Narrow Community. Political science and adjacent disciplines

This is the only PolSci community I'm aware of, but it's named after one work that not everybody might agree with.

The core idea behind these two forms of government is the concentration of power. In Autocracies, power is concentrated in the hands of a single individual, while in Authoritarianism, it resides with a small group known as elites.

Power concentration occurs even in democratic and socialist organizations, a concept known as the Iron Law of Oligarchy. This appears to be a natural force in human societies, similar to gravity.

So, why do we even have democracies? How do they come into existence? I will try to answer that in tomorrow's post.

Using a range of sociological data collected by official and independent polling agencies as well as circumstantial evidence and indirect markers of behavioral changes, including demographic data and crime statistics, Ekaterina Schulmann attempts to trace an evolution of public opinion in Russia from the final erosion of the Crimean consensus in 2018 until into the full-scale war in 2023.

This book from 1651 became one of the most influential works in political philosophy. Its insights and ideas have led to countless references and allusions in a wide range of following works.

One such concept is Hobbesian trap, that describes a scenario in which two groups or nations, driven by the fear of an imminent attack from the other, become locked in a dangerous cycle of mutual distrust. This sense of insecurity can lead to an arms race and a predisposition towards preemptive strikes, escalating tensions and increasing the likelihood of conflict.

The solution to this trap is in the book title: one central authority, or Leviathan, that has monopoly on violence.

Book: Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, full text online

I haven't actually gotten my hands on a copy yet, but it's really looking like social media is not the direct cause of the rise of populism, so any alternative theory is of interest. I understand the basic idea is that political parties fall to radical entryists when they themselves grow weak.

Book: Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself by Francis Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro.

Before the 17th century, the word "liberal" didn’t have political connotations. It was first used in the 14th century to describe the liberal arts -- the seven disciplines every free-born man should learn:

• Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric -- to be able to share their ideas in a competent, consistent, and convincing way.
• Geometry, Arithmetic, Music theory and Astronomy -- to let curious minds observe and perceive the world around.

In the Age of Enlightenment, the meaning of "liberal" slightly changed: it became less slavery-related and more about individual rights and freedom from the State.

Liberalism was born as a reaction against hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings, and traditional conservatism – all the things that were enforced onto people without their consent.

The core of liberalism is the idea of personal freedom; it places individuals above the State and considers the State to be merely a tool to serve individuals and, by extension, society.

Statism is a political and economic ideology that views the State as a pinnacle of human evolution. The idea is that a whole is more than just a sum of its parts, therefore State has more value than any individual personality whithin it.

This stands in contrast with liberalism, which places the highest value on the individual and their freedom.

Statism justifies itself with the assertion that, in a natural state, humans exist in a perpetual "war of every man against every man," and only the fear of inevitable punishment can restrain them.

According to this view, a strong state with centralized authority is necessary to maintain order and prevent chaos by enforcing laws and imposing penalties on those who deviate from societal norms. The state sometimes is compared to the overprotective nanny, leading to the popular term "Nanny State."

When you exercise the voice strategy by protesting against anything you dislike, you create challenges for the responsible party, whether it's the government, management, or any other authority.

Rather than confronting you directly, they might employ a more cunning approach: co-opting you, an outsider, into their inner circle and granting you a share of their power, or at the very least, creating an impression of it.

Another option is to take just your idea and recuperate it, twisting it in a way that makes it harmless for them.

Classic example of recuperation is "green cars".

I don't have any examples of cooptation right now. Will update the post as soon as something comes to my mind.

There's a well-known fight-flight-freeze physiological response to a stress.

In politics it transforms into exit, voice and loyalty.

The book is not just descriptive, but also analytical. So after reading it you can make a conscious choice when dealing with unpleasant organizations of any kind.

Book: "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States" by Albert O. Hirschman

Perhaps you have heard about the shocking experiments of Martin Seligman in 1967. Back then he electrocuted poor puppies, observed their reaction, and came out with the term in the title.

What you might not know is that 50 years later, he published a sequel, in which he redefined 'learned helplessness' based on findings from neuroscience. Turned out there is nothing learned about helplessness. On the contrary, you have to learn to stop being helpless.

Here's a quote:

In conclusion, the neural circuitry underlying the phenomenon of learned helplessness strongly suggests that helplessness was not learned in the original experiments. Rather passivity and heightened anxiety are the default mammalian reaction to prolonged bad events. What can be learned is cortical—that bad events will be controllable in the future.

So helplessness (or freeze) is the default behaviour in mammals. To trigger fight-or-flight response you have to learn.

In game theory, zero-sum game is a situation when advantage on one side means an equal loss on other side. Most of card and gambling games are build in this way.

Derived from games, the zero-sum thinking creates some misconceptions and cognitive biases about real life. Here are some examples:

• Lump of labour fallacy -- a belief that immigration increase unemployment
• Principle of limited good -- a theory held mostly in traditional societies, about how amount of every "good" in the world is constant
• Golden billion -- a conspiracy theory that a cabal of global elites are pulling strings to amass wealth for the world's richest billion people at the expense of the rest of humanity

In reality zero-sum is almost never the case. The wealth is created by people, and total amout of it depends on labor efficiency, which increases over time.

Strong belief in zero-sum can trigger competitive behavior in individuals, reducing the overall efficiency of the society, which ironically reduces the wealth growth. This is an example of self-fulfilling prophecy

Trying to change your parents' mind by sending them media with victims of wars, school shootings or police brutality? Well, this never worked before, and it's not going to work any time soon.

People in general just do not feel emphaty about someone they don't personally know, and this seems to be a normal psychological response.

Book: "Regarding the Pain of Others" by Susan Sontag