RECIPE STEPS
1. To withstand distress better, cultivate your new secret weapon: “psychological flexibility.” A psychologically flexible person adapts their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to a given situation, making sure their actions remain rooted in whatever it is that’s important to them.
2. Mobilize the Psychological Flexibility Dashboard. By relying on four provocations, you can devise workable solutions to mentally distressing problems. First, remind yourself of the reason for dissenting. Second, get in touch with your discomfort. Third, get in touch with your coping mechanisms. Fourth, gauge your opportunities.
3. Stick with it. Building psychological flexibility using the Dashboard isn’t easy, but it’s worth the effort. Do the hard work of realizing your full potential.
CHAPTER 7
Win Responsibly
How to prevent moral hypocrisy if and when you become the new majority
Evo Morales, Bolivia’s former president, knows what it’s like to live in extreme poverty. Born into his country’s marginalized Aboriginal community, Morales and his family lived in a traditional adobe farmhouse—just one small room served as kitchen, dining room, and bedroom. Four of Morales’s six siblings died during infancy, and Morales’s reward for surviving was childhood labor. At the age of five, he went to work as a llama shepherd to help his family afford their daily meals.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Morales dedicated himself to improving his community’s plight, participating in a grassroots movement to legalize production of the coca plant, a vital crop for Aboriginal farmers and a fixture of traditional Bolivian culture. At the time, speaking up for Aborigine culture was risky. The U.S. government was fighting a “war on drugs,” funneling money to Bolivia’s entrenched elites to stop narcotics from reaching American soil. Instead of stopping drug trafficking and arresting drug dealers, corrupt Bolivian government officials cracked down on impoverished Aboriginal farmers, taking their coca leaves and extracting bribes. Officials also arrested farmers and subjected them to elaborate forms of torturous interrogations that included burning them with cigarettes, delivering electric shocks, injecting them with toxic substances, shooting their limbs, and keeping their heads submerged under water. Several arrested farmers died in custody. Morales himself was beaten, jailed, and on one occasion nearly killed after government forces left him in a remote area to die.
By the mid- to late 1990s, Morales was active in electoral politics, fighting for policies to improve the economic standing and power of marginalized members of society. In 2006, despite opposition from the U.S. government, he was elected president on a left-wing platform of poverty reduction, investment in education and hospitals, increases in minimum wage, higher taxes on the wealthy, and the extension of political rights to the Aboriginal population. Once in power, Morales made good on many of his promises, bringing widespread economic growth to his country. Taking back control of oil and gas production from foreign energy companies, he brought billions of dollars into government coffers that had formerly gone abroad. Salaries increased, unemployment fell by 50 percent, and literacy rates rose. Within four years of his election, the World Bank adjusted Bolivia’s country classification from a “lower-income” economy, the lowest possible classification, to the next tier of “lower-middle income.” This new designation translated into three to four times greater gross national income per capita, enabling the government to borrow money at lower interest rates and in turn lay the foundation for even more wealth creation. Between 2005 and 2018, Bolivia became Latin America’s fastest growing economy.
But Morales’s rule had a dark side. In the course of consolidating power, his government quashed dissent. In 2013, Morales issued a presidential decree allowing the government wide-ranging authority to disband civil society organizations. His government intimidated journalists and blacklisted dissenters. In 2011, when thousands of Bolivians protested Morales’s plan to build a highway across a protected reserve of Amazon rainforest, police brutally attacked protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets. According to one account, “when the women marchers yelled their dissent, Morales’s police bound their faces with duct tape to shut their mouths.” The country’s constitution mandated a two-term limit for presidents, but Morales clung to power for a third term and would have remained for a fourth had he not been forced out by elements of his military following allegations of electoral manipulation.
