Raising the powerless
A draft Less Wrong post Alyssa floated to Michael Vassar in early 2012, on a structural trap in egalitarian politics: if you define your side as “people without power,” then anyone on your side who acquires power becomes, by definition, the enemy — and your movement loses both its leaders and its ability to act.
(Warning: this post is about human politics. Although I will try to make it as far removed from present-day issues as possible, please beware that Politics Is The Mind-Killer.)
In any human society, some people will be better off than others, barring a dystopia like Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”. Hence, if we wish to oversimplify, we can divide any society into two groups: group A, which has more stuff (power / money / status / freedom / rights / privileges / etc.), and group B, which has less stuff. In modern America, we argue endlessly about which groups are A and which groups are B, so to take a very clear-cut case, let’s use the old French aristocracy as an example for A, and the pre-French Revolution peasantry as an example of B. This division is not unique; we could also divide 18th-century France into clergy and non-clergy, or other groups; but some divisions will be less important and others more important, and we should focus on the important ones.
Humans, being evolved creatures, often tend to seek more status or other goods for ourselves. Hence, people in group A will frequently treat group B unfairly, in order to make themselves better off. In a society without rule of law, the more powerful might kill the less powerful and take their stuff; in a pre-modern society, they might enslave or beat them; today, they might mock them or defraud them. For the most part, we can all agree that this is immoral, and that the people in group B should take action to stop it if they can.
The usual way to do this is to make it an issue of Blue versus Green: group A is the Blue Team, group B is the Green Team, and the Greens should try to fight the Blues and win more for their side. This has problems of its own, but without getting into those, we need to ask how the Blue and Green Teams are defined. What makes someone on your side, and what makes someone not on your side? When is someone a peasant, and when is someone a nobleman?
A lot of people seem to think: “Group A has a lot of power, and B doesn’t. Therefore, all the people with power are against us. And all the people without power are for us.” In this model, because the nobleman is wealthy and well-known and influential, he is on the Blue side, and bad. While the peasant — because he is poor and uneducated — is on the Green side, and good.
Except… that doesn’t work. You see, in order to make group B better off, you have to change the way the world is, and to do that (by definition) you have to have power . Power can take many forms — economic, social, military, political — but you need to have some sort of power to change society, or you won’t be able to get anything done. You can’t rebel against the king without first getting organized. And — oops — you’ve just defined anyone with power to be on the other team , and therefore the enemy. Now, you can’t ally with anyone with power (for they are the enemy), and you can’t try to get power for yourself (as that would be seen as betrayal). There goes the revolution.
A better way to approach it is from this angle: if group A is better off, then people should prefer group A to B. Yet, we see that a lot of them are in group B. Why is that? Usually, it’s because there’s some barrier preventing them from joining group A, a wall keeping them out. What, exactly, is that wall? You can take the answer to that question, and use that to define a Blue Team and a Green Team, so that you can seek gains for your side without being driven into inconsistency.
For example, the peasants (presumably) would choose to be noblemen if they could. So, why aren’t they? In this case, it’s fairly clear-cut: they aren’t noblemen because their parents weren’t noblemen. We can then define the Blue Team as “people of noble birth”, and the Green Team as “people of common birth”. If someone on the Green Team becomes wealthy and powerful, that’s good (if you’re on the Green Team’s side).