In the real world, the wrong side often wins. The Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War. The Nazis won Germany’s 1933 election. North Vietnam won the Vietnam War. The Ayatollah beat the Shah. The more history you know, the more examples you see of the Triumph of Evil (or to be more precise, the Triumph of the Greater Evil). Question: When you witness these lamentable outcomes, what should you conclude?
Some people will reconsider their original evaluation. When “wrong” wins, perhaps we should conclude that “wrong” was actually in the right. But it’s hard to see why mere victory would exonerate anyone. Even if good ideas are generally more popular, this is counter-balanced by the fact that the unscrupulous – people who will “do anything to win” – are more likely to win. In markets, of course, mistreating others gives you a bad reputation, so customers avoid you. But in politics, mistreating others gives you a frightening reputation, so subjects obey you.
Another strange reaction: When wrong wins, some infer that its victory was somehow “inevitable” – and hence (?) futile to resist. But determinist philosophy aside, why would bad outcomes be any more inevitable than the opposite?
The most understandable reaction: When wrong wins, its tempting to say that the good guys (or at least the less-bad guys) made a major strategic error. This makes some Bayesian sense: On average, good strategy leads to better results; therefore, when results are bad, we should probabilistically infer that strategy was bad. But why think this is a strong effect? Captain Kirk may not believe in “no-win scenarios,” but he’s a fictional character. When I read history, I see plenty of hopeless situations. In any case, hindsight is 20/20; the fact that a strategy seems bad after the fact does not mean that a judicious observer would have acted differently at the time.
The same applies to more debatable disasters. Take Brexit and Trump. Many elite observers seem more upset about these events than they ever were about the victory of the Ayatollah. Perhaps they’re wrong.* But does the mere that these events happened provide a good reason to think that Brexit or Trump were actually good or inevitable? Hardly.
It is far more reasonable to infer that the opponents of Brexit and Trump made major strategic errors. For Brexit, there’s an obvious candidates: Cameron never should have supported a referendum. For Trump, this is far less clear. It’s tempting to say that Democrats shouldn’t have nominated Clinton, but what are the odds that the alternative candidate would have won?
The more general lesson: The world is not a morality play. When bad things happen, it’s not because the universe is punishing us for our misdeeds or misperceptions. The sad truth is that bad people can punish you for being good. Indeed, they routinely do. If you hastily blame yourself, you’re needlessly adding self-insult to injury.
* Personally, I think such elite observers are both provincial and hyperbolic. Brexit and Trump seem bad to me, too – but not remotely as bad as hundreds of thousands of people dying in the Iran-Iraq War.
READER COMMENTS
Bob
Sep 10 2018 at 10:03pm
The weapons peculiar to good, wielded competently, are intrinsically stronger than the weapons of evil, but it’s a long game.
The Soviet Union won a Pyrrhic victory in Vietnam. They paid for three armies they couldn’t afford, and got next to nothing for it.
Bob
Sep 10 2018 at 10:03pm
The weapons peculiar to good, wielded competently, are intrinsically stronger than the weapons of evil, but it’s a long game. These weapons include truth, liberty, and voluntary cooperation. Manichaeanism is not only a Christian heresy, but a fallacy.
The Vietnam war was a campaign of attrition in the Cold War. The Soviet Union was our true adversary. They paid for three armies they couldn’t afford and got next to nothing for it. The Vietnamese were not the proxy the Soviets hoped for in Southeast Asia.
The Soviet Union itself could not compete against relative economic liberty. An economy is like an ecology in that a healthy economy requires a certain amount of apparent chaos. Our grand strategy required avoiding open warfare long enough for them to be destroyed by their own internal contradictions. The irony of that should not escape anyone.
Jay
Sep 10 2018 at 10:34pm
The world is not a morality play.
Do you routinely meet college students who don’t know that? Because it sounds like the kind of insight I would expect from a 13 year old wearing a black t-shirt, and I would expect the phase to have passed well before the kid started driving.
@Bob – What are these “weapons of good” you speak of? Weapons work for and on the just and the unjust alike – whatever those words mean, if anything (a question considered by Plato but still unresolved).
Mark Z
Sep 11 2018 at 12:57am
Of course many college students (and people much older) believe the world is a morality play. Many believe in a a morally and politically linear history in which there is some absolutely defined notion of “progress”, an objectively defined direction in which we are inevitably (if slower at some times than others) going.
Common political narratives are often quite teleological. Marxism, for example: the victory of the proletariat is a historical inevitability.
Ahmed Fares
Sep 11 2018 at 12:43am
“Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue.” —Franz Kafka
We can classify people broadly into two classes, believers and atheists. We can further classify believers into occasionalists and deists.
