices,” at the risk of appearing intolerant or immoderate to a broad majority, while still maintaining a solid core base. In other words, start with a motivated core group; don’t worry about who you alienate; appeal to the prejudices of vulnerable groups, who are then forced to choose between the core group and its most ardent enemies. Make the choice binary.
This is, in a nutshell, the strategy for the authoritarian Left. By putting together an intersectional coalition of supposedly dispossessed groups motivated by a common enemy — the system itself — they can move mountains. They can build a coalition of people who look the other way at revolutionary aggression, who endorse top-down censorship, who believe deeply in anti-conventionalism. And when the ascendant authoritarian leftist coalition uses its momentum against those who populate the highest levels of institutional power, offering job preservation or temporary absolution in return for surrender, institutions generally surrender. And then those institutions cram down these authoritarian leftist values. That’s how you get Coca-Cola, a company with over 80,000 employees, training its workforce to be “less white” in fully racist fashion, noting that to be “less white” means to be “less arrogant, less certain, less defensive, less ignorant, and more humble” — and claiming that this discriminatory content was designed to enhance “inclusion.””
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I don’t know about you, but that makes a lot of sense to me. If I haven’t said it before, I highly recommend Shapiro’s book for facts, insightful observations, and explanations like this. Others who recommend it — as seen on the back cover — include Abigail Shrier (author of Irreversible Damage), Peter Boghossian (co-author of How to Have Impossible Conversations), Meghan Murphy (founder/editor of Feminist Current), and Gina Carano (actress).
