Disrupting Politics
The narratives we tell
Talking about the great groups disrupting politics in the past, it is always important to keep in mind that much of history is in the eye of the beholder. The way the years of the American Revolution are recounted greatly depend on the character and opinions of the author as well as on the cultural norms of his/her present location – and in a globalized world, increasingly on mass opinion at large. This point can be made salient by looking at the example of the public image of the Founding Fathers. Whereas their country regarded them as heroes even decades after the Revolution, we currently see their reputational demise in the violent removal of many of their statues, mainly due to their possession of slaves all throughout their lives.
History is a dynamic process in that it constantly takes on a new shape through different lenses, depending on which angles are uncovered or which aspects are zoomed in on and contrasted with our equally dynamically changing opinions in the present. One might be surprised when reading about the Founding Father’s (at the time not entirely ungrounded) confidence that the issue of slavery would soon take care of itself and their generally abolitionist sentiments, as recounted in Gordon Wood’s book “Revolutionary Characters”. This serves to illustrate how particular aspects brought to light, as well as those that are left unmentioned hardly ever stop to influence how we think of the events that are at the base of many of our institutions and cultural values today.
The same effect of skewing inevitably takes place in these summaries, as they aren’t transcribed, but merely recalled and elaborated on by me, which causes differences in the emphasis put on certain topics, based on my own worldview and experience of the sessions.
It is interesting to think about easier forms of “transcribed history” nowadays that could be found in the permanent artifacts on the web: high school students 60 years from now analyzing Twitter exchanges to understand factors that led to political events. But this, too, would not be without bias, since the information glut we encounter today makes the need for curation inevitable, resulting in filtering algorithms which influence how we perceive the world.
The neat thread pulling together isolated events to form an elaborate narrative makes it easy to under-appreciate how disorganized, scrappy, uncertain – “batshit crazy” – some of the grandest historical development were at their time; the American Revolution being a case in study.
As was stated: “The founder’s work could’ve gone down as a minor blip widely unnoticed had the colonists not won. There was no grand composition from the get-go.”
What differs in the formation of narratives today is the number of people who can participate in their shaping by discussing and commenting on our current stories and publishing their own take on developments around the globe. Whereas Jefferson and his self-made aristocratic circles started collecting artifacts as soon as they realized they might get famous, as they were the few select gentlemen constructing their country’s narrative, there’s a significantly lower barrier to entry in the political discussion today, as Martin Gurri illustrates in “The Revolt of the Public”. Furthermore, the opinion-makers of the 18th century were exclusively interested in appealing to their peer’s rationality, as expressed by John Randolph: “When I mention the public, I mean to include only the rational part of it. The ignorant vulgar are as unfit to judge of the modes, as they are unable to manage the reins of government.”
The commercial pressures on media companies today and the individual’s desire to achieve virality cause the focus of clickbait messages to primarily address people’s emotions, reinforced by filter bubbles and echo chambers.
As we see how half-baked and uncertain some of the most notable successes in our modern history were at the get-go, it becomes increasingly interesting to wonder just what is it about the collective identity of the successful movements that makes them push through, eventually achieving their goal.
A good point was made for the importance of labels in shaping a group’s narrative which has often been found to be a crucial factor, especially initially, in maintaining high conviction and motivation in-group members. As soon as you declare terms around which like-minded individuals and their previously offbeat projects can gather, there is the potential for a story that they can use to identify their place in the world. Labels help identify, legitimize, and unify isolated projects while enhancing collective identity. An example of a field that has only gained its name relatively recently is Progress Studies, as coined by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen. The outcry that followed due to historians claiming that topics concerning the field had been studied for decades perhaps didn’t fully appreciate how, as Cowen put it, “many bricks don’t automatically make a house”. As soon as there is a concise label that the scattered efforts have been linked with, associations can form and the label can furthermore potentially serve as a launching pad for future efforts, those efforts, in the best case, being combined.
