Theme: Agency

DR HAIDT

Relying upon a subjective frame of reference hinders further insight into the causes of behavior. So, instead of:

—“Conflict occurs when someone defines another’s behavior as deviant – as immoral or otherwise objectionable”—

I’m going to reframe this statement so that it provides a bit more explanatory power without engaging in the suggestion endemic to empathic experience and value judgement.

Conflict occurs when someone seeks to impose a cost on another person, consisting of :

1) loss of opportunity for experience – paying the cost of lost opportunity;

2) increased demand for discipline – paying the cost of behavioral modification;

3) loss of status or imaginary status – again resulting in opportunity for reward.

4) loss of normative investment

5) loss of material investment

6) loss of offspring, mates, kin, or friends.

All moral justifications for the imposition of cost on others depend upon the actor’s and subject’s perception of the terms of cooperation. In other words, moral arguments do not bother one’s enemies. Only those whom we ether cooperate with or seek opportunities to cooperate with.

We most commonly call demand for the payment of these costs ‘shaming’, and the population we shame the person with ‘rallying’. The purpose of rallying and shaming is to deprive the subject of the cooperation – meaning opportunities for entertainment, friendship, production, or mating. The degree of rallying increases the scope of opportunities the subject will lose.

Why then is rallying and shaming possible to employ as a means of coercion in some circumstances and not others? Well, have you ever heard the adage “academia is petty because the stakes are so low”? It’s not just academia where the stakes are low. In contemporary urban life, the stakes for almost every social relations are low because opportunity costs of association are near zero, and marginal difference in value when opportunity costs are near zero are also near zero. Hence the emphasis on signaling in dress, hobby, and possessions in urban areas.

Rallying, Gossiping and Shaming can be successfully employed where the participants have limited value internally to one another, and externally to non-group members, and because of individual lack of value the only obtainable value members have , is collective action expressed as deprivation of opportunity of others outside the group – ie Boycott.

Therefore:

(a) students compose a revenue source for universities.

(b) students individually have little (if any) value other than as a revenue source.

(c) boycott by students causes externalities – potential loss of future revenue, but also loss of status signaling by the administration, staff, and faculty, all of whom depend upon signaling precisely because of marginal indifference of administration faculty and staff at other than at the extremes.

Furthermore, students are for the first time finding power in collective action and find stimulation for the first (and perhaps last) times in their lives where their collective action is substantial enough to cause a change in the course of events. In other words, power is both unifying and exciting.

Victimhood then is vehicle by the privileged and valueless to obtain stimulation as a consequence of exercising power as a group. It’s another exercise of parental rebellion and an attempt at new stimulation – greater sovereignty – and therefore maturity.

Now, the question why this generation can rely upon rallying and shaming, and the question why the 60’s generation can rely upon rallying and shaming to threaten deprivation of opportunity to collect revenues and to maintain status signal (and to gain signals for some), is one of economics, class and genetics. Conversely why could some other generations not make use of rallying and shaming?

I’m not a terribly big fan of Nietzsche, but this is an example of Will To Power and little else.

We have little public record of some groups – we didn’t notice the German immigrants right – despite that they’re larger in number than the British? The catholics caused the prohibition movement and a good deal of the consequences of the depression, and a weakening of rule of law, but they even built their own schools and universities. But we noticed other groups as silent but beneficial such as Ukrainians in Canada, Hindus in the entrepreneurial sector, and East Asians in technical sectors in America. And we noticed other groups not silent – relying upon their traditional economic, class, and genetic strategies: shaming.

Our genes are pretty effective puppet masters. And for many of us we are not even aware of the strings – despite the fact that nearly all we say and do in every circumstance is at their direction.

Heterogeneity breeds signaling conflict, breeds normative conflict, breeds economic conflict, breeds residential and workplace conflict, and culminates in polarizing political conflict. Conflict increases demand for authority to resolve difference. Rule of law consisting of universal rules is sacrificed in favor of human discretion. Rule of law cannot resolve incommensurable differences. The more heterogeneous a polity the lower the trust the more demand for authority the more discretion the more corruption.

Eventually, why do groups ABC contribute to commons consumed by groups DEF. Why do groups ABC sacrifice retirement and reproduction to fund unemployment and reproduction by BCD.

Universities are just a barometer of an incoming high pressure front.

Curt