It seems obvious that the way to change administrations is to encourage lots of people to vote for the other party. It seems obvious that the way to stop corporations from raising animals in cruel conditions -- or manufacturing shirts in cruel ways -- is to persuade consumers to stop buying the meat and the shirts. That view may be right, or some version of it may be right. I have doubts. Both voting and selling on a large scale are like market systems with very good information in which the players have access to immense resources. Let's suppose that some player within this system who has counted on a certain result -- 51% in Florida, a 20% market share in Minnesota -- gets early information that returns are lower than expected. That player has all sorts of emergency options -- in the political case: adjusting policies, increasing advertising, perverting the electoral process, readjusting strategies to spotlight other states as swing states; in the economic case: lowering prices, increasing advertising, smearing competitors' products, opening new markets, changing the sales goals to emphasize other products. Some of these moves will go in the general direction that the opposition party or the consumer advocacy group supports: the government may support more UN involvement in Iraqi peacekeeping; the food companies may de-emphasize pork in their marketing strategy. But given the range of options available, that is just one possible outcome.
Another point to worry about: minor challenges to any system are likely to encourage innovation and the competitive weeding out of weaker players. That's the lesson from the overuse of antibiotics and from the strange case of anti-bacterial soap (the germ species' best friend and the weak germ's worst enemy). One does not, as an advocate of social change, want to play the role of the wolf pack shadowing the moose herd: the tough love approach to medicine and public health for moose. No sane supervisor of any large system -- the Republican Party, the meat industry, the Catholic Church, the city of Bloomington -- wants that system to be free of opposition or challenge. In an important way, opposition and challenge are part of the system.
Is social change then random, impossible to direct, not worth the effort? My suspicion is that this is an adult problem, that one becomes an adult when one recognizes and starts to think about what Tanner calls "revenge effects" in his superb book, Why Things Bite Back. The literature of adulthood is limited: the test is whether the literature has a conception of the complexity of action. I think the Tao Te Ching might be a place to start. More later.
Posted by shea0017 at July 20, 2004 9:59 AM