The Political Shirky Principle
Why Leftists are never satisfied, especially with victory
How would you feel if someone tried to get you fired from your job? Not for any good reason of anything you’d actually done wrong, but simply over some petty, inconsequential thing?
Do I even have to ask? For far too many ordinary, normal people these days, this is not a hypothetical question; we live under the ever-present specter of cancel culture, where any word or deed, past or present, can turn out to have a livelihood-destroying land mine hidden under it, and suddenly you lose your ability to put food on the table. If someone actually did come after you, you’d be angry, no question about it. You might not actually respond by showing your anger outwardly — that’s a matter of character and of choice — but you’d definitely feel it!
Now let’s modify the idea a little bit. What if someone wasn’t coming for your job directly, but they were instead trying to shut your employer down?
There are a lot of people out there who hate their work, but even so it’s still what’s putting food on their table. And there are plenty more who don’t hate their work. And at the end of the day, the end result from your personal perspective is the same as the first scenario: you’re out of work. And so you’d most likely get angry about it.
Here’s where things start to get interesting, though. What happens when it doesn’t happen out of malice, but instead benevolence? What do you do if someone’s trying to shut your entire industry down, because they’ve come up with a better solution to the problem you’re in the business of solving? What if you make horse-drawn carriages or accessories for them, and Henry Ford just showed up with his Model T?
Once again, the end result from your personal perspective is the same as the first scenario: you’re out of work. And so the natural response is to get angry about it. This doesn’t necessarily have to happen; there are carriage companies that made the transition to building cars. Some of them were even pretty successful at it, such as Studebaker. But the most common reaction does still seem to be anger, channeled one of two ways, attempts at physical destruction and sabotage, or attempts at legal obstruction and sabotage, such as the absurd laws that were briefly passed in some jurisdictions requiring anyone driving a car to have someone walk in front of it waving a red flag or a lantern to warn people of its approach. We see it again and again throughout history, from the reaction of the fossil fuel industry to competing energy sources to the reaction of artists to AI art tools such as DALL-E to the reaction of the tax preparation industry to proposals to have the IRS, which has all the relevant data anyway, just send us pre-prepared tax returns.
The Shirky Principle
Now let’s modify the scenario one last time. What if the threat to your industry was not an external one? What if the actor threatening to put your company out of work… was your company itself?
This isn’t as crazy a thought as it seems. Just imagine a pharmaceutical company researching ways to treat a chronic disease, and they discover a cure instead. No long-term treatment needed, just take this pill once and you’re healed. Oops! There goes your revenue stream.
What if someone developed a light bulb that would last for years without burning out? (Oh wait...) What if a government receiving a lot of money from the USA to help fight al-Qaeda discovered where the leader of al-Qaeda was hiding? (Oh wait…)
You can’t really get angry and fight against yourself, but the most common response here is still sabotage: undermining the larger goal to preserve the short-term benefits. Clay Shirky described it thus: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” And the more you look into it, the more you start to notice that the entire Progressive movement runs on the Shirky Principle.
We’ve heard a lot about raaaaacism over the past few years, particularly of the “systemic” variety. Leftists sure seem to want us to believe that our day is just like the 1960s and nothing has really changed, when anyone can look at the situation and see that everything has changed. Jim Crow is dead and buried; the discriminatory practices that plagued this country ever since Reconstruction are not only banned by law, but universally viewed as abhorrent these days. So why are we being told that our country is a hotbed of raaaaacism at every turn?
Because there are a lot of people out there whose whole career is built on fighting discrimination. And because it’s ideological for so many of them, it’s not just their livelihood but their self-image as well. When the discrimination goes away, what need is there for people like them? So the only thing they can do to remain relevant is to create the perception of discrimination, stirring people up to greater and greater anger over lesser and lesser offenses. This is where nonsense like “systemic” and “microaggressions” and “cultural appropriation” comes from: they are actively perpetuating the problem to which they are supposed to be the solution.
Likewise, feminists originally fought for women to have the right to vote and to earn a living just like men. And they won. They won overwhelmingly, to the point where no one today even thinks that these are bad ideas. (And if they do, they don’t dare to say it out loud!) But as you might have noticed, this isn’t what today’s feminists care about. Instead of fighting against unjust societal restrictions, today’s feminists fight against inconvenient biology, fighting to try to erase the very real, fundamental distinctions between man and woman, both culturally (inventing ideas like “toxic masculinity” and (again!) “microaggressions”) and physically (pushing an open agenda of transsexualism, even on children who have no proper concept of sex or “gender”.) They are actively perpetuating the problem to which they are supposed to be the solution.
Such institutions have painted themselves into a corner: by any reasonable definition of the word, they’ve succeeded at their goals, completely and totally, but to have the perception of problems go away would be disastrous to the institutions themselves, so they cannot afford to concede victory!