Many successful insubordinates underperform once they gain power, abandoning their values and failing to deliver on the good they promised to do. Vladimir Lenin led an uprising of workers with a vision of “peace, bread and land” for all Russian citizens. How did that work out? And then there was the French Revolution, which promised liberty, equality, and fraternity but devolved into a frightful period of head-chopping under Maximilien Robespierre. Perform an autopsy on successful revolutions large and small, and you will find that amidst the thrill of victory after long years of sacrifice, successful insubordinates often waste or taint the opportunity earned, struggling to catalyze and sustain healthy change. You might chalk this up to the extremism that insubordination often generates, especially after extended periods of repression by establishment forces. But that invites the question: what about human psychology helps fuel such fervor?
Our latent impulses toward tribalism go a long way toward explaining it. We share in our fellow group members’ pride and joy, feeling empathy for them and responding to their needs, but we fail to behave similarly toward outsiders. We ignore when members of our group behave aggressively, violently, or exploitatively toward “the other,” and we assign outsiders as our nemesis, defining our group in opposition to them. In difficult situations, it’s handy to blame someone or something other than ourselves. All too often, these dynamics lead successful insubordinates to persecute members of the former majority, producing needless suffering. Insubordinates discount the fallen majority’s potentially useful ideas, and lay the foundation for future conflict.
Researchers have uncovered several interlocking psychological factors that fuel tribal impulses among successful non-conformists, pushing them to behave destructively toward vanquished members of the former majority. As Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “We must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.”
THE BIG IDEA
With knowledge of how humans are tribal in nature, especially during transfers of power, we can behave more thoughtfully and rationally, neutralizing impulses to demonize those who once doubted or persecuted us.
THE REBEL’S DISCONTENT
When power shifts between majority and non-conformist members of a group, neither of these subgroups views the common group identity in the same way. Non-conformists often experience what I call the “rebel’s discontent.” They wish to abandon the group so as to distance themselves from those who previously rejected their views but who have now transitioned into champions of them. Former dissenters won primacy over the group, so why not stick around and enjoy it? In truth, it’s not so easy. Wounds suffered when struggling as a persecuted underdog still burn. After so much pain, your own identity as a rebel is hardened, and it becomes hard to forgive those who previously disrespected and mistreated you. Why have anything to do with the former majority at all?
We can glimpse the rebel’s discontent thanks to a set of cutting-edge experiments conducted by Dr. Radmila Prislin of San Diego State University. Imagine you’re debating a controversial topic among a group of strangers. Initially, few people in the group take your position. As time passes, more people in the group agree with you. Or perhaps most people initially agree with you, and as time passes their support wanes and they adopt an opposing viewpoint. Now imagine that all of these other people are actors, and the whole debate is an experiment to see how you respond to shifts in your popularity and power. This is the gist of Prislin’s research, which has turned up some surprising findings.
Shifts in power disrupt how both the new majority and the minority parties think about group identity. After a structural change in the group, people struggle to decipher what their membership signifies and why it matters. Understandably, defeated members of the former majority—I’ll call them the Newly Powerless—no longer see the group as an extension of their sense of self. Now that most group members disagree with them, the larger group seems undesirable and foreign. Members of former minorities—let’s call them the Rebels Who Won—experience their own kind of psychological confusion. They are disappointed and unimpressed at how long it took for the previous majority to finally come around to their views, and they rarely trust the former majority on account of its prior opposition (more on distrust in a moment). Harboring lingering grudges, Rebels Who Won regard the Newly Powerless as inferior. For these reasons, the Rebels Who Won want out. As Prislin provocatively noted in her experiments, “It is not those whose position remains disadvantaged (stable minority) who are eager to leave . . . it is those whose position within a group is improving (former minorities)” who are most likely to seek separation from the group.
THE BIG IDEA
In real-life settings, the loss of a common identity might lead Rebels Who Won to disregard the potentially valuable opinions of the Newly Powerless or to behave in ways that yield discord.
If you’re a longtime rebel who has finally made good, stay alert to this dynamic and challenge yourself to discern all that you and members of the Newly Powerless might have in common. Pushing against your tribal impulses, reach out to your former adversaries and shore up a shared identity to the extent you can.
