I have become increasingly interested in a problem that is probably as old as organized human society: how do well-intentioned people, trying to make the world better, end up doing things that are foolish, counterproductive, or even harmful?
I don’t think the answer is that most of them are bad people. Quite the opposite. Bad people are the easy case. The more interesting problem is what happens when decent people—with ordinary human needs for friendship, approval, status, security, meaning, and self-respect—join together in pursuit of ideals.
Humans are social animals. We like belonging. We like being respected. We like feeling that our lives have meaning and that we are on the side of good. A social or political movement can provide all of those things at once: friends, community, purpose, moral elevation, and sometimes professional opportunities, money, influence, or power.
None of that makes the movement wrong. But it creates incentives that can gradually become entangled with the original ideals.
I have come to think of one part of this phenomenon as easy virtue. I use the phrase in my own peculiar sense. Easy virtue is the ability to acquire the feeling—and sometimes the social status—of being virtuous without having to do the much harder work that genuine moral judgment requires.
It can be wonderfully easy to repeat the approved slogan, display the proper symbol, condemn the accepted villain, click “like,” or join the fashionable cause. The reward can be immediate: approval from one’s friends, admiration from one’s community, and the comforting feeling of being one of the good people.
Thinking is harder.
Thinking requires us to ask whether the slogan is actually true, whether the proposed cure will work, what its unintended consequences might be, who will bear its costs, and whether we would apply the same reasoning if the political identities were reversed. It requires us occasionally to discover that people we dislike have a point, or that people we admire are wrong.
That is uncomfortable.
So we often engage in a kind of cognitive outsourcing. We let other people do some of our thinking for us. Most of the time this is essential. None of us can personally verify everything we believe. I don’t reproduce every medical experiment before taking a medicine, inspect every bridge before driving across it, or reconstruct all of modern physics before using a semiconductor.
Civilization depends on trust and intellectual specialization.
But there is an important difference between saying I rely on these people because they know more about this subject than I do and saying I know what to believe because people like me believe it.
The first is a sensible division of cognitive labor. The second is groupthink.
Modern technology has made this ancient human tendency vastly easier to exploit. Social media platforms compete for our attention. Algorithms discover what keeps us watching, clicking, sharing, and returning. Anger, fear, moral outrage, and tribal loyalty turn out to be excellent tools for capturing eyeballs.
No conspiracy is required. A machine told to maximize engagement can discover for itself that an outraged person is often an engaged person.
The result is a powerful feedback loop. We encounter a simplified explanation of the world. People we identify with approve of it. We receive social rewards for repeating it. Algorithms notice our interest and show us more of it. We increasingly encounter people who agree with us, while those who disagree begin to seem ignorant, immoral, or dangerous.
Mass movements and factions are nothing new. Eric Hoffer described much of the psychology of mass movements in The True Believer in 1951, decades before smartphones and TikTok. Thucydides was describing factionalism more than two thousand years earlier. Human nature has not changed very much. What has changed is the machinery available to amplify it.
Edmund Burke worried about another aspect of the same problem: the danger of applying beautiful abstract principles to complicated human societies without sufficient respect for experience, incentives, customs, contradictions, and unintended consequences.
Ideals collide.
Justice can conflict with mercy. Equality can conflict with liberty. Safety can conflict with freedom. Helping one group can impose costs on another. A policy that improves one measure can worsen another. There may simply be no solution in which everyone gets everything we would ideally like them to have.
These difficulties are easy to overlook when an issue has been compressed into a contest between good and evil.
I recently had a conversation with a relative that reminded me how easily this happens. She was concerned about the effects of MAGA politics on schools in Iowa, where she once lived. I didn’t particularly disagree with her concerns, but I pointed out that I had concerns of my own about ideological excesses from the other political direction in schools where our grandchildren live in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Initially, she wasn’t pleased with my comparison. Eventually, however, she acknowledged that I had given her something to think about.
That is about the best outcome I can hope for in a political conversation. Not victory. Food for thought.
I want other people to do the same thing to me.
There is another problem that appears when ideals become institutions. An organization may begin with a straightforward mission: solve a problem. But organizations acquire employees, budgets, buildings, reputations, donors, procedures, and careers. Gradually another mission emerges alongside the first.
I sometimes call this the corporate mission: maximize revenue, minimize risk, and build the brand.
Again, this doesn’t require villains. If I work for an organization, preserving that organization seems completely reasonable. My colleagues depend on it. Our supporters believe in it. And if I sincerely believe our mission is important, then protecting our organization begins to feel morally equivalent to protecting the mission itself.
Mission accomplished can therefore become an awkward outcome.
An advocacy organization founded to solve problem X may discover that solving X threatens the organization’s reason to exist. The problem can then be broadened, redefined, or joined by related or even not-very-related problems. Activists who are particularly talented at organizing may naturally move from one cause to another. Journalists need another story. Politicians need another issue. Universities create offices that acquire constituencies and budgets of their own.
The mission drifts.
This is closely related to Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Organizations begin by measuring activities because they hope those activities will improve the world. Eventually the measurable activities—money raised, people trained, programs created, policies adopted, followers acquired—can become accomplishments in themselves. They become targets.
James Madison famously observed in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” His point applies far beyond government. Institutions must be designed for humans as they actually are, not as we wish they were.
And that includes me.
I have spent much of my life trying to reconcile conflicting ideas. I am bothered by logical inconsistencies and double standards, including my own. When I discover that I am treating an argument differently because I like the person making it—or dislike the person making the opposite argument—I want that to bother me. I also want it to bother me when I haven’t reexamined my ideas or opinions for too long.
It isn’t always pleasant. There is psychological comfort in certainty.
But perhaps the opposite of easy virtue is not cynicism. It is hard virtue: doing the intellectual work necessary to remain uncertain when the evidence is uncertain; listening seriously to people we dislike; acknowledging inconvenient facts; recognizing tradeoffs; and changing our minds when our reasoning fails.
Young people are susceptible to easy virtue because belonging and moral identity are enormously important while they are still forming their views of the world. Older people, however, have no grounds for smugness. We have had more experience, but we have also had more years to become attached to our identities, tribes, resentments, and opinions.
None of us graduates from human nature.
So I don’t think the lesson is “beware of progressives,” “beware of MAGA,” “beware of activists,” or “beware of institutions.”
It is simpler and harder than that.
Beware of certainty that comes too easily.
Ask what evidence would change your mind. Notice when you dismiss an argument because of who made it rather than because of its merits. Be especially suspicious when an idea gives you moral satisfaction, social approval, and a convenient enemy all at once.
And occasionally ask yourself an uncomfortable question:
Am I actually thinking about this, or have I allowed my group to think for me?
That seems like a useful question for any century.
Acknowledgment
This essay grew in part from my reaction to Maya Sulkin’s interview with Sabrina Joy Stevens at The Free Press, available at https://www.thefp.com/p/confessions-of-former-social-justice-warrior. Stevens’s account of her years in progressive activism prompted me to think more broadly about groupthink, institutional incentives, mission drift, moral certainty, and the very human attractions of belonging to a cause.
It also grew from an extended conversation with ChatGPT about those subjects. I supplied the experiences, arguments, concerns, and perspective; ChatGPT challenged some of my generalizations, helped develop several of the ideas, pushed back on my careless or inaccurate statements, and drafted this essay from our discussion.