When the Wheels Fall Off the Bandwagon
Here are some basic truths about human behavior in large groups. This really ought to be two separate entries - one on mass movements and the people who follow them and one on the dangers of figureheads. I decided to mash them into one purely because I think the first gives context to the second. Well, and because the sorts of people who read these entries will, I’m sure, keep up. Let’s start with mass movements.
Mass movements are born out of a frustration with the status quo. The better someone is doing under a given system, the less likely they are to want to change that system in any meaningful way. This is critical, and we’ll come back to it.
Eric Hoffer covered a lot of what we now see playing out before us in his treatise on Mass Movements. The more specific a grievance is, the more likely a mass movement meant to address that system will be focused and effective. When the boundaries of the movement are congruent with the boundaries of a specific problem or complaint about the current system, the faster and more effectively that movement tends to gain traction and produce effects. The reverse is also true. The broader and more vague a grievance is, the closer to a “general frustration with the status quo” it becomes, and the broader its appeal tends to be. However, what that translates into in practical terms is that not much actually gets done. The needle doesn’t move much. It’s lots of motion but no action. People are drawn to what they see as a shared frustration and they feel good about having a common enemy in whatever the movement describes as responsible for the status quo, but there is no endgame other than countering their general frustration. What that also means is that the more generalized a movement is, the more impossible it is to satisfy the movement’s adherents. The lack of focus on any defined cause or any attainable outcome means the tendency is toward perpetual frustration with something that none of the members of the movement can really define. You can identify this in practice when you see the definitions of key tenets of the movement shifting, the goals of the movement only vaguely defined, and the means by which the movement seeks to achieve its goals lacking any cohesion or message. There is just a general anger directed at pretty much anyone or anything that’s doing well under the status quo. The reason for the lack of specificity is complex, but not complicated. There are all kinds of reasons why disaffected people feel frustration, and many of them are absolutely justifiable. Many of them are not. What you tend to see in cases where the reasons for frustrations are real and justifiable are clear, focused movements meant to achieve some clear objective. Consider the Civil Rights movement as one of these. The message was clear and resonated with reason and morality. The debates regarding civil rights laid out a clear moral case that also appealed to reason. Now compare that to the Woke Left. There is no defined end state except submission to the collective. There is no plan, no structure. Just a common understanding that one either submits to the censorship of thought, words, and deeds or they submit to the social consequences of refusing to submit. In short, reject the status quo or else. Which brings us to an interesting point.
To paraphrase Eric Hoffer still further, the more a person identifies with and subscribes to a generalized mass movement like Woke-ism, the more that person tends to be, for lack of a better term, a loser under the current status quo. I don’t mean that as a slight – what I mean is that they tend to choose lifestyles, means of expression, attitudes and opinions that are not congruent with the results that they’d like to achieve in life. From their point of view, their rage and frustration is justifiable because they see it exactly the same way a free and independent thinker sees the demand from a collective to submit to their norms. They feel like unless they conform to the status quo and wear a suit and tie and work a 9-5 job, they’ll never be rewarded with the basics in life. They believe that in order to succeed under the current status quo, they have to submit to the will of that “collective.” From their point of view, they’re making the same argument I am making against Woke-ism, only from the other side. There is a key difference, though. The current status quo doesn’t, in fact, limit them at all to a certain set of beliefs or behaviors. American society today has made multi-millionaires out of people from every stripe and walk of life. Every single minority and demographic can point to wildly successful members of society who’ve achieved unbelievable heights doing exactly what they chose to do. From people who do nothing but play video games on YouTube to people who have made millions and built successful media franchises by being cross-dressers; people who score big in business to people who get launched in outhouses out of bungee cord catapults, America makes millionaires out of more people than any other country and it does so purely on the basis of their ability to provide a value exchange to a willing customer base without regard for race, color, creed, lifestyle, or beliefs. What that should tell any rational thinker is that the current status quo allows for all the things the frustrated and disaffected say they want. The unspoken part is that the results of those successful examples depended largely on their own work ethic and willingness to create that value exchange for others. The work is always the hard part, and it is usually the differentiator between a successful mass movement and an unsuccessful bandwagon that goes nowhere. This would ordinarily be a good place to end, but let’s move on to figureheads.
