The Use And Abuse of Witchdoctors For Life

Originally discussed on 2017-07-24

  • Paper: Why Being Wrong Can Be Right: Magical Warfare Technologies and the Persistence of False Beliefs
  • Summary:
    • Bullet-proofing magic (gri gri) is relatively common in sub-Saharan Africa
    • This bullet-proofing magic does not work - if you get shot while wearing gri gri, you will still be shot
    • So why does belief in gri gri persist?
    • Belief in gri gri lowers the barriers to collective action, and makes more people in the village fight to defend it
    • Therefore, due to group selection, villages with belief in gri gri survive and thrive, whereas villages without belief in gri gri die out
  • Look at the phenomenon from the perspective of the state:
    • In the absence of a scientific paper explaining why a belief in gri gri is beneficial, people would characterized gri gri as “stupid” or “irrational”
    • Even with the paper, modernizers might look for ways to preserve the benefits of gri gri without its harmful elements
    • The problem is that there’s no way to isolate gri gri from the broader worldview that holds faith in village elders and witch doctors
  • This illustrates a more important general concept: metis is both actions and worldview
  • You cannot change the actions without altering the worldview
  • Altering the worldview necessarily changes the actions
  • Economics and politics doesn’t consider individual psychological states
    • Efficiency, money, goods, are only valuable insofar as they make people more happy
    • The problem is that it’s a lot easier to optimize for money, goods, etc. than it is to optimize for happiness
    • Therefore, we optimize for those things far beyond the point to which they bring additional happiness (and indeed to the point where they start reducing happiness)
    • People join institutions for psychological reasons, and the material benefits those institutions bring are a happy side-effect
    • Not all customs that increase psychological happiness improve people’s economic productivity
      • Those customs are selected against by market economies

Without Belief In A God, But Never Without Belief In A Devil

  • Topic: The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
  • Hoffer thinks that mass movements have two stages: active and culminated
  • A culminated mass movement is one that has “settled down” into either being a government or an organization that lobbies the government and has internal structure
  • Hoffer is interested in the earlier part of mass movements, the “active” phase, when it is still revolutionary and attracts zealots
  • The behavior of these mass movements is often similar, even though the content of their beliefs is different
  • This led Hoffer to formulate the horseshoe theory – that extremists on opposite sides are often more similar to one another than they are to moderates on their own side
  • There are two conventional explanations for horseshoe theory:
    • Bad explanation: extremism is extremism – this is a tautology that doesn’t tell you why people with widely varying beliefs would still act the same
    • Better argument:
      • Extremists have to adopt certain tactics in order to be heard
      • Effective tactics are noticed and adopted (or independently reinvented)
      • Only the groups that adopt effective tactics survive, so by a process of evolutionary convergence, extremists all end up looking alike
  • However, that wasn’t the argument Hoffer made for horseshoe theory
    • Hoffer thought that all extremists shared a hatred of the present and a desire for a vague future
    • These two forces drive extremist ideology and praxis
      • Reactionaries manifest radicalism in the attempt to “restore” society to an ideal imagined past
      • Radicals reject the present, and must anchor their society to an idealized past in order to establish continuity between their society and their imagined future
  • The reason that both radicals and reactionaries reject the present has more to do with the sort of person that joins extremists movements than it has to do with the movements themselves
    • The person who joins a mass movement is frustrated
    • This frustration isn’t with the “system” or the “status quo” it is frustration with their self
    • Hoffer identifies in the early, fanatical adherents of mass movements a desire to replace self-identity with group identity
    • This frustration may or may not be justified, but the important thing is that the frustration exists – it is the fuel for extremism
  • Mass movements also offer a substitute for community
    • Mass movements are not communities, because unlike communities, they don’t ask any any specific action of their members
    • Instead of action, mass movements are defined by belief and identity
  • Mass movements’ sense of meaning comes from a tautology
    • The goal is valuable, therefore I’m willing to die for it
    • I’m willing to die for the goal, therefore it must be valuable
    • Since I’m willing to die for a valuable goal, I must be valuable
  • The important thing about mass movements is that they provide meaning in lieu of other things, such as meaningful work, community involvement, religion, etc
  • This explains why mass movements seem so interchangeable and why mass movements often find it easier to recruit fanatics from opposing mass movements than moderates from their own faction
  • Successful mass movements maintain and spread frustration while giving their followers the illusion that they’re addressing the fundamental meaninglessness of their lives
  • In order to preserve this illusion, mass movements dedicate themselves to frantic but ultimately useless work
    • Attack people who “represent” the system but who don’t have any power to change the system itself
    • Write manifestos and critiques to the exclusion of practical work towards their ostensible goals
    • Turn followers against each other, in a race to demonstrate purity of thought
  • Mass movements weaken their participants by making them less able to address the frustration in their own lives without external mediation
  • If mass movements are all so similar, how do they retain members?
    • All mass movements have a “unifying agent” of some sort
    • Chief among these unifying agents is hatred
    • Hatred unifies people, provides them with an illusion of meaning, and spreads frustration
    • The effectiveness of hatred means that the larger and more unconquerable the enemy, the better
  • Mass movements catalyze their own opposition
    • As mass movements either take over the state or push the state into changing laws, they impose the authority of the state onto the metis of other communities
    • This leads to more frustration, and results in the formation of counter mass-movements, which then perpetuate the cycle
  • There are three large things that suppress mass movements
    • Meaningful work
    • Community
    • A broader sense of “meaning” in one’s life that interacts with the first two
  • As Polanyi and Scott have shown, modernity erodes all of these things
  • This sense of frustration can explain the de Tocqueville paradox: why do states experience rebellions only when conditions start to improve?
    • As people get richer, the systems they interact with become more opaque and harder to ascribe meaning to
    • At the same time, the ordinary meaningfulness of people’s lives is eroded as metis is replaced with epistemic knowledge
    • This breeds frustration, and this frustration eventually spills over into rebellion
  • While Scott and Polanyi focus on the causes of modern nihilism, Hoffer shows why nihilism is a problem – nihilism leads to the creation of mass movements
  • Modernity can be described as a cycle where every mass movement changes the rules to benefit itself and harm other groups, creating more frustrated people who then form mass movements…
  • So what should we do? Are we all doomed?
  • Hoffer has a few recommendations:
    • Focus on action
    • Focus on clear goals – movements with giant, impossible-to-achieve goals are designed to fail and will drag you into failure with them
    • Movements that have goals and achieve them burn themselves out, but they also inoculate people against mass movements
    • Example: unionization
      • The unionization movement had a clear goal: the formation of unions
      • It was largely successful in this goal
      • It’s no coincidence that the radical mass movements of the ’60s and ’70s found little purchase in union halls