Atheists should not have a problem with evil because to an atheist, humans are only highly-evolved accidents. Who cares if a highly-evolved accident kills another highly-evolved accident. Atheists caring about people dying are being inconsistent with their core beliefs.
Evil is a problem for deists because they believe in a creating God but not a sustaining God. A clockwork universe if you will. God creates the world, then lets people run amok. Then they need a theodicy to explain why God allows evil.
But occasionalists don’t have a problem with evil because everything comes from God. Islam is an occasionalist religion. In Islam, God has 99 names and He has no partner in any of His names. One of His names is “The Giver of Death”. That means all death comes from God and God alone. Islam has no theodicy.
Hinduism is also an occasionalist religion. Here, in the Baghavad-Gita, Krishna speaks to Arjuna, a reluctant warrior:
“I am come as Time, the waster of the peoples,
Ready for that hour that ripens to their ruin.
All these hosts must die; strike, stay your hand—no matter.
Therefore, strike. Win kingdom, wealth, and glory.
Arjuna, arise, O ambidextrous bowman.
Seem to slay. By me these men are slain already.
You but smite the dead.”
Jay
Sep 12 2018 at 6:23pm
<i>Who cares if a highly-evolved accident kills another highly-evolved accident.</.i>
As a general rule, we do care. There are several highly-evolved accidents that I’m quite fond of. Also, I’d prefer not to be killed. We care about suffering, we’re just not <i>surprised</i>.
If you don’t think occasionalist theists grapple with theodicy, I suggest you reread the Book of Job. They’ve been grappling for some time with the tension between the ideas that God is good, everything comes from God, and not everything is good. To the best of my knowledge, they’re still grappling.
Parleo
Sep 11 2018 at 5:24am
“In markets, of course, mistreating others gives you a bad reputation, so customers avoid you. But in politics, mistreating others gives you a frightening reputation, so subjects obey you.”
Surely what has been demonstrated many times is that in politics, mistreating others (an out group) can win you votes, which is why many politicians do it. A few examples off the top of my head.
·Trump hating on Mexicans & muslims to pump up his base
·Spanish governments hating on Catalonia (a big vote winner in the rest of Spain which is why a solution will never come via either one of the 2 main political parties)
·Many extreme Right parties in Europe pumping up fear of immigrants.
Not to mention all the times a government starts a war abroad to distract from problems at home (e.g. Falklands).
Hazel Meade
Sep 11 2018 at 6:17pm
Too true. Though I would like to believe that over the long term, the persecution of outgroups would make itself felt in some negative effects on society – either via civil strife or economic inefficiencies. Even if you wipe out the out group entirely, you have to come up with a new one, or else you can’t keep using the strategy. So people who persue this path to hold power eventually run out of outgroups to demonize.
john hare
Sep 12 2018 at 4:54am
There is a nearly infinite supply of outgroups though. In the USA depending on your priors, white people, black people, immigrants, feminists, men, rich, poor, criminals, deniers, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives etc. And that’s just a minute off the top of my head for groups I have heard blamed for the countries problems.
My personal complaint is that so many beg the question of how severe many problems actually are. Middle class income has been stagnant for three decades is a complaint that has to ignore multiple gains in standard of living with middle class being defined upward.
Hazel Meade
Sep 12 2018 at 10:07am
Yes. Though a secondary problem is that if you cast too many people as outgroups, you turn yourself into an outgroup. I saw the left doing this under Obama by ostracizing everyone up and down the gamut from Christian conservatives to climate skeptics to people who just didn’t think GMOs were that bad. And now I think the right is doing it even more – by trying to recast America as a narrowly “white Christian” country, and by perversely adopting retrograde norms on sex and gender. If Republicans only represent the interests of straight white Christian men, they’re going to be a minority party.
John Hare
Sep 12 2018 at 1:56pm
I agree there is a problem with the attitude that “if you’re not with us, you’re against us”. I walked away from a so called conservative group for that reason. It remains though that there is an almost unlimited supply of people and organizations to blame for the ones that work that way.
Mark Zheng
Sep 11 2018 at 10:02am
This seems related to the just world fallacy. People will generally assume that victors are good, and this process may not be all conscious.
The fallacy has mental health benefits though. I often feel pretty guilty knowing that my success was mostly due to being born in America, where the world’s most powerful organization shields me from competition from people born elsewhere who are no less deserving. But most people seem to think this situation is perfectly fine, and that seems to be a happier way to live.
Fred in PA
Sep 11 2018 at 2:16pm
Isn’t the problem with what we call right or wrong?
