Economist Writing Every Day

I’ve been making a point to fill in the “gaps” in my film history lately. Yesterday I finally watched the John Cassavettes classic “A Woman Under the Influence” starring Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk. It is a fantastic film, with two incredible performances by the leads, but it is also emotionally exhausting as you watch an already strained woman entirely unravel. It’s the kind of movie that a modicum of chain smoking would probably make for easier viewing. I broke it into two separate sittings.

Nobody needs a new review of a 50 year old film- Roger Ebert already covered it ably, but there is reason to see it with fresh eyes. The principal word used to describle Mabel (played by Rowlands in a jaw dropping performance) is “crazy”. A least one person refers to her as anxious, but insanity is the general catch-all concept.

When you watch it now, though, you see a woman who would likely be be diagnosed with some variation of bipolar disorder, triggered by social anxiety. If she were to grow up today the observation of repeated physical “ticks” might have been associated with Tourettes or identified as the physical coping mechanisms of a child on the autism spectrum dealing with an avalanche of indecipherable social cues. I don’t actually know – the character is fictional and I am not a psychiatric professional. The point is that there are social, medical, and educational mechanisms in place to help a greater variety of people thrive. Maybe it’s just that we recognize a richer set of personal attributes and diversity of personalities than prior decades. There are handles for a person to grab on to before their life spins out of control.

There exists a sentiment that maybe we’ve gone too far, that we’re overdiagnosing, over- compartmenalizing, and over-accomodating a variety of behaviors as mental illness or disorder. And I can see the logic sometimes. But I think we’ve come so far that we can sometimes lose sight of the incredible value of the progress made. There are easily thousands, likely millions, of people who would have in prior generations been expected to endure a life of quiet misery or, barring that, be pushed sufficiently to the periphery that their suffering was just out of earshot. Instead they are provided language to understand themselves and communicate their needs to others, and sometimes the tools to optimize within their diverse set of needs and constraints. That’s much better.

Nirvana fallacies abound, especially when nostalgia paints over the obviously inferior parts of our personal histories. The present is taken for granted, it’s flaws drawn in sharp relief against an imagined perfect future rather than vastly inferior past. There is little to be looked back upon fondly in the formal and informal institutions of mental health. Better to have progressed an overly diagnosed and indulgent inch passed the unknowable social optimum than regress to a past where ignorance obstructed our empathy.

Disappearing people to El Salvador is bad. Unilaterally raising tariffs is unconstitutional and bad. Threatening an American city with violently imposed martial law is really bad. Unilaterally defunding USAID of their legislated resources was bad. The consistent spectacle of cruelty is a spewing sewer geyser of bad. There’s so much bad that I can’t really do it justice here. I’d call it the death of democracy by a thousand papercuts, but these feel more like slashes from raptor claws looking for each and every weakness in an ever-diminishing cage.

Enumerating what is bad and what it means if things get worse is not what I want to write about today. What I want to discuss is how we collectively comment and respond to it. Obviously there is a wide spectrum of responses that we can sift through and evaluate, but broadly there seems to be three categories.

1. This is fantastic
2. This is catastrophically bad
3. Sure, it’s bad, but it’s not that bad.

I don’t care about the first category. If you are cheering this on, well, I can’t help you. You’re either entirely detached or a person whose lens on the world allows them to enjoy personal cruelty and institutional arson. Persuading you otherwise through a blog post is way, way above my pay grade. What I’m interested in understanding, and possibly mediating, is the conversation between types 2 and 3.

Whether you identify as a “highly alarmed” 2 or a “calmly observant” 3, I want you to step back and consider the possibility that you are in 80% agreement with the alternative type, you just don’t know it.

Consider your typical policy expert. They are engaged with the same information ecoystem as everyone else, but there is a policy channel or mechanism they participate in via their expertise. They observe the general sentiment that things are bad, hearing each day about things that are specifically bad. But sometimes there is a news item that either they created (“Here’s a new bad thing I found”) or are impeccably credentialed to comment on (“You can trust me when I say this bad thing is especially bad”). They aren’t going to abstain from contributing or commenting just because other bad things are happening. And neither is anyone else who shares their vein of expertise. Further, those who aggregate or broadly comment on such things will contribute as well. The system quickly becomes oversaturated, and that oversaturation incentivizes and selects for a darker, sometimes panicked tone. There’s a collective action problem here because individuals cannot coordinate to produce an coherent message, ordinal queue, or collective tone.

That’s the primary collective action problem. The secondary problem occurs at the level of commentators who, either because of political or personal temperament, are skeptical of anything that achieves the status of conventional wisdom in the commentariat. Each time a newly weakened democratic guardrail or act of indiscriminate cruelty raises the collective tone beyond what would be a “normal” response in an unsaturated information environment, the skeptic will feel compelled to lower the temperature. This response, however, backfires because it is not engaged with by the uncoordinated collective, but rather an individual. An indvidual, often, who is the relevant expert in question, who knows exactly why it is very bad, and has no interest in the collective temperature, but rather the validity of the narrow and specific bad thing. As experts in narrow fields don’t like being told they’re wrong by non-experts, they likely see the temperature of their own language rise, making the marginal discussion of the bad thing in question more, not less, angry and concerned. The skeptic has not only made things, from their own point of view, worse, they have procured further evidence that the conventional wisdom is overly panicked, compelling them to try to tamp down that much harder on the next wave of concern.

What we are left with is an inner and outer set of collective action problems that are recursively feeding into cohorts of panicking experts fueling doomer fatalism while smug denialists reassure every frog who will listen that their cozy pots of water are not in fact getting warmer.

I’m sure it’s obvious that I’m in the camp that thinks the United States is in greater institutional danger at the moment than at any time since the Civil War. What might not be clear is that I think that the probability of an actual collapse to early 20th century authoritarianism within the next 20 years is about 2 to 4%.** Mathematically, that is a slim chance, but in terms of expected cost its terrifying. Many of you may have read my tone as an implied near inevitability (>90%), a hurricane at sea that is rapidly approaching the shore. Some of you may actually hold that belief, that the US is exactly on track to becoming a failed state, and upon seeing my estimated probability of collapse think me a denialist myself (NB: To be clear, even if the worst doesn’t come to bear there will still be terrible costs along the way). In the context of our discussion, it doesn’t actually matter whether I’m right or wrong. What matters is the failure of collective tone to actually reveal the beliefs held by the individuals that comprise it.

What are the outcomes you are concerned about? What do you think are the odds they will each come to be realized? If we want to take small steps towards improving communication and increasing the quality of collective beliefs, I think we need evolve social norms around communicating our beliefs more directly, even, yes, quantifiably. That way, when our beliefs are internalized in the information zeitgeist, they retain more of their intended meaning, regardless of the tone that emerges after a couple cycles through the collective wash.

** Yes, a 4% chance of democratic collapse within a decade is very large. Think about it this way – if 4% was anywhere near normal, the US would have probabilistically collapse to authoritarianism long ago.