The Silent Majority Paradox

The Fermi Paradox comes to politics

There is often a “silent majority” in political and cultural issues: a group that comprises the most people, but whose members do not speak up publicly.¹

This allows vocal minority groups to lead on culture and policy, and creates the Silent Majority Paradox:

1. Groups with power, majority, and resources do not allow themselves to be overruled by those with less power, non-majority, and fewer resources.

2. We see such groups frequently overruled in politics nonetheless.

This resembles the Fermi Paradox in astronomy, otherwise known as the Great Silence²:

1. Life expands to fill every niche it can reach, and intelligent alien life would likely do this on an intra- and intergalactic scale. The scale (physical and temporal) of the universe make it likely that we’d observe many such civilizations.

2. We have no conclusive evidence of even one of these civilizations.

As an ardent fan of both politics and science fiction (especially space operas), this parallel is right up my alley. Both paradoxes could easily be called The Great Silence, just applied to different domains, and both often have analogous resolutions explaining the lack of noise. They aren’t the exact same—for example, I can talk to individuals 1:1 and they’ll tell me majority opinions they won’t express publicly, while I can’t talk to aliens and ask why they’re silent—but the comparison is fun and fruitful nonetheless.

This essay is not a discussion about whether majoritarian silence on any particular issue is good or bad; it’s also not a verdict on minoritarian outspokenness. It merely investigates causes of the former phenomenon.

So: why don’t silent majorities speak up in politics? I have nine potential resolutions for you.

Resolutions of the Silent Majority Paradox

1. Cancellation—the Dark Forest Hypothesis

In astronomy, the dark forest hypothesis says that intelligent life will remain silent, fearing discovery and obliteration by a more advanced alien race. Imagine you were in a dark forest, unsure of what lurked in the dark. Would you be silent, or call out?

There’s a similar phenomenon in politics.

If you venture opinions publicly in any way, you open yourself up to a response by others. If you suspect someone on the receiving end of your opinion would harm you, you might opt to remain silent instead. This harm can range from an in-person sharp comment, to a social media backlash, to losing your livelihood and reputation (cancellation). In authoritarian regimes like the former East Germany, you would more heavily self-censor because anyone could be a state informant.

2. Diffusion—lack of institutional support

Individuals come together to create institutions that can project cultural and legal force on their behalf, either offensively or defensively. The largest version of this the U.S. government and its military. But within the United States competing groups have fleets of non-profits, think tanks, advocacy groups, companies, houses of worship, and more.

But there’s no guarantee that every viewpoint will have an institution (or enough institutions) behind it, even if it is a majority opinion. If the opinion is newly held by the majority, there’s a good chance the institutional landscape has not changed to accommodate it yet.

The nature of the opinion might also invite the “narcissism of small differences,” and diffuse a majority along axes other than the one of principal agreement.

In any case of diffusion, it will be up to relatively isolated individuals to suffer the risk of venturing the opinion (venturing into the dark forest), and supporting it consistently. But most individuals cannot replicate the work of large institutions who pay people to continuously fight for mind-share and legal outcomes in the larger political arena.

3. Primitive social technology

Social technology, like material technology, is built up over time with increasing sophistication. Advanced social tech like governments, money, and law are not easily sustained, and they degrade without maintenance.

Forming voluntary associations, and standing up new institutions of any kind, is an exercise in social technologic sophistication. Whole nations can have trouble with it, to say nothing of an issue-based majority in the United States.

Nothing guarantees that a political majority will have sufficiently advanced social technologic skill to create the institutions it needs to protect, solidify, and announce itself.

From Atlantis on the Hudson:

New York City has a lot of curious problems. Despite being America’s preeminent city, possibly the world’s, it continues to lose the ability to course correct and do fundamental things…in the face of these truly extraordinary circumstances, the vast majority of New Yorkers, especially those with intellect, money, and time to spare, do nothing. They don’t try to learn the source of the problems, and they assume they’d be unable to fix the source if they discovered it. They just vaguely blame city hall, take the punches on the chin, and move along. Why is that? I think it’s profoundly strange behavior…

This overbearing incuriosity in the face of crumbling capacities resembles a civilization that has lost the ability to understand and build its own advanced technology.

