Recently Posted Two broad lenses that can be used to analyze political activityOne form is what I call “activism as production,” which occurs when activists are motivated by a desire to contribute to some form of production. Public Goods What I call “activism as consumption” occurs when activists are motivated by the gratification they get from better environmental sanitation, an improved justice system, etc. The other form occurs when activists are motivated by the gratification they get from the activism itself, such as a sense of community, social status, or pride in “being part of the solution” or “being on the right side of history.” As I said in that post, these are not the only two lenses through which activism can be viewed, and they are not mutually exclusive. A given individual or organization may be motivated by varying degrees of one or the other, or both. But over time, we expect to see trends in which of these is more prominent.
This is because activism follows what Anthony de Jasay calls “institutional Gresham’s Law,” which I have explained as follows: in frontIn economics, Gresham’s Law refers to the tendency of bad money to drive good money out of circulation when the exchange rate between bad and good money is fixed and prevents it from moving towards equilibrium. When exchange rates are allowed to adjust freely in the market, the effects of Gresham’s Law are prevented. Anthony de Jassay described institutional Gresham’s Law as the tendency of bad institutions to drive out good institutions over time.
Organizations that prioritize their own growth and survival over being beneficial to society will drive out organizations that prioritize being beneficial to society over their own growth and survival. Unlike money, there is nothing to act as an exchange rate to curb this process. In de Jassay’s words, organizations are selected on the basis of “characteristics that are beneficial to society.” themselves The selection pressure on institutions is not one of survival of the most socially beneficial. It is what de Jassay calls “survival of the fittest,” meaning that institutions that prioritize their own growth and expansion over other factors, including the most socially beneficial ones, will survive. As this process unfolds,
…the institutions that survive may not be those that contribute most to the prosperity and growth of the host civilization…For various reasons, the principle of survival of the fittest would be expected to produce a population of institutions with many monsters and no bias towards good and instrumentally efficient institutions. In the struggle for survival, the latter are likely to be exterminated by the former. The lack of a significant tendency in history for societies with good institutions to “win” is consistent with this expectation. …If the agent selected by the environment for the traits that best serve its survival is the entire symbiotic set of the host society and its complementary institutions, then institutional Darwinism will function in the good way that is ascribed to it, and “good” civilizations will spread. For this to happen, the parasitic institutions in the set will need to lose more by undermining the host society than they gain by feeding on it. Gresham’s law would then fail, because the “non-good” institutions would either be unable to withstand the negative effects of undermining the host society through their own parasitic behavior, or would change their nature through the process of mutation and selection. There is absolutely no evidence to support such speculation.
The same thing can happen with activism over time. Suppose there are two activist organizations committed to alleviating the same social problem, one a “good” organization as defined above, and the other a “bad” organization. Suppose, over time, the social problem that both organizations are trying to address is significantly alleviated, perhaps even to the point of disappearing altogether. The “good” activist organization acknowledges the progress, realizes that its work is no longer necessary, and scales back the scope and scale of its activities. The “bad” activist organization denies that progress has been made, claims that the situation is worse than it has ever been, and tries to continually expand the scope and scale of its activities. Over time, the second organization completely overwhelms the first, not because the second organization is better, but precisely because the latter is worse. The bad organization has a lot to gain by convincing people that the problem they were formed to address is getting bigger, even if in fact it is getting smaller and smaller.
This is true at the individual level as well. As I noted in my first post on this topic, being motivated by “activity as consumption” is a matter of degree, not a dichotomy. But because of institutional Gresham’s Law, we can expect that over time the proportion of “activity as consumption” will increase and overwhelm “activity as production.” At the extreme, those who are motivated by “activity as consumption” are the types of people who see “involvement” as a major source of meaning, purpose, and satisfaction in life. There is certainly no shortage of people who describe themselves this way. As social problems improve over time, we can expect that those who see “involvement” as a means to an end will be displaced by those who see “involvement” as something to be pursued for its own sake.
But to what extent is it possible that some people are engaged in “activism as consumption”? Two researchers, themselves highly sympathetic to activism, ask: saw In response to this question, they begin by saying: AristotleAristotle’s idea that “man is by nature a political animal.” One implication of this idea is that when people engage in political activity, they are expressing a fundamental motivation for being human. If this is true, Aristotle’s logic goes further to suggest that the degree to which people engage in political activity may be positively related to their well-being. “That is, political activity is a deeply felt need that people may feel motivated to pursue for its own sake.
They sought to measure the extent to which activism provides personal psychological benefits and under what circumstances. Their findings are not surprising: participating in activism in itself provides people with significant personal psychological benefits. In their words, “The more people self-identified as activists, committed to their activist role, and reported engaging in or intending to engage in activist behaviors, the higher their well-being. Results were similar for measures of hedonic well-being (e.g., life satisfaction, positive emotions), eudaimonic well-being (e.g., personal growth, purpose in life, vitality), and social well-being (e.g., social integration). Results from both studies also suggest that activists are more likely to experience satisfaction of basic psychological needs, which is an indicator of experiencing intrinsic motivation more frequently.” Thus, activism as consumption has very fertile ground to grow.
The strength of this effect depends on many other factors, such as the extent to which people agree with the statement “being an activist is central to my identity.” This is the type of person I had in mind when describing the more extreme case of people who seek “activism as consumption.” But even if only a minority of potential activists fall into that category, institutional Gresham’s law would expect selection pressures to force that group to dominate activist engagement over time. And if something like institutional Gresham’s law applies to political activism, it could explain the phenomenon Eric Hoffer observed about mass movements: “Eventually, every mass movement becomes a scam, a cult, or a corporation.”