After all, a lot of the people who fought for the Bolsheviks, or the Nazi’s, or the North Viet’s, 0r the mullahs thought they were in the right. What they regard as wrong is when we on the opposite side win.
Hazel Meade
Sep 11 2018 at 5:56pm
I agree. Since Trump’s election, we’ve seen a lot of commentary in which people varyingly attempt to rationalize it as some sort of necessary corrective to political correctness, or to argue from Trump’s victory that his preferred policies are good, or that losing the election is effectively a refutation of the beliefs of his opponents. Or that his opponents must placate Trump’s supporters by giving in to their policy ideas in some ways (i.e. on immigration).
None of these things are true. Trump’s victory was narrow. He lost the popular vote. A statistical aberration could flip the next election the other direction and send everyone spiralling off into the same cycles of rationalization in other directions. Winning over Trump voters by implementing bad policies is not a long-term solution as those policies negative effects will eventually be felt. History will remember it if you hang an innocent man to placate a mob.
The correct course is always to try to persuade people of the good policies. In the best case, you will convince them, and they will change their minds and the balance of power will shift, and in the worst case, over the long term the effects of the good and bad policies will shake out of the system. It’s like looking at a very noisy statistical signal and reacting to each random fluctuation as if it signaled some new revelation, when what you should do is wait a while and see how it averages out.
Weir
Sep 11 2018 at 7:47pm
But would Obama have won in 2008 with a promise to abolish ICE? With a promise to create a free market in immigration? Obama’s guilty of precisely this sin of “giving in” and placating the voters, winning over voters with a policy of regulation and compromise.
He said: “We all agree on the need to better secure the border and to punish employers who choose to hire illegal immigrants. You know we are a generous and welcoming people here in the United States, but those who enter the country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law, and they are showing disregard for those who are following the law. We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.”
He said: “The number of immigrants added to the labor force every year is of a magnitude not seen in this country for over a century. If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole–especially by keeping our workforce young, in contrast to an increasingly geriatric Europe and Japan–it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains on an already overburdened safety net.”
So if you run the counterfactual of an uncompromising, take no prisoners policy instead, what is the result? Obama thought there was wisdom in reassuring people and winning them over by “giving in” to their concerns. How can we be sure that Obama was wrong?
Hazel Meade
Sep 12 2018 at 9:58am
That’s exactly the problem. If you never tell the voters that they are wrong, if you keep feeding their biases, they are going to keep on believing the same wrong things. And eventually if you don’t live up to your promises they will vote for someone who will. And the voters get the ad policies they asked for. Someone has to do the hard work of changing people’s minds. It’s not just on immigration. I think trade is an even better example. The left has been telling people that NAFTA and free trade in general is bad for working class people, for literally decades. And the right has not been doing a great job of persuading them otherwise. It took the election of Trump and the actual threat of withdrawing from NAFTA to wake up Democrats and get them to stop using free trade as a boogeyman.
Weir
Sep 12 2018 at 12:02pm
There’s winning hearts and minds on one side, and total victory on the other. A strategy of no surrender is a strategy of elimination, a war to the death. If you wage total war for total victory against the voters, you get bogged down in a forever war. For every voter you eliminate, another voter rises up in his place. Even just announcing that the voters are the enemy is going to make this “enemy” stronger, and conjure them into existence. Destroying the voters, shaming them, owning them, no-platforming them, throwing them out the window, none of this is the same as persuading them. And that’s what the actual hard work of winning them over would look like, to treat them as equals, to respond to their stated concerns instead of strawman arguments. You underestimate your enemy if you rule out the possibility of any legitimate disagreement or any grounds for compromise.
Hazel Meade
Sep 12 2018 at 1:46pm
Oh yeah, I totally agree that ostracizing and no-platforming is not a way to persuade people. Shaming is useful occasionally if you’ve basically already persuaded 95% of the population, but not so much if you are 51% trying to shame 49%, and definitely not if you are in the minority. (You have to be the socially dominant group to effectively use shaming).
What you don’t do though, is pay lip service to policies that you thing are wrong and harmful in order to get power, and then try to sneak in the good policies even though voters don’t understand why they are good. Eventually voters will catch on and then they will vote for someone who is serious about the wrong and harmful policies.
Weir
Sep 12 2018 at 11:47am
What if we take the perspective of King George III and imagine the Stamp Act is still in force, unchanged, ten years after Yorktown? George Washington is the so-called president of the newly “independent” colonies of America, but upstart patriots everywhere, from Ireland to India, get the lesson that loyalty to the empire is not negotiable. Why should the King see that as a disaster? Or think that “independence” even happened at all? What’s he got to blame himself for? For making it absolutely clear that there is no breaking free?
Comments are closed.