4. Bread and Circuses—the Zoo Hypothesis

The “zoo hypothesis” is a potential resolution of the Fermi Paradox: alien life purposefully keeps Earth and surrounding space as a “zoo” or nature preserve.³ In this case, we don’t observe other life in the universe because it purposefully quarantines us.

Similarly, in politics, majorities can be purposefully and accidentally isolated from the broader political arena. A common method: bread and circuses (panem et circenses), with “circuses” including deliberate propaganda and narrative. If majorities are materially content and distracted with sufficient entertainment, they will be disinclined to give either of those up to engage in political combat. It is easier (in some sense) to leave it to others.

5. Durable, bad institutions

Picture it: you live in a “one party” jurisdiction dominated by Party A. There’s a good chance that you’re locked into an inadequate equilibrium where many people would prefer a second party, but few people throw their weight behind that second party. Why?

People observe that Party A seems to be the only game in town. Voting for Party B, let alone Party C, is a waste. And if you want to vote in a primary (the real election) or get involved in party leadership, you better just go ahead and register as a member of Party A—even if you don’t really belong to it. It’s the only path forward!

Even if a competitively-sized portion of the population would vote for Party B if everyone revealed their preferences at the same time, no one will do this voluntarily. They’re caught in an incentive trap that is hard to break out of.

The combination of party infrastructure, individual choice, and legislative redistricting has potentially locked a majority opinion out if it’s attached to Party B or C. And everyone’s desire or perceived need to affiliate with Party A makes them remain silent on their opinions that would otherwise be associated with Party B or C.

There are many other ways that durable, bad institutions can lock majority opinions in silence. In more authoritarian regimes, they can literally threaten you with death or disappearance!

6. Curse of Wealth and Advancement

From “Fish in Water: Chapter 1 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto” from

The Roots of Progress

:

The comforts of the modern world are among its greatest achievements. But by their nature, those achievements detach us from the harsh reality of daily life that used to be the norm. We don’t smell the stench of sewage or horses in the streets, we aren’t burned by the sun while laboring in the fields, we don’t feel the weight of a pail of water as we carry it back from the well. We don’t worry about whether the crops will fail from drought or frost, or whether the creek will flood and wash out the footbridge, or whether we’ll have enough firewood to last the winter, or whether a brother will be lost at sea on his two-month voyage across the Atlantic, or whether a child will die from a scrape by a rusty nail. Life is convenient, comfortable, predictable, safe, and clean, in a way that’s hard for any of us to appreciate.

Industrial civilization has become a victim of its own success: it has solved the problems of daily existence so thoroughly, and with such finesse, that the solutions and even the problems fade from our collective memory.

In Jason’s telling above, those of us who live in technologically advanced societies have generally forgotten what is required to give us our lives of relative ease—and what is required to maintain that ease! If a whole society forgets why it needs certain supply chains, it is relatively easy to get them to stop maintaining them as well. And so the ease that those supply chains bring is endangered.

This is the Foundation Effect: “a civilization loses the ability to understand its own technology. It can’t rebuild it. It can’t fix it after significant damage. It can’t improve upon it. It can only use it via heuristic until it breaks.”

The same is true with social technology. Above, I discussed how a lack of advanced social technology, like institution formation, can keep majorities silent in the political arena. Here, I contend that formerly vocal majorities can lose their enabling institutions. They fight hard to build them, enjoy the ease that they bring, and then stop performing the work necessary to maintain them. When they finally notice critical failure, it is too late.

7. Social capital bankruptcy

In Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, he describes the destruction of civic associations and the social capital flows that create and flow from them.

Social capital, like monetary capital, can be destroyed and squandered. Principal can be spent down faster than it can bear interest. It can be reallocated to less-wise investments. It can sacrifice longterm benefit for short-term gain.

If institutions that carry majority opinion suffer social capital outflow, and voluntary associations that strengthen a majority opinion do the same, there’s a good chance that opinion won’t remain politically dominant.

8. Political Voice Can Be Hard, Success Attracts Bandwagoneers and Free Riders

Building institutions, standing against opponents, enduring over the long term, raising and deploying resources—all of this take effort.

And while certain people are putting forth that effort, others will free-ride.

A majority voice can collapse by default if people stop working towards it.

