The Villains We Were Promised

Any story is told more easily when it has an antagonist.

Let’s say I told the story, “I got a Diet Pepsi”. Boring. So boring it’s hardly even a story. I’d have to say something like, “I tried to get a Diet Pepsi but my wallet was missing.”

Still boring, but more interesting than the first story.

There’s an obstacle.

However, it’s still missing something. More character. People understand mathematical problems better when they’re framed as conflicts involving people. As social animals, much of our talk has to do with what other people are doing.

So it’s easier for a story to spread if the obstacle is a person.

“I tried to get a Diet Pepsi but my wallet was missing. It had to be Dave."

Who the fuck is Dave?

We don’t know, but now we have an antagonist. Someone to blame. An obstacle that is a person.

And obstacles that are people are sooo much easier for people to coordinate against than an obstacle that’s just a thing.

Fighting an intersection that averages three deaths a year? Good luck getting anyone to do anything about that. Fighting a homicidal maniac? Now everyone’s interested.

Today, blame flows downhill.

This was how factories in the 19th and early 20th centuries had to function.

But it wasn’t too far from what happened in the past, either.

We see this in the word ‘villain’.

You’ll find a similar history with the word ‘mean’. Like, “Dave is mean”. As in, common. A peasant. Not of the nobility.

But that’s not as fun, is it?

When the bad guys are just ‘those poor people over there’, it doesn’t carry as much interest.

A lot of our ancestors hunted big game to feed their tribes.

Many of our norms descend from that.

Bears and mammoths may not scare us as much anymore.

So we have modern villains.

Curiously, these mimic the last great threat to the modern state.

Members of the old aristocratic classes.

Warriors who lead from the front.

Proactively driven for their own ends.

Many of us grew up expecting, somewhere in our subconscious, to face villainy like this.

That would’ve been convenient!

It’s far easier to change one person than it is to change thousands.

Many today love to speak of the supremacy of democracy. They use ‘democracy’ as a stand-in for whatever government rules over them today. Yet, the tyrants of the past give us some advantages of structures ruled by one instead of many.

Commodus was an Emperor of Rome. Judged a bad one by most people who are inclined to place moral judgments against the dead.

A tyrant.

So his wrestling coach took care of things.

He choked his Emperor to death.

Imagine change being that simple in any of our organizations today. The flipside of regicide would be sales, or building a strong enough relationship with a tyrant to change his mind.

But we don’t really have villains that can be punched.

If we look at what groups most influence norms today, they’re big.

There are usually tens of thousands of them.

Showing one of the advantages of dilution.

If your group takes power and there are too many of you to target, then you become faceless.

The power of an HOA, a board of directors, or best of all, a professional association.

However, it’s hard for such groups to try anything new, or survive sudden changes. Much of what they’re about is in maintaining a stasis.

What we can learn from them, we can learn from bees.

From schools of fish.

From swarms.

Except, where our professional managers might work to squash initiative or dilute purposes, a swarm might reward initiative and hone purposes.

A concentrated group that can afford to lose each part.

We can look around at what tribes have done for millenia.

Strengthen fictive kinships.

Grow fun where we find it.

Hunt what’s plenty, and move when something’s scarce.