1        Soul Bound 1.3      Making a Splash 1.3.3    An Unrequited Love 1.3.3.20 Sharpe Lecture: allies (part four)

Flashback to being a student in 2030s studying "Effective Political Activism" at University College London.

Dr. Sharpe paused for a sip of water, before returning to the main theme of his lecture.

"Quiritis" is an interesting word - it's what Romans called the citizens during times of peace, when they could act as stonemasons rather than conscripts. Some say the original meaning derives from the Sabine word for "spear" or a phrase meaning "assembly of people". But the etymology I like best is that it means to cry out - they were the people who had a voice.

The Quirities weren't generally members of the rich Patrician class who owned Rome's marbled buildings (they were commoners who worked for a living), but that didn't make them feel they deserved unfair treatment. At the height of Rome's wars against the Sabines and other nearby tribes, Rome appointed a temporary military dictator who nearly doubled the number of Legions and most of the people who sacrificed their peaceful civilian jobs in order to put their lives on the line for their nation were the Quirities. They were also the ones who discovered, on returning victorious, that their possessions had been seized by money lenders to pay for the harsh taxes that had continued to be levied in their absence - even upon those whose estates had been incinerated during Sabine incursions."

This was the Dr. Sharpe that Nadine recognised - the one who used stories like ships, safely transporting the listeners across uncertain seas to previously unimagined shores.

"Oh the Patricians claimed to honour their sacrifice, even paying for diverting celebrations at the Circus Maximus, but what did that matter when, with the other hand, they were also putting your family in prison and threatening to whip them unless you gave them ownership of an ancestral farm? It might be legal, but it wasn't justice.

The Quirities made their voice heard.

More than two and a half millennia ago, they launched history's first recorded general strike, a "Secessio plebis". They walked out. Not just out of Rome's shops and crafting halls, but out of the city itself. A mass abandonment. The tools remained, but the Patricians didn't have the skills to use them properly. The warehouses and carts remained, but the Patricians themselves didn't produce any food to fill them with.

With one simple action they did what words alone had failed to do. They made the Patricians understand that they needed the Quirities and that the Quirities were aware of this. That the Quirities were united and resolved - they couldn't be divided or diverted, delayed or dismissed. That the Quirities were free to choose to give up the benefits of sharing the city with the Patricians, and were willing to make that sacrifice rather than carry on being taken advantage of.

Unsurprisingly, they won.

The Patricians passed laws permitting a Quirities to stand for election and to marry into the Patrician class, thus surrendering the Patrician's monopoly hold upon social and political power, and in return the Quirities returned to the city and to work. No class of people gives up their privileges willingly, because any privilege held for more than two generations melds into the unquestioned status quo of tradition. Those who benefit forget their advantage is a privilege rather than something they earned or naturally deserve, and when their status returns to equality, the comparative absence can leave an unpleasant feeling of loss, or even the illusion that their class is being victimised, their rights stolen and their identity discriminated against. To force the Patricians to compromise, it took the Quirities putting them into a position where their only alternatives were to become labourers themselves or starve to death.

There are many lessons we can learn from this example, but I'm going to draw your attention to two that apply to every issue where authority backed power imbalance is a factor, from slavery to surveillance.

The first lesson of the Quirities is: "Remember the audience."

Too often political activists become focused upon one single immediate struggle, carelessly letting their world narrow down to the point where everyone they encounter is mentally pigeonholed into one of only two categories: "With us" or "Against us". In doing so they tend to lose sight of any finer distinctions of motive and capability, or their potential to change. They're faceless. Dehumanised.

Does it matter? Isn't it just a question of economics where any rational opponent will change their mind once the price of not doing so rises high enough?

Perfectly rational people are rare outside the pages of economic textbooks and my colleagues in the faculty of mathematics. The Quirities actually went on strike several times, and initially the changes in the law made while maximum pressure was being applied were later quietly reversed after everyone went back to work. In order to win a permanent victory, they had to influence public opinion about whether the strikers were decent people who'd been treated unjustly, people who'd reacted reasonably, people who deserved action from the politicians."

He brought up a slide peppered with cartoon characters.

 

The Spotter's Guide to Audiences

The Persecuted - those in the group which tends to unfairly suffer the most direct harm under the bad laws

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The Perpetrators - those willing accepting direct benefit from the bad laws

The Police - those physically enforcing the bad laws

The Politicians - those with the power to directly change the bad laws

The Populace - those whose opinion of whether a law is bad affects the decisions of the politicians

The Press - those controlling the flow and presentation of information reaching the populace

Note: Here "bad laws" means "the rules and institutional practices providing a stable (or even a supportive) environment for perpetuating unjust inequality of treatment, or status and of opportunity, based upon group membership rather than individual merit."

"Those too are arbitrary pigeon holes with their own hidden dangers, such as an assumption that everyone fits into one of them, and only one of them. But for now I'd like you to bear them in mind while I tell you about seven prisoners, five sausages, three psychologists and one remarkable man.

