EA - Autonomy and Manipulation in Social Movements by SeaGreen

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Autonomy and Manipulation in Social Movements, published by SeaGreen on February 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.In this essay, I want to share a perspective I have been applying to evaluate movement-building efforts that have helped me understand a feeling that there is “something off”. This is not supposed to be a normative judgement about people building social movements, just a lens that has changed the way I evaluate my own behaviour.Examples of optimisation in social movementsSuppose you are running a retreat (a sort of themed 3-ish day group residential work trip) aimed at getting more people interested in a social movement. You mean well: the social movement seems like an important one and having more people interested in it should help more people down the line. You want to do a good job, to get as many people as interested in the movement as possible, so you try to work out how to optimise for this goal. Here are some things you might say:“In our experience, young people are more open-minded, so we should focus on reaching out to them”.“We should host the retreat in a remote location that’s fun and free from distraction”.“Let’s try to build a sense of community around this social movement: this will make people feel more supported, motivated and inspired”.“We will host presentations and discussions for people at the retreat. People will learn better surrounded by people also interested in the ideas”.Framed in this way, these suggestions sound fairly innocuous and are probably an effective way to get people to be more interested in the social movement. However, there seems to be something fishy about them. Here is each thing framed in another way.“Younger people are more susceptible to our influence, so we should focus on reaching out to them”.1“Let's host the event in a remote location that separates people from other social pressures, and the things that ground them in their everyday lives”.“Let’s build strong-social bonds, dependent on believing in the ideas of this movement, increasing the cost of changing their values down the road”.“We can present the ideas of the movement in this unusual social context, in which knowledge of the ideas corresponds directly to social status: we, the presenters, are the most knowledgable and authoritative and the attendees who are most ‘in-crowd’ will know most about the ideas”.2Either set of framings can describe why the actions are effective. In truth, I think the first set is overly naive, and the second is probably too cynical. Further, I understand that there are plenty of settings in which the cynical framings could apply, and they could be hard to avoid. That said, I think they point to useful concepts that can be useful “flags” to check one’s behaviour against.How I understand autonomy and manipulationI want to put forward conceptions of “autonomy” and “manipulation”. Although I don’t claim these capture exactly how every person uses the words, or that they refer to any natural kind, I do think having these concepts available to you is useful. Since these concepts were clarified to me, I have frequently used them as a perspective to look at my behaviour, and frequently they have changed my actions.As I understand it, a person’s choice or action is more autonomous when they are able to make it via a considered decision process in accordance with their values.3 The most autonomous decisions are made with time for consideration, accurate, sufficient and balanced information, and free from social or emotional pressure. Here is an example of an action that is less autonomous:I don’t act very autonomously when I scroll to watch my 142nd TikTok of the day. Had I distanced myself and reflected, I would have chosen to go for a walk instead, but the act of scrolling is so fast that I never engaged...