Monday 15 February 2021

Politics as Fluid Dynamics

Imagine a huge balance beam with 80% of the population distributed near the middle with 10% on each edge.  The great mass of voters move just slightly, between the centre-left and the centre-right.  Overall the scale doesn’t move very much and, accordingly, neither side is too disturbed when the other wins an election, because nothing shifts very much from their own preferred position.  So there is stability overall and each side can view the other as an opponent rather than an enemy.  

To those on the fringes, the whole thing looks like a sham.  They see what looks to be a single Party with two branches, each taking turns in power but neither one offering any real alternative to the other.  From the edges it appears to be a rigged game in which only a thin slice of orthodoxy is tolerated.  Those on the outside looking in will want deep and fundamental change at the core of the system, and will likely see advocates for either part of the mainstream as fools or dupes. 


With enough time, even those in the 80% start to feel dissatisfied. Against the background of years of domestic stability, the minor differences between centrist opponents begin to look more and more significant.  The small movements in the balance begin to feel like large swings.  Soon, what looks to the fringes to be essential agreement within a fixed system, looks to those clustered around the middle to be a set of deep and volatile divisions.  There is no longer general agreement with minor differences, which defines opposition, but instead, divisive conflict, which defines combat. Politics becomes war.  


As a result, members of the 80% start to pull away from the centre.  After all, who wants to be associated with an enemy?  As more and more move toward the edges, the swings in the balance become increasingly extreme. This causes the “enemy” to appear increasingly dangerous because their moment in power now represents what is perceived to be a great departure from the other side.  As the swings in the scale increase, so does the shift on each side toward its fringe, causing the swings to increase even more, causing the mass to move further, and so on, in a vicious cycle.  


If something like this impacts a society, what responses are available?


One is that of the authoritarian: force everyone to move to a fixed point on the political scale and simply eliminate those who insist on remaining at the newly defined fringes.  The evil of this is obvious.


Alternatively, a society could manufacture regular crises so that people overlook differences that would divide them in calmer settings.  This is about as bad as the first suggestion and, at any rate, it is hard to see how it could be pulled off.


We could opt to just let the cycle play out: calm descends into instability which moves to crisis which results in a new consensus which leads to a period of calm which then descends into instability, etc.  If the instability of this cycle could be dampened so that relatively little damage is done even at its worst, then this might be a reasonable path; history, however, suggests that the cost of political breakdown can be quite horrific before order is restored. 


A fourth alternative is anarchism.  We reject centralized authority and free people to organize themselves as they see fit, with the ability to move between organized groups to find the setup that best suits them.  Instability is dampened by the freedom to move. We are no longer trying to make one balance beam support everyone. 


One advantage of anarchism is that it seems consonant with human nature.  As a general rule, nobody wants to be coerced by others.  We are beings who deeply cherish our autonomy, creativity, and freedom.  Imagine, for a moment, that a perfectly free and fair election leads to a government that follows proper protocol in passing a law banning all books of history.  Would you feel that the government is to be obeyed on this issue, just because it was fairly elected?  What if it passed a law outlawing your scientific beliefs?  Clearly political authority doesn't just come for free with the political process.


Human beings are diverse and will continue to disagree about their most cherished values, including the very foundations of government itself.  For some, a certain amount of coercion is acceptable.  For others, no amount of coercion is tolerable.  Some might be willing to ban books.  Others unwilling to accept a single word of censorship.  Is there a realistic hope of including all viewpoints in a single system?  It is not clear that there is.  Given that government is centralized coercive power, it seems inevitable that it will end up forcing large numbers of people to live lives in conflict with their deepest held values.  Why not opt for a system of anarchic free association?