Endurance and Assurance

In the last 7–8 years or so, I cannot remember how many times I saw someone on social media, upon an outrageous development purported by the sovereign political party (which is opposed by roughly half of the nation), saying that this is the worst it can get, that this is the ground zero, and this country (Turkey) is now officially and utterly impossible to live in. Most of the people who has written that kind of stuff are still in Turkey today, living and all.

The curious issue is, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for those people to become really convinced that their country is uninhabitable, so much so that they go on to actually do something about it in a cooperative manner?Here, what I mean by “do something” includes instances of collective action as drastic as Arabian Spring, French Revolution or Gezi Protests in Turkey and the like, along with any collective action that is openly opposed against the sovereign authority. I will inquire as to what it might be that made the people who initiated that sort of remarkable events do what they did, and what prevented other people subject to unfavorable authority from doing likewise, despite being very upset with authority.

The way I see it, there are two games in play here. One is being played between the oppressor (the leadership) and the victims (the citizens who are not happy with the leadership) and indirectly the supporters of the leadership. That, I will call the endurance game. The other is played between the victims themselves. I think that is an assurance game as defined in game theory which characterizes the games that involve a conflict between risk and benefit.

Let me start digging into first game. Naturally, a legitimately elected government can have tremendous power over the citizens, and despite all the talk about democracy, that power is exerted by some certain people, and in some unfortunate cases prominently by a single person (which is considered to be the case in Turkey, and the president Erdoğan). Considering human nature, it shouldn’t be surprising that when this happens, there is a great incentive to hold onto that power for those who have it, and if that necessitate maintaining the support of your current followers at the expense of upsetting the others, they usually do just that.

But causing suffering to a massive number of people is not indefinitely feasible. Indeed, if you make people suffer long and badly enough, almost definitely you will get some sort of retaliation (aside from the ones people can exert at next to no cost, like voting against the governing party), history tells. That is, the oppressed will not endure the suffering forever. There is a point where people just snap, like in the case of Arab Spring. And I think this point happens to be somewhere around making retaliation the most viable option. Anything less than that is not likely to be enough to cause a drastic reaction, as I think history again tells. Then an endurance game describes the situation in which there is a conflict between keeping up with unfair exertion of power and the risk of having to pay for it.

So every once in a while in the history of humanity, the people in power get a tad too confident about what they can get away with in this sort of game and pushes the malady to a point that ordinary, nice people (who can normally put up with a substantial amount of bad stuff, provided that they can maintain a reasonably decent life overall) start to think that they have had enough. And when it comes to that point, where people believe they have nothing left to lose (or nothing left to gain by enduring), standing up and taking action against the oppressor becomes the dominant strategy, and then usually the rest is, well, history.

But that kind of history-altering collective action does not come to occur easily, which brings us to the second game I mentioned, the assurance game. It is not enough that a considerable portion of the population is extremely angry individually; they should know other people are just as angry and just as ready to take action. So, when people get so disturbed that they start considering to take action (or at least wish someone did take action), initially you’ll see them try to make other people as angry and afraid as they are, often at the expense of accurate communication of ideas and facts. And in our time we have just the right tools for this, social media. Examples of this include propagating fake news (mostly ones that exaggerate the direness of the situation), making up apocalypse scenarios (“Soon we will be ruled by Sharia!” in the case of Turkey) and so on. So in bursts of outrage, they want something to change, but they can’t do it without everybody else cooperating, so they try to make everyone else just as eager. So, basically, they say to the others “This is so bad, why aren’t you angry and afraid already?” The response from other people, (who also aren’t pleased with the authority) explaining why they wouldn’t take action, usually varies from “Come on, it is not that bad,” to “Yeah, it is bad, but there is nothing we can do about it.” On my view the former response is usually right (in terms of risk/benefit), while the latter is another way of saying the former, which means “There is nothing we can do that won’t cost us more than we are willing to endure.” Because otherwise, of course, a considerable percent of the population always have something to do that could at least disturb the authority as long as the individuals don’t mind the risk of being imprisoned, losing theirs job and so on.

I implied that the expected cost for collective action against an oppressive authority is pretty high. But how about when it is not higher than the pain of enduring being in some dreadful state (e.g in terms of liberty, equality, fairness, etc.) continually? Even then, however disturbing the conditions are, when the stakes are that high, they would want to know for sure, like, really, really sure that the fellow oppressed will follow through when they make their move. Because being high in numbers is the central advantage in this kind of attempts, and the less number of participants there are, the more likely they are to lose anonymity and become targets. Given that, I’d like to be super-assured that many people will play along, and as far as social dilemmas involving assurance games go, there is no shame in that. And as long as the others do not provide that kind of assurance, I will stay furious and — aside maybe from social media — inactive, thank you.

On a related note, my contention is that the current leadership of Turkey is and has been well aware of the said dynamics of the game. For years, they made the section of people that are against them just angry enough that their power and authority is emphasized in the eyes of their supporters, and they could relish the misery of the out-group, becoming in turn more supportive of the leadership. Think about it, there are many examples such as a half-way ban on late-night alcohol purchase (of which virtually nobody speaks of today, as it is enforced very seldom), bans on popular websites (which anybody with a little computer literacy can bypass) to count a few. The common point is that, these are easily circumvented, and consequently not really enraging. So it seems to me that the authority is being watchful, as there is always the outside chance that people start to care enough and start cooperating to cast you out of power.

To wit, for collective actions against unfavorable authorities to instigate, the endurance game as I defined has to come to such a state that people have nothing to gain for enduring the maladies of the authority, and a great deal to lose if they stay inactive. Even then, individuals need to be assured that their enraged fellows will actually join them when it is time to take action.