Paradoxical strategies in societies

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins explores various evolutionarily stable strategies employed in nature. Usually, a strategy can be thought of as the position taken during a conflict with another organism over resources. Generally, one would expect an aggressive strategy against a perceived weaker opponent and a submissive strategy against a perceived stronger opponent. This allows the organism to increase resources when the opponent can be defeated and minimise damage to oneself when the opponent is superior. However, rather ironically, the opposite strategy offers even better net gains to the organisms, i.e where all organisms employ an aggressive strategy against the perceived stronger opponent and a submissive strategy against the perceived weaker opponent. This ensures the aggression rarely ever leads to actual harm and a variation of this seems to have been employed by societies in the world today.

Aggression against someone weaker is codified to be morally bereft in most modern societies. Most of us have grown up being taught not to fight, especially against someone weaker. We’ve also been taught to stand up against the bully who could be perceived as the stronger opponent. In many ways, societies of today look to promote this paradoxical strategy where the strong and weak are expected to take on contrarian positions to their respective capabilities. The enforcement of this strategy can either be through codified implicit/explicit principles, authority or societal condemnation. And this, as illustrated above leads to societies which can function relatively peacefully.

This leads us to protests, especially in more democratic societies. The past year has seen protests in different parts of the world — the BLM protests in the US and the farm law protests in India. Both of these, in my estimation, seem to illustrate the paradoxical strategy. The BLM protests are a rally against racial injustice against minority racial groups especially by the police. What’s interesting here is that protests are aimed at the perceived stronger group — primarily the police and secondarily the prominent racial majority. Despite this, the protests have largely remained peaceful with minimal retribution as could have been expected given the relative strength of the opposing group. In India, we notice something similar with the farm laws. The major angst is displayed by the minority group — the farmers — against a the stronger government. Also, a majority could be thought to side with the government given the support the government has been provided by the electorate. Despite this, the protests have been relatively free of retribution because of an implicit paradoxical strategy.

As an extension to this, I would link Taleb’s piece — The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority. The article argues that minority opinions become the standard because of majority apathy. Sounds a bit like a manifestation of the paradoxical strategy again to me