From The Anti-Concreteness Meme:

The emperor has no clothes: for many reasons, a whole group (up to a whole society) can be incentivized to not explicitly state the obvious, or get anywhere near it. Perhaps because acknowledging the concrete situation would result in doing the unpleasant work of remedy, or require changes in habit (from vice to virtue).

As Max Weber said, politics is “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.”⁴

9. The Great Filter

The Great Filter hypothesis is another potential resolution to the Fermi Paradox. It goes like this: when we observe the known universe, we don’t see evidence of other intelligent life. This is “the Great Silence.” But that’s strange. Given the immense scale of the universe, in both space and time, even a low probability of abiogenesis and advanced intelligent life would happen many times.

So either the emergence of intelligent life itself is strikingly low probability, or something reliably happens to that life that prevents it from making any change or signal detectable by our technology (dark forest, zoo, etc).

This is the Great Filter. In the case of low-probability evolution of advanced intelligence like humanity, it’s already behind us. In the case of a reliable threat to intelligent life, like nuclear war; durable, bad institutions; or bioengineered plagues, it might still be ahead of us.

Robin Hanson

outlined this hypothesis in a 1998 paper, and at its end he says (emphasis added):

First, let us keep in mind the interdisciplinary nature of the this puzzle. While it may comforting for each discipline to claim that the Filter must surely lie in some other discipline of (in their eyes) lessor repute, such claims should surely be backed up by detailed analysis using our best understanding of that discipline.⁵

The reason that I included the Great Filter on this list is to get at this point: just like the great cosmic silence is likely multi-causal, with causes anchored in different disciplines, the silence of political majorities is also likely multi-causal.

The eight points above are often different steps in the same sequence, or they can cause each other, or they are different facets of the same phenomena. It is hard to point at any one in isolation and say “aha, it was that one!”

When do majorities become vocal?

No social majority is meaningfully real until you can get it to cohere. What can cause that?

• “The Emperor’s New Clothes” phenomenon: When an event happens that lays things bald and bare, destroys preference falsification, and induces a preference cascade. When concreteness replaces what was formerly abstract, either due to willful ignorance or prohibitive technical detail.

• When majorities concentrate into institutions that can project influence and power.

• When majorities are sufficiently mad.

• When majorities are no longer scared, or at least not enough to stay silent. This might mean they become courageous, rash, or both.

Any of these things and more can cause a vibe shift.

But caution: it’s also possible that a majority will not become vocal. And it’s possible that an overeager ideologue will proclaim a majority where there is none as justification for their actions. Take care to validate your silent majority hypotheses!

The Bloomberg Silent Majority

Well, Daniel, what’s a Silent Majority you think exists?

In New York City’s civic world, I think a “Bloomberg Silent Majority” exists.

This doesn’t mean they agree with everything that Mayor Bloomberg did (I certainly don’t), but they broadly agree that government should work well, fast, do big things, improve public order and commons, and be informed by experienced gained “in the real world” as well as government.

When I talk to New Yorkers, I hear a desire for a neo-Bloomberg more than anyone else, even from people who have their scruples with him. Maybe you like that, maybe you don’t. But it’s there. The really interesting question, for another essay: why is this majority silent?

1. The term was popularized (but not coined) by President Richard Nixon in a November 1969 speech. In his “Silent Majority Speech,” he asked that majority of Americans to stand with him as he recommitted the United States to the war in Vietnam (emphasis added):

And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.

I pledged in my campaign for the Presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge.

The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed...

2. “The Great Silence - the Controversy Concerning Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 24, NO.3, P.283-309, 1983. From the article summary:

Recent discussions concerning the likelihood of encountering extraterrestrial technological civilizations have run into an apparent paradox. If, as many now contend, interstellar exploration and settlement is possible at non-relativistic speeds, then reasonable calculations suggest that space-faring species, or their machine surrogates, should pervade the Galaxy. The apparent absence of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations, herein called "the Great Silence" places severe burdens on present models.

3. The zoo hypothesis was put forward in 1973 by John Ball in a paper called “The Zoo Hypothesis.” It is sometimes behind paywalls on the internet, sometimes not. Scientific papers from decades ago are all over the place. Here’s a link that works, but feel free to find your own.

4. Politics as a Vocation, originally published in 1919.

5. The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It?, Robin Hanson, 1998.