The Studebaker solution
There are exceptions to every rule, of course. One well-known institution that managed to avoid the problems of the Shirky Principle is the March of Dimes. Founded 85 years ago to combat polio in little children, they did a lot of good to help suffering kids, including funding Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine project. When polio vaccines were successful enough to virtually eradicate the disease, though, this left an anti-polio organization with no problem to fight.
So they switched to fighting other diseases that affect small children. Among other things, they’ve since worked to help combat other childhood diseases, reduce fetal alcohol syndrome by raising awareness of the problems of drinking while pregnant, and helped bring down premature birth rates. Like the Studebaker carriage company, they adapted to changing times rather than trying to pile negative change on top of positive change, and they’ve done a lot of good in the world because of it.
“Progressing” backwards
A left-wing blogger who goes by Issendai came up with the idea of a sick system several years back, a type of abusive relationship characterized by keeping a victim under your thumb by depriving them of the time and mental energy to think clearly, keeping their success tied directly to yours, and giving out rewards on an intermittent basis. In a follow-up article, she mentioned that a necessary component of running a sick system is causing harm to yourself just as much as to your victims.
The thing I think she doesn’t realize is just how much this applies to her own political allies. (Hey, there’s Rule 1 again!) Rather than taking the Studebaker/March of Dimes route, Leftists have gone all-in on the Shirky Principle, actively making things significantly worse for the people they claim they’re trying to help. (And for all the rest of us too.)
Its’s often forgotten that, alongside his criticism of the oppressors of his day, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. also criticized their victims. He would tell his fellow black Americans that they needed to live up to the expectations of society if they wanted society to take them seriously and treat them as equals. He found it particularly scandalous that approximately 1/4 of black children were born out of wedlock, for example.
Since his death, though, the movement he led has been appropriated by people who have worked tirelessly to make the problem worse, not better. By attacking the institution of marriage that King sought to strengthen, today they’ve gotten that figure up to approximately 3/4 instead!
There is no better way to destroy a population. Between encouraging high crime rates (“The relationship [between fatherlessness and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime”) and encouraging the ongoing traumatization of children, (the highest risk factor for severe child abuse is the kids living with their mother while she is living with a man other than the kids’ father,) progressive black leaders have been damaging their own community and contributing to the destruction of the actual progress their forebears made.
And it’s not just black people. We see it across the board: anywhere progressive policies take root, living conditions deteriorate and the problems they were meant to solve get worse, not better. Whether it be the Affordable Care Act driving insurance costs through the roof while coverage quality deteriorated, COVID stimulus checks convincing people to not go back to work, or public schools measurably degrading academic performance with each new “innovation” in teaching methods, it’s the same story again and again. Leftism is the ultimate sick system, sending its adherents spiraling down, ever further down, in order to maintain its hold on them.
An alternate picture of the 60s
When the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, it was received by the public with great acclaim. So here’s an interesting question that nobody ever seems to ask: if everybody loved its principles so much… was the law truly needed in the first place?
You’ve probably heard of the famous interracial kiss between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura that aired on Star Trek during the 60s. There was a lot of controversy within NBC about filming and broadcasting the scene: everyone seemed to have been worried that it would offend people and stir up a ton of controversy. But…
the writers didn’t have a problem with it; they wrote it
the actors didn’t have a problem with it; they even went out of their way to sabotage takes that didn’t have a real kiss in it so the show would have to use the real kiss
the network executives chose to run the episode
the local TV channels chose to broadcast the episode to local audiences
Everyone seemed to be worried that someone else would take issue with it, and so they kept kicking the can down the road until it reached the final “someone else,” the audience. And then… the audience didn’t have any problem with it either. According to Nichelle Nichols, the feedback they got on that episode was “one of the largest batches of fan mail ever, all of it very positive.” Out of thousands of letters, there was a grand total of one that was even slightly critical, stating that “I am totally opposed to the mixing of the races. However, any time a red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain't gonna fight it.“
That’s it. That one single “it was a bad thing but not really that bad” letter was the entirety of the racist backlash against that groundbreaking TV moment. So why was everyone involved with the show so worried about massive numbers of racist Americans who would hate it, who turned out to simply not exist?
Because the media told them to be worried about it. Because that’s what they kept hearing about in newspapers and news broadcasts. Because there was a class of people with a strong interest in pushing the idea that a problem that the USA had been successfully fighting for 100 years now was still as bad as ever. They would cherry-pick sensational examples of a few specific people in power abusing that power and imply it was an issue that involved everybody. But when they had the chance to put it to the test, the results suggested that the problem was essentially nonexistent.
…huh. Maybe today really is just like the 1960s afterall.