I recently posted about two broad perspectives that one could use to analyze political activism. One form is what I have called “activism as production,” which occurs when activists are motivated by a desire to help produce some form of good audience – better environmental health, an improved justice system, etc. The other form is what I have called “activism as consumption,” which occurs when activists are motivated by the satisfaction they get from activism itself – a sense of belonging to a community, social status, pride in “being part of the solution” or “on the right side of history,” etc. As I mentioned in this article, these are not the only two perspectives through which we can view activism, and they are not mutually exclusive. A given individual or organization may be motivated by one or the other, or by both to varying degrees. But over the long term, we should expect to see a trend in which of these two perspectives is more pronounced.
This is because activism is subject to what Anthony de Jasay called “Gresham’s institutional law,” which I have described BeforeIn economics, Gresham’s law describes the tendency for bad money to drive good money out of circulation, when there is a fixed exchange rate between the two that prevents the situation from moving toward equilibrium. If exchange rates are allowed to adjust freely in the market, the effects of Gresham’s law are avoided. Anthony de Jasay described institutional Gresham’s law as the tendency for bad institutions to drive out good ones over time.
Institutions that prioritize their own growth and survival over their social utility will crowd out those that prioritize their social utility over their own growth and survival. Unlike money, there is no exchange rate that can control this process. As de Jasay puts it, institutions are selected “for characteristics that are conducive to growth and survival.” theirs The selection pressure on institutions is therefore not the survival of the most socially beneficial. It is what de Jasay calls the “survival of the fittest” – meaning the survival of institutions that prioritize their own growth and expansion over other factors such as what is most socially beneficial. As this process continues,
… the institutions that survive may not be those that are most conducive to the prosperity and growth of the host civilization… For a variety of reasons, we should expect that the survival of the fittest will produce a population of institutions that is full of monsters and unbiased in favor of both benevolent and efficient institutions. In the competition for survival, the latter may well be driven out by the former. It is entirely consistent with this expectation that there is no marked tendency in history for societies with benevolent institutions to “prevail.” … Institutional Darwinism would work in the benevolent way that is attributed to it, and “pleasant” civilizations would spread, if the subject selected by the environment for the characteristics that best help it to survive were the symbiotic whole of the host society and its complementary institutions. For this to be the case, the individual parasitic institutions in the set would have to lose more by weakening the host society than they gain by feeding on it. Gresham’s law would then cease to apply, because the “unsympathetic” institutions would either not survive the negative feedback they receive from their own parasitic actions that weaken the host society, or they would change places through a process of mutation-selection. There is no evidence to support such an assumption.
The same thing can happen over time with activism. Suppose there are two activist organizations dedicated to solving the same social problem. One is a “good” institution, as defined above, while the other is a “bad” one. Suppose that over time, the social problem that both institutions are supposed to solve diminishes considerably, and perhaps disappears altogether. A “good” activist organization will acknowledge the progress that has been made, recognize that what it is doing is less necessary, and reduce the scope and scale of its activism. A “bad” activist organization would deny that progress has been made, insist that things are worse than ever, and seek to continually increase the scope and scale of its activism. Over time, the second organization would completely smother the first—not because it is better, but precisely because it is worse. The bad institution would have much to gain by convincing people that the problem it created to solve is large and growing, even if it is actually small and disappearing.
This is also true at the individual level. As I mentioned in my first post on this topic, being motivated by “activism as consumption” is a matter of degree, not a dichotomy. But for reasons of Gresham’s Law of Institutions, we should expect to see over time a greater proportion of “activism as consumption” supplanting “activism as production.” At the extreme, those motivated by “activism as consumption” are the kind of people who find “getting involved” to be a great source of meaning, purpose, and satisfaction in their lives. I have certainly met many people who describe themselves this way. As a social problem improves over time, we should expect to see those who see “getting involved” as a means to an end being pushed out by those who see “getting involved” as something to be pursued for its own sake.
But how plausible is it that some people would engage in “activism as a mode of consumption”? Two researchers (themselves quite supportive of activism) look at to this same question. They begin by telling AristotleThe idea that “humans are political animals by nature” is an implication of this idea: when people engage in political activity, they are expressing a fundamental motivation for being human. If this is true, then Aristotle’s logic would further suggest that the extent to which people engage in political activism might be positively associated with their well-being. In other words, political engagement is a deeply felt need that people may feel motivated to pursue for its own sake.
They sought to measure the extent to which activism provides personal psychological benefits and under what circumstances. What they found should come as no surprise: Engaging in activism, in and of itself, provides people with significant personal psychological benefits. As they put it, “well-being was higher to the extent that people identified as activists, expressed commitment to the activist role, and reported engaging or intending to engage in activist behaviors.” Results were similar for measures of hedonic well-being (e.g., life satisfaction and positive affect), eudaimonic well-being (e.g., personal growth, purpose in life, vitality), and social well-being (e.g., social integration). Results from both studies also suggest that activists are more likely to experience basic psychological need satisfaction, an indicator of more frequent experiences of intrinsic motivation. » So activism as consumption has a very fertile ground to grow.
The magnitude of this effect depends on many other factors, such as how strongly people subscribe to the statement “being an activist is at the core of who I am”—the kind of person I had in mind when I described the most extreme case of those who seek “activism as consumption.” But even if only a small number of potential activists fall into this category, because of institutional Gresham’s law, we should expect there to be a selection pressure over time for this group to dominate activist engagement. And if something like institutional Gresham’s law applies to political activism, it might provide an explanation for what Eric Hoffer has observed about mass movements—that over time, every mass movement “ends up becoming a scam, a cult, or a business.”
