On the other hand, recently I've been thinking about this. According to some theory it takes about 3.5% of the population to take part in active resistance to cause change (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=YJSehRlU34w). Now, 3.5% is clearly not a majority required to vote in the right politicians. Which leaves you with direct action. Something like that.
1) Confounding variables. She essentially states that she looked up resistance movements and then quantified what percent of people participated and the outcome. But there are going to be tremendous confounding factors here. While she does not offer much in the way of examples she did reference the most iconic examples - Gandhi and the US Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights Movement has some great examples, but I think India is perhaps even more striking so let's just consider that.
The British Empire was collapsing into bankruptcy in 1946 following World War 2. They were only saved by an emergency loan from the United States. At the same time this was happening the world had become divided between two superpowers - the USSR and the USA. And neither of them looked fondly upon British imperialism. India would be granted independence in a matter of months - in 1947. And over the next 18 years so would nearly every former colony of India, regardless of the level of resistance. And indeed, our author here almost certainly also listed all of these incidents as successes of nonviolent resistance from tiny minorities, even though their independence was driven largely by outside factors.
2) The meaning of protest has changed in the age of the internet. In the 1960s organizing was extremely difficult and travel was expensive. Seriously, imagine trying to organize things when the best you have is a phone where you have to manually dial each and every number (and long distance was pricey!) or things like hanging up signs on street lights. And people getting places was costly. A one-way domestic flight could set you back nearly a thousand dollars. The net effect of this is that in times past a single person represented far more people than just themselves.
However today this has radically changed. Organizing people is completely trivial and free. Travel is still a burden but it's become much cheaper and easier than ever before. This also means that protests mean something entirely different. if there are a million people protesting something, it's entirely possible that these million people don't necessarily represent all that many people other than themselves.
This also makes me wonder about something else, but since it's a distinct point - I'll put it in another post.
If that's true, it should be made more widely known.
I think that would be cause for hope for many people who despair at democracy and collective idiocy, and it would change their behaviour because of hope and belief in the effect of personal actions.
If the 3.5% is actually true, that change of behaviour caused by knowing it might tip serious balances.
You end up in a situation where you want people you agree with to engage in disruptive behavior, but not people you disagree with. Yet messaging like this would fully motivate everybody. It seems likely to ultimately do little more than encourage fringe extremism because you have to remember everybody always seems themselves as the good guy. Let them think they can win with a negligible minority of disruption, and you're strongly motivating extreme behavior from fringe groups. For that matter you even motivate people who like to play puppeteer. Imagine you're a billionaire and you now believe you can achieve near anything you want if you can just get 3.5% of people to start misbehaving.
Getting your way by misbehavior is exactly what we aimed to move away from with democracy. And I completely agree with you on the failings of democracy which does seem to be trending towards idiocracy. At the same time, I think this is the sort of solution where the cure is far worse than the disease. You keep the same idiocracy, but now you convince them that they can get whatever they want if they start trying to break down normal civil order. And the current establishment in politics would use it, similar to 9/11, as an excuse to greatly expand domestic surveillance and further strip away privacy and various civil rights. You know, for 'your' protection.
I agree when it comes to "getting your way by misbehaviour", that democracy is designed to improve on that.
But if we generalise to "change caused by individuals' actions", which may not be the change each direct actioner demands, so much as the consequence of their applied lives, that covers more things.
For example, climate change activists who don't fly and tell others not to, are not causing a democratic catastrophe, yet they are having an effect and it's probably disproportionate and probably good.
I don't think that's chaos, I think it's a form of distributed intelligence and attention process. Albeit a messy one, without monotonic improvements.
So let's just imagine some chunk of this group starts engaging in civil disobedience and so on. You'd need less than 12% participating to hit that magic 3.5% from which it supposedly literally "never fails" according to our researcher. So now what? Clearly we're not going to now just go overturn Roe vs Wade. And even if we did it would create even more chaos. The protests themselves would also likely lead to violence due to the inevitable emergence of counter protesters. It may be the case that 3.5% works in some cases, but that's going to need to come with several asterisks after it to clarify what, when, where, why, how, and against whom.
This is something I hope people will soon recognize on a much broader scale. We should forget about fuel cells vs. batteries, wind vs. solar vs. nuclear, CO2 capture or not, etc.
We need all of the emission reduction technologies we can muster ASAP.
Even with mild assumptions about a duty to not harm future generations (say if we substantially discount the livelihood of our children and their children in favor of our own), we would need to take action that dramatically reduces our emissions.
American voters will not vote for anything even remotely of that magnitude. Most Americans would be unwilling to see their electrical bills rise $10 if it meant averting climate change.
Meanwhile, the Anglo-West is hyper-focused on the US because there's a president they don't like. This has been a blessing (now the average Anglo-Westerner at least pretends to care about the environment), but also a curse (they think the US is the only country that can save humanity).
USA is doing terribly thanks to having by far the largest emissions per head, dramatically in excess of anywhere else.
Asia is doing poorly thanks to having larger populations, developing apace and being home to much of the world's manufacturing.
UK is just about world's worst for historic cumulative emissions thanks to being home of the industrial revolution.
Shall I go on? It's everyone's problem, and needs addressing everywhere, at every election. Anything else is just finger-pointing excuses not to act.
One of the primary ones is that most of the developed world has gotten to the quality of life it has today through very high historic emission levels (and continues to have higher per capita emissions). Additional emissions in the West go towards maintaining our very, very high quality of life - emissions in the developing world (like Asia) go towards bringing millions of people out of poverty.
Asia may be the largest polluter by far, it also happens to be the continent with the most people and the most people in poverty.
Nobody thinks that the US is the only country that can save humanity (even if the US cut to 0, that wouldn't be sufficient, although it'd be approaching it), but if the US, which easily emits 4-6x more than most people per capita is unwilling to cut, than we are totally FUBAR on a global scale.
It's easier to reduce 1 ton of annual CO_2 emissions when you're producing 17 tons per year and person (like in the US) than when you're at 6 tons like the Brits. In either case, it would be 1 ton saved per year but it's only a 6% reduction for someone in the US but a 17% reduction of their yearly emission for a Brit.
- China is taking concrete steps to reduce emissions: capping coal production, switching to electric buses, et cetera
- For better or worse other countries are far more likely to say "why should we reduce emissions if even the US won't" than to say "why should we reduce emissions if China won't".
Don't forget that a lot of that pollution is due to production for western consumption.
That doesn't mean that US policy can't address the problem; US policy—on climate as well as most other things—need not be limited to domestic policy.
Russia and China are not fighting against the sort of collective action we need to take?
The two-party system is a farce, it's not like past democratic leaders made any meaningful systemic changes to prevent climate change.
However, systemic change is possible. We have numerous counter-examples: the UN, the Montreal protocol, free trade deals, et cetera.
So why don't we have systemic change for climate change, because people like you and I let our politicians get away with it! If it was obvious to politicians that doing something about climate change was required to get re-elected, they'd do it.
It's an incredibly difficult task, which means we need to try harder, not that we should just give up on the planet.