humanitarian to brutal

AVI has a post asking for comments about why humanitarians turn brutal in power. My comments were too long, so I'll post them instead.

He asked for comments on A Short Hop from Bleeding Heart to Mailed Fist, which presents 6 possible explanations for why humanitarian plans turn vicious.

I can think of three sources of human oppression and violence: individual and collective and accidental.

Individual is easy to understand—you know brutal and predatory people, and if you don’t you should get out more. They show up at the 1-2% level in the best environments, and much more frequently when the culture encourages them. Original sin is the one Christian doctrine you can prove from the newspaper. Or from inspecting your own heart.

Collective/tribal conflicts can congeal into laws and informal rules when one party manages to dominate. I’m thinking of India here, and not kindly. And the slightly more extreme Nuremberg Laws.

Accidental is as good a term as any to describe the side effects of compromises between tribes (We fish on our side, you fish on your side, nobody fishes in the middle—but some poor shmoe starves because nobody lets him fish in the middle during a bad season.). Alternatively, economic rules seem cruel until you look at what happens without them.

The ultimate source of all three is in the evil in each individual heart. But sometimes the connection is hard to see.

• “Bleeding hearts” often think they can solve the “accidental” easily enough—just change the rules of the system. But typically an individual doesn’t have the smarts to match the wisdom of traditional compromises, and so El Primo breaks the old system and unintended hell breaks loose. A simple example is the electoral college we use—I haven’t heard anybody’s suggested replacement that addresses the concerns that provoked the compromise in the first place. Pretty much all of them just say “Let the cities win.” Strangely enough, they are all from the cities... You can predict what the consequences would be.
  

  And plenty of B.H. seem to think that “supply and demand,” or “you can’t get something for nothing” are arbitrary rules. The results of monkeying with these are predicatably catastrophic; predictable by anybody not blinded by “empathy.”

• Collective oppression is a more promising target. At least it seems so at first, until you actually try to repeal caste laws and discover that you get violent reactions. Which, if you want to accomplish your goals, will have to be met with force. Maybe that’s best. Maybe not.
  
• Individual oppression we think we mostly agree on, but the devil is in the details: hang ‘em, rehabilitate them, lock ‘em up, try pro-active intervention (God preserve us all!)? The tools used matter, and might provoke reactions. Think about “stop and search” policies that we have now—they get quite a bit of reaction. A number of people, both of the B.H. variety and not, hold models of human behavior that are just flat wrong and are guaranteed to cause havoc if you try to implement them--but the B.H. folks are more likely to try.
  

And then the B.H. run into what I think of as Godel’s Pollitical Problem: “Every new political framework generates new problems.” The B.H. aren’t smart enough to find a perfect solution. They think they are, which is a problem and demonstrates un-wisdom as well. (A committee is usually worse.). And when the solutions don’t work, they have to fight to make the obviously holy and true solution fit despite resistance. When the world doesn’t react the way your model says it should, is that a flaw of the model? Nah, it's gotta be rebellion.

B.H. tend not to distinguish between Nuremberg Laws and accidental oppression. You can legitimately use force against some types of oppression, therefore you can use it against all types. It doesn’t help clarify matters that the power of government is force.

The article’s suggestions are

1. Politics is brutal, and the brutal wind up taking over. As the article points out, it does happen, but very often the B.H. themselves turn brutal.
2. In a wicked world, the best way to pursue good policies is with violence. It might be better to say that the only way for a government to pursue extreme changes is with force. It turns out tha the cures are usually worse than the diseases.
3. Hostile foreigners force them to be violent. On inspection, this claim generally falls apart.
4. The bleeding-heart rhetoric is propaganda, the goal is dominance. Certainly true of some people—I incline to think a majority—but others seem to actually try to help—at first.
5. Bleeding-heart rhetoric is disguised hate speech. Once again, obviously true for some B.H. Envy and hatred are problems for us all, if we’re honest, and some of us make a meal of them.
6. The policies work so poorly that only force can sustain them. Very true.
   

Neglect his case 1; it doesn’t require explanation. In a revolution, very often the most brutal rise to the top. Water is wet. Neglect his case 3; in some cases outsiders matter, but not enough to require explanation.

His cases 4 and 5 are closely related, and are quite easy to recognize in other people. The B.H. are agonized for their tribe, not everybody. I think 5 plays a major role, and 4 is lurking behind the scenes. People have mixed motives.

About 2 and 6: When the only tool you have is a hammer, and it isn’t working, use a bigger hammer. And if that doesn’t work use a bigger hammer. And if that doesn’t work, smash it into the ground with a pile driver. Because the B.H. are human too, and get as frustrated or hateful as the people they despise, especially when it starts to become clear that the B.H. were wrong. They can’t be wrong, and they have to prove it while they can.

UPDATE: The most prominent B.H. these days tend to be of the political collectivist persuasion, but Savonarola and Jim Jones also seem to have started out with a pure concern for the well-being of their fellow-man, or at least some subset of them.