Planting the seeds for a turn of sentiments – politics as a long term game
As we have been primarily looking at the early days of fast-moving, agile start-ups in past sessions, disrupting public office reveals to be much slower and incremental. The groups we focused on were incredibly persistent, constantly chanting about the “Long Term Goal”, something that fast-rising and fast descending companies, for a multitude of reasons, not always see as the first objective. Think tanks primarily work to change political sentiment through the spread of content, events, and networking with a broad range of people, from outsiders to politicians. If we look at the early days of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) to make neoliberal ideas the standard in economic thinking, it becomes clear just how much they were up against. Keynesian principles were the norm and would stay so for decades to come. The motto of the disruptors was to simply persist long enough, to refuse some short-term beneficial action in favor of playing the long-term game, until public sentiments were “primed” to welcome their theses and incorporate them into policy.
As was commented on, there seems to be some threshold of common knowledge of what an “expressible” opinion is that has to be reached in order to have most people publicly and comfortably adhere to it. As public opinion gradually ripened, shaped by the MPS’s incremental efforts as well as by favorable world events, more became permissible in the area of neoliberal thinking, and eventually the philosophy was able to take over. Note that this took more than a quarter of a century for the MPS, illustrating their determination and grit. The same happened with Christianity in its rise from an oddball, marginal cult to the biggest world religion. The early years were dominated by a small number of believers, almost causing the faith to die out least once, but that number eventually grew into billions.
This almost universal law of incremental cultural change requires a lot of focus and conviction on the part of the ideology’s spreaders. If we look at social trends today, we see a lot more “fear of missing out”, arguably due to the visibility of everyone’s life online. The opportunity cost of doing one thing over the other is constantly reevaluated, the term “opportunity cost” itself seemingly permeating more and more conversations. Many people think in 3-year-brackets while the desire to switch between careers and projects seems to increase. It might be important to consider whether the increasing outward-focus makes people generally less persistent with projects that aren’t showing relatively immediate results.
The Long Now Foundation is an interesting contrast case to the fast-paced nature of the tech ecosystem of Silicon Valley that it is embedded in.
As industry, especially tech as mentioned, is fundamentally faster moving than politics, public office might be unattractive to those that are in high ranks of technological and scientific professions. We often complain about a lack of competent leaders in positions of political power, and it is a critical challenge to get more of them interested in doing so. But, as was voiced, there are major hurdles to overcome.
First of all, there are significant differences in pay and status. Nobody has heard of making big bucks in Congress or the Senate, compared to the environment of tech unicorns and FAANG. And whereas the so-called gentlemen of Jefferson’s times saw it as their social duty, as a task that was often dreaded by them, but expected by their peers and by the public, nowadays the cultural pressure to serve politically is gone in tech and science’s circles. Your peers will likely be more impressed by your building a next company than heading to DC for a term or two.
But the comparably low effect of virtue signaling and a low pay perhaps aren’t the whole story.
Another major factor to consider is that if you “lose” in tech, it usually means your competition was faster and better at execution, while the outcome of the developed product is similar: there now exists the thing you believed in. In politics, on the other hand, things look differently: If your camp loses, it means that the outcome you were working toward, your proposition, the product, won’t see the light of day. Furthermore, it may even be that the failure introduces the opposite of that which you believe in – failure in politics implies more negativity regarding your goals.
Public office is dominated by great uncertainty of what you can achieve in 5 years. Whereas the startup ecosystem is fast evolving, the hamster wheel of drafting and redrafting proposals whilst aware of the milestones reached in your peers’ lives is unattractive to the innovative and creative mindset of many of those active in tech and science.
“In it for the long run”
Lastly, we often hear about the respective drawbacks of working in high-pay, relatively low-impact professions (i.e. investment banking, law, etc) and taking a lower salary at companies that challenge the status quo through tech and science. One might reason that the high pay could be used to enable charity efforts which the low pay couldn’t, but it is important to think about the long term collective implications of talented individuals choosing that route. As talent is lost in the impactful sectors, innovation won’t move as quickly as it potentially could, either. And eventually, the question becomes: “whom to invest the money in?”. Peter Thiel makes the argument for the existence of a stagnant society by showing how much money is moved around without a clear goal in mind. Eventually, nothing can replace innovation, and high-potential individuals are required to get us there. And so it is important not to outsource one’s own direct effort in life, in the belief that money can substitute it all.
Tim O’Reilly’s mantra about companies’ and individuals’ task hits a similar note: “Create more value than you capture.”
Among the works discussed in this session was “The Revolt of the Public” by Martin Gurri, “Revolutionary Characters” by Gordon Wood, and “The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement” by Steven Teles