I’ve written a few posts lately about intolerance in the context of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin in the Game and the process of preparing those posts made me think back to this article. More specifically, I thought about Taleb’s insights into intolerant minorities and wondered how the process of a larger group adopting the minority’s preferences help explain some of the political events of the day.
An important aspect of Taleb’s thinking is that minority preferences thrive in multiplicative environments. In these environments, when one person in a group refuses to go along with everyone else the group is forced to either adopt the minority preference or to splinter into factions defined by the difference in preference. This process allows societies to ‘adopt’ a minority preference even if the majority is not strongly in favor.
The most dangerous aspect of fascism is how it leverages this pattern to grant outsized power to those who hold the minority preference. Taleb cites one aspect of Nazi Germany to make this point – one person could turn in dozens of hiding victims with just one report while it would take dozens of people working together to hide just a few victims. The article I shared suggested that historically a fascist regime needed around 40% support before it could consolidate power – based on what I read in Skin in the Game, it seems to me like far less than 40% would be required.
The key underlying idea (and one I’ll cover in more detail in an upcoming post) is contagion. A minority preference in a contagious environment has the potential to completely alter the normal preferences within that environment. People intuitively understand the significance of a contagious threat. A good example of this understanding is the difference in how people react to news about someone contracting a highly contagious illness – since just one other person becoming sick increases everyone’s chances of becoming ill, such news is always delivered with grave concern (and occasionally a mild strain of panic). On the other hand, though thousands of people die in car accidents every year, accidents are independent of each other (that is, one accident yesterday doesn't increase my odds of having one today) and therefore such news reports are rarely delivered with the air of a public health warning.
Fortunately – at least for those mildly opposed to fascism – the loose organization of the USA slows the spread of contagious ideas and reduces the chances of a minority preference becoming a societal norm. The key to the balance is the diversity of preferences that emerge wherever ideas, lifestyles, and ambitions must coexist. Without this mixture of preferences, uniformity of thought emerges and the threat of contagious minority preference taking root in a society becomes very real.