This is where things start to get really interesting. While a movement itself tends to, paraphrasing Eric Hoffer, act as a coagulant for those who hunger for change and experimentation, it is a charismatic leader that tends to capture the movement in the flesh and give its adherents someone to rally behind. The leader or figurehead becomes the avatar of the movement, taking that common collective frustration and directing it at some course of action or message the collective hopes will produce effects. Almost instantly upon rising to the station of movement leader or figurehead, the person is somewhat deified. Their faults and hypocrisies get swept under the rug, and the PR campaign to make them the fitting leader of the movement goes into full swing. Sometimes, this is done with a purpose. Other times, it’s purely opportunistic. In absolutely every case, there is a risk involved in making a movement about a person instead of about ideas. It’s a risk because that person is a person, a multi-faceted, fallible, flawed and broken human being with a past and with biases and all the other things humans come with. When you make a movement about a person, the movement now has to contend with all those flaws and failings. When you hitch your wagon to a person instead of to what’s right, the wheels can come flying off your bandwagon without warning. You can be absolutely blindsided by things that otherwise could have been observed and predicted, all because you chose to only see the things that supported the movement or hurt the opposition.
At the beginning of this entry, I said we’d come back to the idea that the better someone is doing under a given system, the less likely they are to want to change that system in any meaningful way. Consider who the figureheads of mass movements tend to be. If they come from within the movements themselves, it’s easier to trust their motives and their message. No one could have any reason to doubt Dr. King’s sincerity regarding the Civil Rights movement, for example. But there are plenty of examples in recent years in which members of a given movement launched their full-throated support for someone just because they said something that hurt the movement’s opposition. Not because they actually belonged to the movement, not because they too were disaffected by the status quo, not because of any shared morality – nothing of any depth at all. In fact, quite the opposite. In these types of cases, all that’s required for figurehead status is that something a person said has a pithy, stinging effect on the opposition. No further examination or analysis is required. By way of just one example, let’s look at Elon Musk.
Conservatives clamored to support Elon Musk when he announced he wanted to purchase that bastion of Woke Left censorship, Twitter. Now there is absolutely no question that Twitter is run by partisans with an obvious agenda and an axe to grind against virtually anyone who regularly says libertarian-slanted or conservative sounding things on their platform. There is absolutely no question whatsoever that Twitter’s stated reasons for doing this are fabrications. One cannot use as the reason for de-platforming a sitting US President “he incited violence” and then continue to allow the Taliban to remain active on your platform. One cannot de-platform a YouTube star for being a misogynist and then allow anyone from the Saudi government to remain active. That level of hypocrisy is indefensible, so it’s easy to understand why conservatives might want someone to come along and stick it to Twitter. It’s understandable that Elon Musk’s declaration that he intended to purchase the platform and free-speechify it might rally those who’ve been suppressed and censored by the Twitterati. And it’s also easy to understand why, without any independent thought or analysis, conservatives and libertarians so affected might latch onto Elon Musk as the figurehead of their movement to make social media platforms less tyrannical in their censorship of ideas. After all, Elon said that his decision to buy Twitter was rooted in the platform’s decision to censor the Babylon Bee satire site for “misgendering” a US official. But there’s a problem.
The better someone is doing under a given system, the less likely they are to want to change that system in any meaningful way. Elon Musk is by no means suffering under the current system. The world’s richest man is, in fact, doing quite well under the status quo. I have an immense respect for Elon Musk, and for his approach to life in general. I think he is a bold, brave innovator that has both the vision and the capacity to change the world for the better in a myriad of ways. I would love to meet him and work with him and talk to him about all kinds of different things. But I won’t ignore reason and analysis in favor of those biases and feelings. Consider: Musk has said publicly that purchasing Twitter is an accelerant for his everything platform concept “X.” This is modeled on the Chinese platform WeChat, in which Chinese citizens can shop, chat, engage with each other, pay for things, buy travel tickets, and submit themselves to comprehensive life monitoring and social credit scoring by the Chinese government. In Musk’s own words: "It's a pretty, pretty grand vision. Now obviously, that could be started from scratch, but I think Twitter would help accelerate that by three to five years. So it's kind of like something I thought would be useful for a long time."
