2.6 million views on one YouTube video from Missouri. More than one million on a video from Yale. National news coverage and stories in the New York Times and the Guardian.
Last fall, a small group of outraged students took Halloween costume policy at Yale and something some guys in a truck said at Missouri and grabbed the attention of millions of people around the world. They transformed local events into the global news.
These two incidents are part of a larger movement of cry-bullies on college campuses around the world. Students finding reasons to call themselves victims, and then appealing to authority to punish the people who have offended them.
These cry-bullies also have a lot of people asking, “what is wrong with the world?”
For those of us who promote the ideas of a free society, we might initially like to turn away from the spectacle around Yale or Missouri. We would prefer to read stories about cooperation, and of people taking personal responsibility when it comes to solving problems, instead of stories of people acting like victims and appealing to authority. It is a natural response to want to avoid the spectacle, but turning away doesn’t help us. Trying to ignore what’s happening in the world means we lose the opportunity to learn from it.
When you stop asking “what’s wrong with the world?”, and start asking “what can I learn from this?”, you can start becoming more skillful at promoting the ideas that you care about. For those looking to promote liberty, the cry-bully movement provides something important to consider.
In a world where gigantic companies are spending billions of dollars on ad agencies and psychological studies to get a larger share of your attention, a seemingly rag-tag group of students made their issues mainstream without spending a single cent.
In a short amount of time, without resources and without popular support, a small group of students harnessed the power of social and mainstream media to rapidly popularize their causes.
You now know about micro-aggressions, cultural appropriation, cultural genocide, and Yale’s Halloween costume policy. The cry-bullies have grabbed your attention. They’ve caused you to form an opinion, and to feel something. You probably don’t agree with any of their arguments, but in the storm of attention from around the world they have found many people who do.
How did they do it?
They created a spectacle.
Instead of small, respectful protests, they have screaming matches. Instead of polite discourse, they get aggressive. Instead of looking for opportunities for connection and cooperation, they search for opportunities for conflict and division. They don’t treat people with respect because they don’t want respect in return. What they want is attention.
This is ideological guerilla warfare; it just looks like Jersey Shore.
By behaving in a seemingly outrageous manner, the cry-bullies attracted a lot of opposition. Hardly anyone who shared the videos from Yale and Missouri supported the cry-bullies. People were appalled and confused by the cry-bullies, and they shared the videos out of horror. But sharing something you oppose attracts more attention to it.
The cry-bullies understand that attention is leverage in a bureaucratic system, like a college. People leading colleges are very risk averse, and the attention on their schools puts a lot of pressure on them to cave to the cry-bullies’ demands.
I am not suggesting that libertarians should start trying to play this game of victimization. But rather that we see past outrage and notice the game that is being played, and the strategy being used.
A small group attracted a ton of attention by creating a spectacle. Then, they were able to use that attention as leverage over the colleges to get what they wanted. They were able to harness the attention they were getting from their opposition and use it in their favor.
Instead of looking for respect from people with opposing viewpoints, they acted in ways that attracted more opposition. If they had followed the formula for how you ought to act, their stories would be told by the campus paper. Instead, their issues are now in newspapers all over the world.
So, instead of trying to make your positions inoffensive and respectable, you can embrace the most radical aspects of your beliefs, offend people’s sensibilities, but at the same time engage their curiosity. Attract the attention of the media and let it do your work for you.
A libertarian example of this strategy is the 3D printed gun created by Cody Wilson in 2013. Cody embraced the most radical aspects of his positions and used the outrage of the progressive elite to his advantage. He embodied the dangerous and almost villainous role that people wanted to cast him in and used it to bring even more attention to the idea of liberty.
There is an obvious difference in the substance of the arguments made by creating 3D printed guns and the cry-bullies and an obvious difference in that the cry-bullies are actively harassing people. There is something similar in the strategy and the success of the strategy, though.
When you find yourself trying to take an idea from obscurity and move it into the mainstream, consider adapting some of what has made the cry-bullies successful. Embrace the most outrageous and radical extensions of your argument. Create a spectacle around it. Embrace offending people who disagree with you. By creating an emotional reaction in others, and engaging people’s curiosity, you will be creating a story that can spread virally.
Leave a Reply