Comments on: Schelling Orders

By: Ziz

Ziz — Sat, 13 Apr 2019 02:18:21 +0000

>Schelling points are decided by the shape of the question, by the interests of the parties involved, and the extent to which different subsets of those involved can communicate among themselves to help the thinking-together process along.

And of course, recursively, how much the Schelling ledger within subsets must be crowded by hypothetical or actual conflict between sub-subsets.

By: Benquo

Benquo — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 20:27:40 +0000

“First they came for…” is what it looks like in a scarcity environment where the dominant coalition is retreating/retrenching, but things can look quite different with growth. Consider that Americans now openly talk about how Hispanics will be considered more white in the next generation than this one. This doesn’t make any sense if you are trying to cluster people compactly by genetic characteristics, but it makes a lot of sense if a particular coalition is trying to adjust its narrative to maintain a governing majority by acquiring more allies as ostensible equals.

Unfortunately, in a finite world, growth based on expanding your coalition (rather than learning to make better use of a fixed pool of resources) must end eventually. Fortunately, this sort of “expanding circles of concern” can also be a symptom of abundance freeing people to be nicer. Unfortunately, these can be hard to tell apart, and there is a strong incentive for the former to pretend that it is the latter.

By: Benquo

Benquo — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 20:21:50 +0000

Slight extension of this framework: there’s a way a coalition can expand its reach by constructing an ostensibly neutral set of operating parameters that implicitly treat their core members as the central case, and everyone else as exceptional. Since the ostensible universality is foregrounded, resistance to the standards’ asymmetric burdens can be delegitimized as undermining solidarity/fairness by asking for special treatment, because the system is constructed so that this asymmetry is not legible inside the frame, or at least so that such complaints have a high message length. (Also, people harmed by these standards will often find people who actually do want to tear things apart ready to work with them as tactical allies.)

This seems to be how whiteness and the British Empire have actually worked.