July 3, 2012

• Why majoritarianism doesn’t work

   

  JDN 2456112 EDT 11:02

   

  Any sane person, upon reading about philosophical majoritarianism, realizes that it cannot possibly be right. But as Bertrand Russell remarked on the Ontological Argument, it is very difficult to see what exactly is wrong with the argument.

  One common approach is to point out all the ways in which intellectual deviants have advanced human society. Every major advance in knowledge, from Plato to Galileo to Einstein, was made by someone who didn’t believe in the majority consensus. This is surely correct, but it is also a well-worn path, so I don’t want to spend too much time on it.

  Instead, I’d like to focus on another point that I think is equally compelling, but underrepresented: This the matter of does the majority believe in majoritarianism?

   

  It is commonly assumed that they do not, in which case majoritarianism has a problem because it is at once saying “believe what the majority believes” and also saying “do not believe what the majority believes”(because the majority do not believe that we should believe what the majority believes). The methodology itself is not one that most people would subscribe to!

  Majoritarians generally concede this point and argue that it is precisely the fact that most people have a genuinely valid epistemology that allows majoritarianism to work. (How this is not utterly conceding the ridiculousness of majoritarianism I am unsure. It is basically trying to copy someone else’s paper on the test of life.)

  But in fact, we should not concede the point at all, because the premise is faulty. It is simply not the case that most people are not majoritarians. Most people are majoritarians, in fact; at least on the vast, well, majority of their beliefs.
  Why are Christians Christian? Because everyone around them is Christian. Why are Muslims Muslim? Because everyone around them is Muslim. Why are Republicans Republican? Because everyone around them is Republican. Why are Democrats Democrat? Because everyone around them is Democrat. And so on.

  There are obviously exceptions—indeed, there are obviously leaders of any given ideology that direct the beliefs of the masses. Whether they do so for good reasons (e.g. evidence) or bad reasons (e.g. personal gain) varies. These leaders are important; they are the compasses by which others navigate. But they are always a minority, even in the best of times.

  Moreover, don’t take “everyone around them” too literally; it really means everyone whose opinion they care about. So for instance you can be Muslim in a Christian society, so long as your friends are Muslim, your family is Muslim, and you keep in touch with people in the Muslim nation you immigrated from. You can be a libertarian surrounded by social democrats, as long as you hang out with other libertarians and read lots of libertarian books.

  This is also why nonconformists are often the worst conformists. They deviate from society’s standards… in exactly the same way as all the other nonconformists. Tattoos and brightly colored hair! Yes, I can see how your pink hair will truly undermine the oppression of global capitalism. (Not that I have anything in particular against pink hair or tattoos. Just wear them because you want to, because you like them; don’t act like you’re being somehow edgy or rebellious by doing so.)

  I was raised in such an environment; living in Ann Arbor and going to Community High School, I ran into a large number of people who made a point of being deviant for the sake of deviance. I tried to explain to them that this is silly, but very few would listen. Some even saw me as a tool of the system, because I was willing to conform to society’s standards when necessary to achieve my goals. I in fact think this makes me the truest form of radical, someone who thinks orthogonally to social norms, makes decisions based on what is right and uses society’s norms only as information about how people will respond to different actions. (Saul Alinsky would agree with me by the way: “The true radical cuts his hair.”)

  Indeed, in psychology and behavioral economics we call these things conformity bias and social proof, and they are astonishingly powerful upon the weak-minded ordinary folk. You can literally make a man say that two lines are the same length when they obviously aren’t, if you present him with three likeable, sincere-seeming comrades who say so. You can even do this when there are monetary incentives attached to making the right decision.

  Indeed, most people act this way in real-life decisions. They choose who to marry, what school to attend, what to eat, what religion to follow, what job to take, even whether or not to kill themselves based on social conformity. (A widely-publicized suicide will trigger about 50 copycat suicides.)

  What does this mean for majoritarianism? Well, it resolves the self-defeat problem nicely. You no longer have to fear that you are deviating by conforming.

  But it raises a much bigger problem, which undermines the original justification in the first place. A system that has two groups, searchers who seek evidence, and conformers who follow the judgments of the searchers, can actually work quite well. Indeed, this is basically the model of the scientific community; as much as we’d like to, there isn’t enough time in a lifetime for each student of science to rediscover everything on their own. We hope that some will eventually go on to do original research, but many won’t, and even those who do have to start by taking some received truths from respected authorities. (A system of all searchers seems ideal in theory, but is very hard to operate in practice.)

  But a system that is dominated by conformers, and doesn’t have enough searchers, becomes unstable. It undergoes positive feedback loops which can carry it to almost any belief in the space of possibilities, because it is no longer tethered to reality and instead is only tethered to itself.

  In practice this doesn’t happen, because there is a third category, not as numerous as conformers but more numerous than searchers: these are the deceivers, who use the conformity of others as leverage against them. A typical deceiver is a used car salesman, an advertising executive, or for that matter a politician or a preacher. Under a system with more deceivers than searchers, the conformers will converge, but they will converge upon beliefs that systematically bias towards the interests of the deceivers. (And suddenly the horrific inequality of our society, held together by ignorant voters and consumers who provide the resources to support their own oppression… begins to make perfect sense.)

  Thus, it is precisely the circumstances that make majoritarianism philosophically coherent which also make its practical consequences horrific. Indeed, the price of majoritarianism is literally paid in Nazis and Gulags. If there is one single thing about humanity that makes these terrible atrocities possible, it is conformity. Don’t make waves… go with the flow… if everyone else is doing it, it must be right.

  But again, the last thing you should do is take my word for it. The world needs more searchers above all, and the only way to be a searcher is to not take anybody’s word.

  • 11:43 am
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