Here's some background. X.com was an online bank that Musk co-founded in 1999. It merged with software company Confinity Inc. and changed its name to PayPal. Then, eBay bought it for $1.5 billion in 2002 and, in 2015, PayPal became an independent company. WeChat, a Chinese app used for messaging, calling, payment and other functions, was created by Tencent Holdings. The “everything” app has collected over 1.2 billion users since its release in 2011. At a town hall with Twitter employees in June, Musk said he wants Twitter to reach one billion users and that he planned to replicate WeChat's model, noting that people in China "basically live" on the platform. "If we can recreate that with Twitter, we’ll be a great success," Musk told his soon-to-be-employees.
Does it sound like Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter was really rooted in a personal response to the platform’s censorship of the Babylon Bee? Or does it sound like a status quo business decision that a certain group found it easy to get behind without a whole lot of analysis?
Now look at Starlink. In response to a Tweet sent by the Ukrainian prime minister, Elon Musk provided Starlink terminals to secure Ukrainian communications during the Russian invasion. In so doing, Elon threw his hat and his company into geopolitical affairs firmly on the side of Ukraine. This month, he has come out apparently on the side of Russia, pleading the case for Ukraine to accept Russia’s terms for ending the war. At the same time, he turned off Ukraine’s access to Starlink before turning it back on again, and began making the case to the Pentagon and the US Taxpayer to pick up the $100M bill for Starlink and a contract for ongoing services. Which “side” of the conflict is Elon Musk on? Happily, for shareholders of Starlink, he is on the company’s side. As he should be in that role, I’ll add. He is benefitting quite handsomely from the status quo, and anyone with a rational mind should be dubious about why he might want to change that. It doesn’t mean he has bad intentions or that his creation of an everything platform and internet for all wouldn’t be a great benefit to the world. It just means be damned careful when it comes to hitching your wagon to a figurehead instead of to an ideal. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up on a bandwagon whose wheels are falling off.
The better someone is doing under a given system, the less likely they are to want to change that system in any meaningful way. This statement may run contrary to what you hope, to what you wish for, to what you want to believe, but it is true vastly more often than it isn’t. Consider that when listening to career politicians who’ve amassed tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in their careers as public servants. Consider it carefully when voting for politicians who’ve spent decades in the same offices collecting influence and fundraising while the problems you’re angry about get worse and worse. Clear your mind and look rationally at how far the needle has moved under their leadership as they’ve raked in money and benefitted from the status quo. And as they benefit, ask yourself honestly why the hell they’d ever want to change it. There is an old tongue-in-cheek saying among consultants that goes “If you’re not part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.” That saying is not at all tongue-in-cheek among Washington’s entrenched politicos. They are the ones who benefit under the status quo of frustration and anger and division. They are the ones positioning themselves as the leaders of the generalized frustration coalescing into woke mass movements. And when it suits them, they will become the wheels that fall off the bandwagon and leave those who trusted them in the lurch as they move on to a new collective and a different set of frustrations. Let them become the avatar for your own frustrations and you’ll end up defending their appalling hypocrisies and ignoring their manipulations and lies until the dissonance becomes so great there’s no choice left but to abandon them and blame something besides your own lack of awareness for the turn of events. The only way to avoid the trap is to refuse to get on the bandwagon in the first place. Root your thinking in reason and a solid relationship with truth, no matter where rational and truthful messages happen to come from. Forego the need for a figurehead or a messenger altogether and stand firmly instead on whether or not an idea is correct. It is the idea, not the ideologue, the message and not the messenger, that matters anyway.