Political Activism: What's the Point?

I don’t mean to suggest that activism is pointless. I just want to ask: what are activists trying to accomplish?

This may seem like a silly question. Usually, they tell you what they are aiming at: They want abortion to be legal (or illegal), they want the current President to be out of office, they want universal health care, etc. But, is their stated goal their actual goal? In other words, does each political activist actually hope to cause the political change they advocate to happen, and is that hope the actual motivation for their actions?

I see at least some reason to doubt that.

1. The Inefficacy Problem

In most cases, the extreme improbability of their own actions actually causing the stated goal to be achieved poses a puzzle. I mean, whether or not the goal happens, and whether or not the movement causes it, it is extremely unlikely that you would have made the difference to whether it happens. And, I assume, everyone pretty much knows that. So are they actually trying to cause this thing that they pretty much know they can’t cause?

You might think that perhaps they value the goal so highly that, even with a very small probability of making a difference, when you do the expected utility calculation, it still comes out worthwhile to do the activism.

This is possible; however, I think this requires an implausible level of altruism that few if any people have ever had. Political activism usually involves non-trivial costs in time and energy. I would guess that the probability of your making a difference is commonly in the range of 1 in a million to 1 in a billion. So you’d have to value the goal itself a million to a billion times more than the time and energy that you expend on it.

To be clear, I am not saying that it’s irrational to do that — a good utilitarian will in fact value many political goals millions of times more highly than the time & effort of his own activism. That’s because many of these political goals affect millions of people, and the ideal utilitarian values other people’s welfare equally to his own.

What I’m saying is that this is not the actual explanation of the motives of actual activists. I think there basically are no good utilitarians in reality. What I mean by that is that even people who intellectually endorse utilitarian are nowhere close to actually being motivated equally strongly by other people’s welfare as their own. Even the most utilitarian people we have are still people who, in terms of actual motivation to act, value their own welfare hundreds or thousands of times more than the welfare of strangers. They might give away 10%—20% of their income to charity — yet even at that rate, the marginal dollar that they keep could probably do hundreds or thousands of times more good if given to charity than the benefit the utilitarian himself gets out of it.

So if we assume that people are engaged in goal-directed behavior, and they have even minimally realistic expectations about their own efficacy, it’s a real puzzle why they engage in activism.

Qualification: I’m assuming that you’re not Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks. Obviously, if you’re a major leader of an activist movement, then you can really make a difference. But the correlative point is that if you’re not a leader (and hardly anyone involved in a movement is — e.g., you’re just a random one of hundreds of thousands of people protesting), then you have essentially no influence.

2. Ancillary Benefits

At this point, no doubt you can think of several other benefits that you get by political activism, whether or not you actually make a difference to the cause. Perhaps you find protesting enjoyable. It might be satisfying to yell at your presumed enemies. You meet other people whom you like and perhaps can become friends with. You can impress (certain kinds of) other people by telling them about your activism. You get a sense of community, something many modern people in big cities are sorely lacking.

Those benefits are all things that (i) are quite likely to occur, and (ii) fall upon you specifically. Hence, they make more sense for explaining why you would undertake the personal costs of activism. When you include these personal benefits, the activism might be overall beneficial to the activist, and thus no altruistic motivation is needed.

That doesn’t mean that their moral and political beliefs are epiphenomenal, though. Those beliefs serve to explain which cause the activist joins, since almost any cause can give you those kinds of benefits.

You might then wonder why not everyone is an activist. The reason is different tastes: some people find it a lot less enjoyable, and have less desire to meet the kinds of people you meet that way, and less desire to impress a certain kind of person, and maybe have other sources of the feeling of community (e.g., if you belong to a church).

3. Self-Congratulation

But there is one “benefit” that I find particularly interesting. It is the “benefit” of portraying yourself as trying to help society. This could be aimed at other people, but also, more interestingly, at yourself. In other words, one benefit that you get from activism is convincing yourself that you’re working to better society — which helps to convince yourself that you are a morally good person. Some people have a stronger need for that than others (either because they have a stronger desire to believe that, or because they have stronger doubts about it or weaker independent evidence for it). So that partly explains who does and doesn’t choose to become an activist.

This is a pretty cynical theory! But don’t dismiss it for that reason. Think about whether it makes sense.

How could we tell if a person is doing X to help society, or merely to portray himself as trying to help society? Wouldn’t those two behaviors look exactly the same?

The Dogmatism Test

Almost, but not quite. I can think of one very important difference between those two goals: the goal of actually helping society requires having accurate, detailed beliefs about society. You have to know a lot, and reason carefully and logically, in order to be sure of helping rather than harming.

On the other hand, the goal of convincing yourself that you’re helping society does not require accurate, detailed beliefs. It only requires strong beliefs. As long as you have strong beliefs about how to help, and you agitate for the stuff that your beliefs say will help, you succeed in convincing yourself that you’re helping.

So that’s the test: people who want to actually help will make strong efforts to ensure that their beliefs are true and sufficiently detailed. People who only want to convince themselves that they’re good will instead try to have strong beliefs. In practice, those two behavior patterns will look pretty much like the opposite of one another. The first group of people would be very open-minded and would spend a lot of time looking for evidence and considering objections. The second group of people would do the opposite; in particular, they would avoid listening to objections, or avoid taking objections seriously, since that could weaken their beliefs.

Checking Behavior

A friend recently pointed out in conversation that, in your normal life, if you have an ongoing plan to achieve some goal, you try to check on how well it’s working. E.g., say you have cancer, and you’re getting chemotherapy over the course of several months. You wouldn’t just assume it’s working; you would try to check. Like, your doctor would do scans to see if the tumor is shrinking.

Or say you really want your kid to be well educated. (Some people don’t care very much about that. But say you really care a lot.) Then you would sometimes try to check on what the school is teaching and how well they’re educating your child. You wouldn’t just choose a school system at the start and then for the next 13 years assume that it’s fine.

I would add that, if the plan doesn’t seem to be working, you would usually stop it. In most cases, you wouldn’t say, “Oh, we need to do more of it” or “I need to put more money into that.”

How well do you think activists are doing on these criteria?

I would say almost no one passes the test for actually wanting to help society. Most people (and now I include activists as well as people who just express political opinions) make almost no effort to figure out the truth. They adopt political beliefs extremely casually, with minimal effort to seriously engage objections. In fact, most people’s reaction to hearing objections to their political views is to get angry. They actively desire to not hear any objections. At least, that’s the very strong impression that I have after a couple of decades of periodically encountering people with political opinions.

An example would be having strong views about economic policies, which one holds for many years, but never learning any of the actual mainstream economic theory.

As far as checking: We’ve had various government programs that have been going on for decades. It seems that supporters of those programs ought to have checked on them to make sure they’re working.

For instance, say you really care about reducing drug use, and thus you support America’s “war on drugs”. At some point in the last few decades (probably many points), you would certainly have tried to check on how well the drug war is working. And if it wasn’t working, you’d think hard about different strategies. You wouldn’t just say, “Oh, we better do even more of the same.”

Or suppose you care deeply about helping the poor, and so you support government poverty programs. Obviously, you would have thought to check on how well they work some time during the last 50 years. If they didn’t seem to work very well, you’d try to find other approaches. Surely you wouldn’t just say, “Oh, we need to do more of it.”

Well, how much of that checking has your typical political activist or commenter done? Basically zero. They make basically no effort to seriously find out whether the thing they’re talking about works for the goal they say they want.

Conclusion: That’s not their actual goal. The evidence is more consistent with their goal being self-congratulation. In that case, they would not want to hear objections or counter-evidence, since that threatens to undermine self-congratulation.