How do we control social problems?

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Social problems can be reduced by getting enough people with enough resources together to put together a plan for educating people, and then following through and actually carrying it out. Educated people who realize there’s a problem will educate others on that problem. Before you know it you have a critical mass of people that are all doing their part. Once that critical mass is achieved, then further progress looks like the business concept of pushing a flywheel. The hard work is done, you can relax and build a system.

Experienced activists are all extremely aware of the utter magic that a dedicated, intrepid individual can work when operating within a support system of their peers. Activist circles are amazing places to be. The sense that I’m doing something meaningful right now is palpable, so thick you can cut it with a knife. The other, far more depressing side of the coin is knowing that you can take twenty steps away from the circle and it’s like the circle never existed, it’s invisible.

The goal of the circle is to invert it so that everyone can participate in the world the activists are creating. But the world is so big, and they’re so small. And the resources are so limited. What is there to do against all of that.

Asymmetrical warfare. Do things that raise blunt awareness that, hey, there is this group of people here who want to say something to you! Get people talking by doing things that nobody else does. Interest is the first step to education. You start handing out flyers, talking to anyone who will listen about your cause.

Once interest is raised you have to direct it. Undirected energy can’t help but dissipate into the surroundings. You have to build up what’s called political capital. You can’t act nationally, you don’t have that kind of attention yet. But you have to think bigger otherwise all that momentum will just go away and you’ll be left with the sense that you just wasted 6 months of your life.

So you raise money for a billboard, or a television ad, one of the commercial avenues for communicating with large numbers of people. The goal is the same, get people to sit up from their mundane, boring lives and listen to your ideas of how to make a better world. Knowing that most people are just going to either laugh at you or agree, but never take further action. It doesn’t matter, getting people on message isn’t the point yet. Oh you’ll definitely try, you never know where the next dedicated activist superhero is going to come from.

But eventually you’ll succeed in getting enough people aware of you on a local level to take it to the next level, creating a movement. This is where you have people calling in to your headquarters and showing up at your door asking how they can help. Now you have to organize and lead. This is a never-ending fount of personal challenge and growth. But it’s so compelling you just can’t help but carry on with your work.

You take all these interested peoples, give them a boring, mundane task that needs to be done that you used to do but don’t have time for, like handing out flyers, and try to convince them to do it. 90% don’t show up again. You can’t give them more interesting tasks because there’s a very high chance that they’ll just screw it up, and screwing up is far far worse in activism because it actively works against the leverage you’re trying to build. One screw-up can render hundreds of hours of focused activism moot.

The sad reality is that most people don’t care about causes, they just want to feel like they’re powerful. So you shunt all these people off onto discussion forums where they debate endlessly about points that the barest of anything to do with the actual cause, post once a week about the next march, and get back to work. Battle-hardened feminists look at today’s social justice warriors and shake their heads sadly.

But eventually you get enough people coming in to where the 90% outflow isn’t that big of a deal anymore. Now you’re getting somewhere, you have an effective engine of political capital at work building up to the next step. Making an actual change.

The gold standard here is legislation. You start taking opinion polls and tracking them over time, trying to ascertain when the best time for a political campaign is. You need to first get on the ballot, then get endorsed, then work those established channels as hard as you can to, if not actually pass an initiative, at least make a bigger splash than you’ve made so far.

Activists can’t afford to keep swimming in little ponds, you’re always going to be swimming with sharks and whales and guess what, you’re a little clownfish. These legislators have heard it all and won’t be shy about expending all your foolish energy and co-opt it into his campaign. You need to learn how to operate in that world, you’ll need to get affiliated with one of the established third political parties because the main parties will eat you alive. You’re just not big enough yet to get taken seriously, even though you’ve already expended years of your life into this cause. These guys don’t give two fucks.

The legislative initiative you’re hoping for won’t fix the problem. In fact, the unintended consequences of whatever legislation you’re trying to get passed is very likely to make the problem even worse. Worse still, you’re probably going to know exactly what those unintended consequences are but still won’t be able to stop promoting it anyway. Because legislation is a messy messy business of horse trading and have I mentioned they don’t really care about you or your cause? All they want to know is whether their endorsement of you is going to make them look good, look cool. If you can’t offer them the opportunity to ride on the coat tails of everything you gave your life for, they just won’t endorse your initiative and it’ll probably die on the vine without establishment support.

The initiative will give you some boost, and your little movement will gain momentum, not really by virtue of its passing or failing, but by, again, simply raising awareness that, hey, we’re here, we think there’s a better way to live, listen to us.

You’re finally at the stage where you can spare some brain cycles towards thinking about how to actually educate people. You need to nail down the philosophy and message of the movement because at this point, everybody’s got lots of competing ideas and plans and not all of these ideas are cohesive. You can’t get too dogmatic about it because you could easily turn off what could turn into a new superhero to invite into your inner circle. You’ll think you’ve done this years ago, but this stage of the game is different.

You come up with better, more well-designed pamphlets. Circulate them amongst the faithful, have endless, ugly, spiteful debates about what belongs in them, debates about seemingly meaningless, inconsequential things. Over and over and over again.

Until you get it right, and it’s like lightning struck the whole camp. You’ve been digging for the right vein for years, when you finally find it, it’s every bit as rich as you hoped it would be. You lament that if you could have just started with this one pamphlet, you could have shaved years off the journey.

But done it is, and once you feed this pamphlet into your engine of social change, it hits mainstream like a wildfire. Everyone can pick up the pamphlet and instantly get your message. Better still, their buddies are all picking it up too.

Congratulations, you’ve finally managed to reach 1% of society. Give it another 20 years, and that’ll get up to 5%. People debate over what the critical mass is, but no one denies that a number doesn’t exist at which point no further effort is required to keep the movement going.