Most of you will remember me talking in a previous lecture about Phil Zimbardo and the experiment he conducted in 1970 upon a group of young male students from Stanford University, to see how their actions and attitudes would be affected if he told half of them that they were now prisoners, and gave the trappings of authority (such as keys, whistles and intimidating uniforms) to the other half. For those who were too drunk to attend or remember, the result was the experiment having to be halted because it was too successful - the guards became increasingly inhumane, and the prisoners became increasingly stressed and helpless.

Well, in 2001 there was a spike of interest in finding out more about the development of mindsets related to tyranny and extremism, and the psychologists Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher received funding to replicate Zimbardo's experiment, but this time with a focus on observing the resistance of the prisoners. To that end, they made one big change in Zimbardo's setup - they recruited some subjects with workplace experience, rather than sticking just to fresh-faced highly academic students.

Initially the results were the same. The guards set rules for the prisoners to obey, and used small privileges and humiliating punishments to keep the prisoners divided into high status Cooperatives and lower status Uncooperatives which the others were led into looking down up and blaming when measures the guards 'had' to take in response to the Uncooperatives doing things like stealing keys caused all the prisoners to suffer. Just as in the previous experiment the subjects who'd been told they were prisoners felt trapped by their initial consent and fell into the narrative of the situation, with all the assumptions about rights and authority implied by their roles. They didn't like it, yet the only solution they 'saw' was winning the guard's approval in hope of being promoted to their ranks.

But it all changed on the morning of the fifth day, when the guards produced a plate of sausages and passed them into the cell of a prisoner we know only by his initials "DM", with instructions that only the prisoners not in punishment were allowed to eat them. Unbeknownst to the guards, DM wasn't a student - he'd worked in a factory for several years and had been trained as a negotiator by his Trade Union. DM didn't comply with the guards, but neither did he directly oppose them. He'd taken time to study the situation he was in until he found a third option, and then he'd limited himself to quiet preparations of the sort that wouldn't alarm the guards so he'd be free to act rather than react - so he could pick which issue to make the initial battlefield of his campaign.

Why sausages?

Unlike the effect of humiliating uniforms or eye contact rules upon dignity, they were a concrete issue. You either had one in your hand or you didn't. But, more importantly, he'd been listening to the guards talking to each other, and had realised they weren't united in their opinion - some were going along with the rest of the guards but weren't happy because they still saw the prisoners as fully human, and they didn't yet enjoy the role of being rude and harsh to them.

So what did DM do, faced with a choice between either giving a sausage to an Uncooperative, or not giving it?

He called a meeting.

He behaved like the guards weren't there and asked all the prisoners, Cooperative and Uncooperative, to discuss the issue and make a collective decision. He did it with politeness and dignity, moderating the meeting in such a way that the guards couldn't help contrast the civilised and reasonable behaviour of prisoners with memories of their own debate the previous evening, which had been filled with anger and manipulation.

You see, in Britain's proper prisons at that time, withholding food was not a legal punishment; by opposing it, DM turned the prisoners into the ones 'doing the experiment correctly' and the guards into the failures. DM picked that issue not because he cared deeply about whether two Uncooperatives got their fair share to eat that morning, but because it was the thin end of a wedge he used to divide the Perpetrators (and eventually convert some of them into allies), while uniting the Persecuted and undermining the illusions that Politicians (the authorities - Haslam and Reicher) had worked so hard to set up. He appealed to the wider audience, challenging their assumptions about what it was fair for people to do in the situation.

A few days later the recreated experiment was halted. This time, though, it was the guards who wanted out."

He spent the rest of the lecture going over the list of tactics he earlier described, but this time he involved them, letting them share their opinions on how effective each tactic was likely to be at affected the opinions and decisions of the various audiences, acting more like a secretary or interviewer than an authority, keeping discussion flowing without imposing his own views, and making sure even the quietest and most hesitant student had their chance to speak without being interrupted. She could see, just from the more relaxed way people sat and the shoulders no longer slumped or hunched, that it had made a big difference to how the students felt. Bungo in particular looked almost a new man, after Dr Shape encouraged him to explain his idea about what he called 'tapping the jigsaw pieces' by which he meant rotating them to point at the podium for agreement or along the bench for disagreement, and the others voted to accept the method.

Alderney also wanted to contribute, after hearing Dr Sharpe talk about cute inflatable rodents used by strikers in America to refer to employers who hired 'scab' labour to replace striking union members, and once she'd gotten everyone's attention she had held up a quickly sketched poster showing an inflatable tiger bearing a remarkable similarity to a well known cereal company mascot, standing arm in arm with underpaid employees while holding up a banner saying "They're grrrrrrrrrrrrrreedy!"

It was a wonderful time. So wonderful that it wasn't until the end of the lecture that she realised Dr Sharpe hadn't actually mentioned the second lesson of the Quirities. The only clue he gave was the coursework he asked them to have ready before the following week's lecture.

"Think about words or phrases applied to a group you are a member of, that have had a negative impact upon your life (or upon the life of someone you know personally) because of an assumption built into what those around you commonly assume those words or phrases mean. Pick one example you'd be willing to share."

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