Although we might feel alienated from others in certain respects, we can almost always find nonideological identities that bind us thanks to common interests, life circumstances, or past experiences. We might, for example, share in common our identities as weight lifters, cigar aficionados, seafood lovers, people who grew up with divorced parents, survivors of the world’s most dangerous amusement rides at Action Park (never heard of it? go watch a video of my childhood mecca!)—and the list goes on and on.
Take an inventory of your childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, noting the identities you have in common with people who seem to be locked in antagonism with you. Can you create new norms or rituals that include people whom you initially regarded as outside your tribe? Challenge yourself to set aside lingering antipathy or that sense of superiority you might feel toward members of the Newly Powerless. As Martin Luther King, Jr., taught, “If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation, and this means we must develop a world perspective.” You, too, must develop a grander “world perspective” toward the sects within your group, even if the relations between those sects remain raw.
THE REBEL’S NIGHTMARE
In 1969, after 268 years as a male-only school, Yale University admitted 588 women to join its class of 1973. A number of men didn’t take it well. Sarah Birdsall, a student at the time, remembered the sophomore boys as friendly and supportive, but “the seniors were pretty horrible that first year. We girls had, after all, ruined their perfect fraternal experience. To them, girls existed for weekend fun.” Yale administrators didn’t go out of their way to make the women feel welcome. Yale failed to provide resources for women’s sports teams, and when a woman signed onto the men’s soccer team, staff told her to resign “for the good of the college.” Her male teammates neglected to rise to the occasion. Instead, they announced their intention to forfeit any game in which a female athlete played.
It’s no wonder Rebels Who Won fail to identify warmly with the Newly Powerless. When majority parties lose their power, they tend to behave badly. As research by Dr. Prislin and her colleagues documented, the Newly Powerless refuse aid to the group, expressing their hostility by taking advantage of the group when they can, and expecting hostility and a lack of helpfulness from Rebels Who Won. This reaction in turn engenders distrust and hostility in the Rebels Who Won. Recognizing that the Newly Powerless have become embittered and hostile (what we might call the “rebel’s nightmare”), the Rebels Who Won react defensively, spending far too much time searching for signs of disrespect and rejection, finding those signs, and battling them, all of which distracts from pursuing their own goals. At Yale, one female student wanted to work on the prestigious Yale Daily News but explained, “There really was a sense that women were not going to be considered for leadership positions. I was put off by that, and I guess the message was strong enough that it made me not want to put in the effort.”
Antagonism begets antagonism. Aggression begets aggression. As another female student reflected, “The tragedy of all this is that I took on many of the male chauvinistic attitudes toward females . . . I didn’t think females were worth spending time with. I picked that up from the institution, and I’m only now getting out of it.” Basically, this female student (and probably many others) internalized the hostile attitudes of misogynistic Yale boys.
As a result of this dynamic, Rebels Who Won often wind up departing from the values they cherished while in the minority. Think back to Bolivian President Evo Morales, who literally used industrial-strength duct tape to shut the mouths of those who disagreed with his ideas and practices. Whereas previously they might have valued dissent, believing that all factions deserve a chance to speak and be heard, and that disagreements are healthy, now the Rebels Who Won have second thoughts. Suspicious of opponents’ motives and fearing their aggression, Rebels Who Won become less interested in welcoming dissenting views, as they seem to detract from the restructured group’s ability to solve problems and lock in progress. Instead of seeking out diverse viewpoints, the Rebels Who Won stifle debate.
In Prislin’s research, the Newly Powerless became more tolerant of debate, whereas the Rebels Who Won increasingly interpreted disagreement as unwelcome and unhealthy, valuing cognitive diversity 50 percent less than they had before. The Rebels Who Won became rigid, tolerating the Newly Powerless’s opinions in a frosty, disrespectful way. Rather than fostering debate, the Rebels Who Won felt there was only one way, their way. Revolt now seemed dangerous and unhelpful. In truth, dissenting ideas remain valuable no matter who is in charge (as discussed in chapter 3). By hardening their position and clamping down, the Rebels Who Won failed to reap the continuing benefits of dissent and, again, sowed the seeds for future discord.