Scraps 3: Hoffer and Performance Art

  • The most radical people are people who have little or no meaning in their lives – not necessarily the poor (or rich)
  • Moderation comes more from having something to care about or defend than any change in socioeconomic status
  • Both economic and familial instability can set off mass movements
    • This advantages the left, because the left can create family instability directly
    • Successful right-wing mass movements either
      • Bait the left into disrupting the family
      • Subsume the family into a larger family-like structure (there’s a reason that right-wing dictators so often position themselves as the “father” of the nation)
        • Metonymically preserving the family while subsuming it into a larger structure allows you to pay it lip-service while destroying it
        • Allows you to convince people to report family members to the authorities, by shifting loyalty from one’s immediate family to the “larger family” of the state
  • Why does the Left love Freud?
    • The Left has a blank-slate view of human nature, but Freud wasn’t a blank-slate thinker
    • However, Freud came up with the notion of developmental stages
    • If you squint, you can map developmental stages onto Marxist economic stages, and relate all of it to political events
  • A general complaint about the Left is that it’s not very good at formulating goals and that it’s not very effective at exciting members of the working class
    • However, the Left has many goals which are quite popular (universal health care, improvements in working conditions, etc)
    • The main Left goal that lacks popular support is cultural – mainly to do with free speech
    • So of course, the Left spends all of its time and energy policing speech
    • This is necessary – mass movements have to breed frustration in order to sustain themselves and grow
    • Mass movements don’t grow from victory, they grow from frustration
  • Real danger comes not when mobs seize power, but when they relinquish it
    • Power implies responsibility, and when a group has relinquished individual responsibility to a leader, it can do terrifying things
    • The scariest mass movement isn’t one with a charismatic, clearly identifiable leader, it’s one where the leaders don’t know that they’re leaders
    • The true believer, no matter now evil his or her actions, is basically an obedient person – someone who was truly out for themselves would join a mass movement in the first place
  • Liberalism (in the European sense) was a social technology created to contain and fight the religious fanaticism of the 17th century
  • It’s not coincidence that liberalism arises from the ashes of a century of religious conflict