Via The Corner, something I always knew deep down, but never had succinctly coalesced into a single paragraph.
In 1999, Cass Sunstein wrote an article in the Harvard Law Review entitled “The Law of Group Polarization.” Its thesis was simple:
In a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments. For example, people who are opposed to the minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be still more opposed; people who tend to support gun control are likely, after discussion, to support gun control with considerable enthusiasm; people who believe that global warming is a serious problem are likely, after discussion, to insist on severe measures to prevent global warming. This general phenomenon — group polarization – has many implications for economic, political, and legal institutions. It helps to explain extremism, “radicalization,” cultural shifts, and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations; it is closely connected to current concerns about the consequences of the Internet; it also helps account for feuds, ethnic antagonism, and tribalism.
I suppose this explains why extreme measures such as erecting thousands of expensive and sometimes operating windmills that blight the landscape, are often attractive to the global warming movement.
Imagine the howling if somebody wanted thousands of natural gas well derricks on the same plot of land in California, yet they would produce far more energy and help far more people, at a lower cost.
Oblique low-altitude aerial photo of wellpads, access roads, pipeline corridors and other natural-gas infrastructure in the Jonah Field of western Wyoming’s upper Green River valley. Photographer: Bruce Gordon, EcoFlight – Image via Flickr
I dunno.
Theories abound, some I simply reject without even checking (like the “human cycles” theory, which sounds deterministic). Observations and tactics are worth knowing to spot them and perhaps to use some, but context is very important.
Some people are just eager to do something about the perceived state of the world, so easy to co-opt. In many cases it is just flailing – examples include people blaming immigrants/imports for economic problems, and environmentalists. They don’t think, and tend to conspiracy theory – “deliberation” is the wrong word as that implies thinking, mutual reinforcement and group-think are more accurate. A psychology of needing to belong is a key factor, getting one’s identify from the tribe – which leads to concluding that other tribes are inherently inferior. (Hence for example attempts to define people by superficial characteristics like race instead of “content of character”.) Closing ranks against questioners is an element of group-think, as that is expected to protect the false self-esteem the person gets from membership in the tribe. Similarly for “peer pressure” and such.
I can point to networks of people who tend to split apart after debating, though those are free-thinking types. (Certainly heated debate herein sometimes, though we have been seeing alarmists throw others under the bus – while some still blindly support as they did for Gleick, and heavy bashing of Muller by prominent alarmists.)
One corrective action is a dose of reality. Most likely to be effective for other than True Believers. “thingadonta” might have a point about who rises to the top – certainly the case in Marxist societies, which quickly led to cheap thugs like Lenin and Trotsky being in power (they of course were willing to use brutal force against their socialist brothers – even each other, climate alarmists use the “velvet glove” of speech suppression by various means). Lenin and Trotsky were free lunchers as criminals are, but like Hitler they got to power because many people accepted the combination of appeals to brotherhood or tribalism (nationalism) and blaming others for their troubles. “The Ominous Parallels” by Leonard Peikoff is an exhaustive examination of what enabled Hitler to gain power.
My thought on this is that many well-intentioned people have set their hearts on fighting to save the world from the well-advertized danger of ‘global warming’ from anthropogenic carbon dioxide, as one of the ‘good’ things that they are going to do with their lives. Fighting this battle is one of the ways they can feel good about themselves. Thus, they may actually regard any suggestion that this battle, or portions of it, do not have to be fought as a threat to their heroic image of themselves. So they would be forced to regard anyone attacking the ‘good fight’ to be morally corrupt and being motivated by base self-interest.
When news of Climategate first came out, I remember, in an interview, one journalist, with a tinge of fear in his voice saying something to the effect, “This misconduct by a few scientists does not mean the basic science behind man-made Global Warming is invalid.” That response suggested to me that he, personally, might find the invalidation of basic global warming dogma to be a rather inconvenient truth.
My own view is that man may be seriously damaging the environment in many ways, but over-production of carbon dioxide is not one of them. That is based on the gradual logarithmic nature of the effect.