Ultimately, most people are good, and good people are too trusting. That’s not why the world is bad. It is why evil people get the upper hand.
Why is this?
The desire to not be bothered is incredibly powerful. It’s probably the key to politics. It’s why, despite everything, it’s so tough to mobilize good people against the evil ones.
A lot of people forget (or want to ignore) that, to some extent, we are society. Rules and laws and norms are all things that get upheld because we collectively uphold them. This goes all the way up to national politics.
Most people are who I would call “normal people”. If you’re reading this, you are most likely a normal person. Do you think you’re weird? You have strange politics? You’re still normal. You’re normal in the sense that you are willing to be a part of society to some level. If society at large decides something is a crime, let’s say, a normal person will — for the most part — see the sense in this and work with it.
Now, I know you’re thinking about various ways in which the state oppresses people who shouldn’t be oppressed, and that’s true. I’m going to get there shortly. For now, though, let’s just say these types of laws, rules, and opinions are abnormal.
When normal people get together to run a state and government, they are relying on everyone else’s reasonableness to help the process move forward. Normal people don’t go into this thinking about how to game the system, about how to work the edges so they can eke out victories, or any of the high-level political operation that modern politicians should be good at. That isn’t, for instance, how local direct democracy ever operates. People simply make proposals, argue for them, and then there are votes. When the vote happens, it’s respected and its results are carried out.
That is a normal political process.
Part of what helps normal people accept this process is the assumption that they will be judged fairly by it. Crucially, on top of this, normal people expect that there is an interest in the common welfare that is shared by everybody in the government. We as normal people trust the governing process because we make all these assumptions and, by making them, we don’t have to worry constantly about gamesmanship etc.
But what if you are not normal? What if what you want to do is something that would be considered a crime?
Now, if we take that totally literally, you do have one pro-social option here. That is to say, if you do something that the society currently doesn’t like – smoking weed, let’s say – you have an option that is totally fine for normal people: persuasion. The society doesn’t like that you are doing something, you can talk to people, convince them that it’s okay, and they will then let you do it. The key thing here is that the likelihood of people changing their mind in the future is small, at least if everybody is normal and the thing you’ve asked for continues not to introduce societal problems.
But what if you want to do something that people would otherwise stop you from doing, like criminalizing trans people or outlawing abortion or destroying services to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy? Something that even if you got agreement now, it would not be tooo long before normal people would realize that it’s a bad idea and reverse it? What if you want to do something that will hurt the community?
That’s not being normal, everyone. That’s being abnormal.
If you want to be abnormal, you can’t just use persuasion, that will only work temporarily and your influence on an issue will get weaker if you’re proven wrong, like if you say that a measure will save everyone money when in reality it only saves you money.
No, the thing to do if you are abnormal is to take control of the state and keep control of it. That way, no one can ever overrule you when you want to do something that would hurt everyone else. That way, you can claim to set the rules, laws, and norms so that normal people have to dance to that tune.
So it’s really a two-way problem when we’re talking about why it’s hard to mobilize opposition to the freaks and fascists who have come to take control of the government. On one hand, abnormal people are motivated much more than normal people to take control of the state. Normal people don’t need to control the state, they can simply participate. For abnormal people, it’s win or die. On the other hand, normal people would rather not work hard to control the state, partly because they naturally don’t want to be bothered and partly because they feel they should be able to trust everyone else to act in a forthright way.
It also probably has something to do with why liberals (the ur-normal people of the modern age) distrust leftists so much, seeing their political agitation as another measure of being abnormal. But, if anything, the left is hyper-normal. It is the part of normal people that has realized what is happening and that they have to work hard if they want to beat the abnormal people.
The truth is that abnormal people have been in control of most governments for most of human history, including today. Normal people just get outcompeted, as it were. And if you want to defeat the abnormal people, you will need to get motivated enough to want to take control of the state away from the abnormal people who currently have a death grip on it.