THE BIG IDEA
If you as a successful rebel are gaining adherents and power, you would do well to provide assurances to everyone involved in the war of ideas—friends, foes, and neutral observers—that their opinions still count.
Reach across the divide to draw out former adversaries. Understand the pain that the Newly Powerless are nursing due to their loss in status and the reality that just being around you reminds them of this loss. Reflect on lingering traumas you might have suffered thanks to years of rejection as a marginalized minority. Rejection’s sting might be damaging the quality of your attitudes and decisions today, coloring your view of former opponents. How might your emotions make matters worse, even if former opponents’ mistrust and aggression remain palpable? Recall how you once felt as a member of the minority.
Most of all, resist the urge to pull away from the distrusted “other,” even when they express hostility. As Prislin and her colleagues found, repeated interactions over time between the Rebels Who Won and the Newly Powerless brought a measure of reconciliation. Initially, relationships between these parties were awkward or tense. But after four or five interactions with their opponents, Rebels Who Won found it easier to spend time and collaborate with them. They could recognize more readily the common humanity and interests they shared with the Newly Powerless. Everyone became more attached to the group and willing to sacrifice for it. With time and effort, the old antagonisms faded, replaced by a new, fledgling spirit of cooperation.
THE REBEL’S BLINDNESS
At the peak of the French Revolution, during the Reign of Terror from September 1793 to July 1794, nearly 300,000 citizens were arrested, some 17,000 were executed, and thousands more died in prison. But get this: Maximilien Robespierre, a former judge who became the architect of the Terror, previously argued against judicial violence. Robespierre even resigned his judgeship after pressure to sentence a criminal to the death penalty. As late as 1791—just two years before the Reign of Terror—he argued, “The legislator who prefers death and atrocious penalties to the gentler means in his power outrages public feeling and weakens the moral sentiment among the people he governs; like a clumsy preceptor who, by the frequent use of cruel punishments, stupefies and degrades the soul of his student; he wears out and weakens the springs of government by wanting to wind them up too strongly.” And yet, once in power, Robespierre spearheaded a law that allowed for the death penalty if the revolutionary government even suspected someone of dissenting against the newly established order. “There are only two parties in France: the people and its enemies,” he said. “We must exterminate those miserable villains who are eternally conspiring against the rights of man. . . . [W]e must exterminate all our enemies.”
We’ve seen that dissenters who take power regularly abandon their foundational beliefs about the benefits of diversity and dissent. But Robespierre’s unparalleled and awful hypocrisy suggests another dynamic at play: a frightening inability of victorious insubordinates to remain self-aware. Indeed, Robespierre seemed blissfully ignorant of any contradiction with his former beliefs. In a 1793 speech, he proclaimed that constitutional regimes need only “protect the individual citizen against abuse of power by the government; but under a revolutionary regime the government has to defend itself against all the factions which attack it; and in this fight for life only good citizens deserve public protection, and the punishment of the people’s enemies is death.” Such words convey no clue of any deviation from his former beliefs. As one observer noted, hard-core ideologues strongly believe in their own justifications of violence. Indeed, “the atrocities only strengthen the utter certainty with which ideologues hold their convictions and impose their aim.”
As Prislin and her colleagues found, hypocrisy creeps in almost immediately after a power shift within a group. In their experiments, the Rebels Who Won abused their power by creating rules that favored their in-group at the expense of the Newly Powerless. The Rebels Who Won implemented new rules that demoralized the Newly Powerless in an attempt to fortify the new status quo. As Prislin’s work suggests, Rebels Who Won become unaware of their own hypocrisy out of a fear of losing hard-won power, status, and approval. Without knowing whether the Newly Powerless support the reformulated group, the Rebels Who Won believe their power is unstable. If they don’t aggressively reinforce their power, they think, it will prove fleeting. This logic dominates, pushing aside other considerations, such as how consistent their present behavior is with long-standing values.
THE BIG IDEA
