Revolutions promise many things: life, liberty, justice, equality, prosperity, even happiness. Yet one of the most depressing aspects of history is how often revolutionaries have ended up being even more murderously tyrannical than the oppressive regimes they overthrew. Rivers of ink have been spilled arguing over how this can be. Why have the people who seemed to be the hopeful idealists of the world so often become its ogres?
This morning I read an article in The Conversation with the provocative, if rather long, title “Would you stand up to an oppressive regime or would you conform? Here’s the science.” I’d encourage you to read the article yourself, but I’ll try to summarize it here.
Basically, the author (Nick Chater) says that oppressive regimes stay in power by relying on our natural inclination to obey social norms, even when those norms are arbitrary or inconvenient. Since obedience to authority is a social norm, most people will obey the authority. Those who rebel must reject important social norms to do so, and those who lead rebellions must be able to convince others to follow them. In conclusion, “a tendency to adopt non-standard norms [is] linked to verbal ability and perhaps general intelligence in individuals who actually rebel.”
It occurred to me that we have a term for people like that: high-functioning sociopath.
And suddenly I understood why so many “freedom fighters” have turned out to be monsters. After thinking about it a little more, I realized why some revolutions have been disastrous bloodbaths and others haven’t.
George Washington was almost unique among his contemporaries for not declaring himself emperor, or at the very least president-for-life. (cf. Napoleon in France, Dessalines in Haiti, Bolivar in Gran Colombia, Iturbide in Mexico, and Dom Pedro in Brazil.) Another revolutionary who stands out for his basic lack of dickishness is Nelson Mandela who, despite spending most of his career as a literal Communist, when he won power was content to be bound by democratic norms. The same cannot be said of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, or Pol Pot, or even of many non-communist revolutionaries like Gaddafi, Mugabe, and Arafat.
The monarchies of France, Spain, Russia, China, etc., were thoroughly authoritarian regimes which did not permit dissent of any kind. Neurotypical people conformed. Only the sociopaths rebelled, and they spread death and destruction wherever they marched.
The Thirteen Colonies and Apartheid South Africa, on the other hand, were quasi-democratic regimes with at least a strong tradition of free thought. In these societies, dissent was socially acceptable, so neurotypical people were much more likely to adopt dissenting views and lead rebellions without falling prey to sociopaths.
On the bright side, this shows that we needn’t instinctively fear politicians like Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders who speak of revolution. We live in a society that fetishizes dissent to a degree unparalleled in all human history. One only has to look at the many “punk” genres to see the irony that rebellion itself has become a social norm which everyone strives to conform to. The leaders of a modern revolution in America or any Western nation would most likely be true idealists, and not sociopaths who’d murder anyone standing in their way.
