The recent protests in the UK by Extinction Rebellion have stimulated discussion of the so called ‘3.5% rule’, that 3.5% of population need to join a protest movement for it to succeed. This is based on research by Erica Chernoweth, which is discussed in this BBC article. Chernoweth looked at a variety of protest movements, and found they tended to succeed if they reached that threshold, as we see for instance in the civil rights movement in the US in the 1960’s and quite recently in the overthrow of  Omar al-Bashir in Sudan.

How can a whole society be changed by such a relatively small proportion of people? It all depends how determined they are – but if they have taken to the streets, even willing to face arrest or potential violence, they are obviously resolved. This research seems to offer an example of a much wider property of systems, whereby it only takes a relatively small but unyielding element of a system to force a modification in the way the whole system operates. I have come across this same point discussed from different standpoints in two other places: Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Skin in the Game (2018) and Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point (2000).

Taleb talks about the power of stubborn minorities, giving the example of orthodox Jews who want food labelled kosher obliging US food manufacturers to include it on their label. The proportion of orthodox Jews in the US is, according to Taleb, only 0.3%, but nevertheless, because this 0.3% were very definite and uncompromising about what they wanted, and because it did not require any great sacrifice on a food manufacturer’s part to label kosher food as such, they did so. So you may not need anything like as much as 3.5% if not too much is demanded of everyone else.

Taleb’s other example is the gradual replacement of Muslims for Coptic Christians in the population of Egypt. The Copts are now a minority of about 10% of the Egyptian population, but after the Muslim takeover in the eighth century they were the great majority. The Muslims were tolerant and did not force anyone to convert. What made the difference, however, is that Muslims refused to contract marriage with anyone who did not convert to Islam. All it took was that degree of unyieldingness, over many centuries of just a trickle of mixed marriages, for the Coptic majority to become a minority.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point approaches the same phenomenon from the standpoint, not of minority resistance, but of minority enthusiasm. He offers story after story of new products or ideas that suddenly ‘took off’: hush puppies, Blue’s Clues, The Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. The apparent causes of them doing so are not consistent, but in every case a kind of group epidemic occurred: the product suddenly ‘went viral’ after passing a ‘tipping point’. The sales chart started rising, not arithmetically, but exponentially. It’s clear that there are lots of reinforcing (or closed) feedback loops going on that are leading more and more people to adopt the product, because it has become a mark of acceptance by the group to do so.

What does all this have to do with the Middle Way? Well, it seems likely to me that what is often, though not always, going on, when people reach a tipping point of this kind, is absolutisation. People get into feedback loops in which the desire for the new thing (or rejection of the old thing) is driven by obsessive desire for social acceptance (or fear of losing it), and such feedback loops have the effect of producing sudden exponential change. That change is easy for even a very small group to achieve when the sacrifices demanded are small and the resistance is low (as in labelling kosher food), and require the magic 3.5% when there is some resistance, but the majority resistors are still much less strongly motivated than the minority.

But do minorities always only get what they want through absolutisation? I suggested that absolutisation may often be the source of the unyieldingness, but not always. Instead, it must be possible to be unyielding for far more justifiable and considered reasons – that one is confident of one’s cause, that it is supported by good evidence, and that it is far better justified than any alternative view. This, I hope, is what we are seeing with the campaigns of Extinction Rebellion. All the evidence I have seen so far suggests that they are very careful to try to combine a sense of urgency with calm. We need to ‘panic’ in the sense of acting urgently in response to the climate emergency, but not to ‘panic’ in the sense of locking ourselves into closed feedback loops of obsession or anxiety. This suggests that a tipping point can be reached, on a genuinely important issue, by following the Middle Way rather than any absolutized belief.

However, we also need to beware of the same phenomenon being utilised by absolutists, whether it is to advertise a product, spread a conspiracy theory through social media, or get people to accept a simple idea (like Brexit) that is grasped at as a false solution to complex problems. It takes a lot of effort and difficulty to reach a tipping point without absolutisation – but to do it with absolutisation seems so much easier! Fast thinking and easy solutions are always appealing, but there is no alternative to the harder road to the tipping point if you want to make the world a better place.

Picture by Michal Parzuchowski (Unsplash)