Why Men Don't Rebel

Why Men Don’t Rebel

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I have, of late, been immersed in scholarly literature trying to answer the question of why it is that people rebel. Ted Gurr famously tried to answer that very question in his landmark book, Why Men Rebel.?That book became the basis for my Reed College thesis, pretentiously titled, “A Model of Mass Political Violence”

I remain fascinated by the questions surrounding what provides the means and the motives, what causes the many and varied forms of political instability, be it as civil war, revolution, terrorism, rioting, or similar. And while that topic seems particularly germane given the insurrection at the United States Capital on 6 January, and while the seemingly worldwide conflagration of violence continues (witness the reporting on one day this summer by CNN, the BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post and numerous others of violence, sometimes deadly, in Haiti, South Africa, Beirut, Cuba, and Iraq – I want to start with a related but different question.?And please note upfront that I have no answers to the question, merely the question itself to ponder.

Perhaps, turning the inquires surrounding political violence on its head, I am lead to wonder, given the nature of societies through time, why is it that political violence is not present everywhere and at all times?

Looking back as far as the Roman Empire, one sees, according to Walter Scheidel, in his extremely detailed and well-researched book, The Great Leveler, massive levels of income and wealth inequality.?Indeed, if you were not, according to Scheidel, one of the roughly 600 Senators or the few other wealthy Romans, you went through your life at a bare subsistence level.?Not at all what is portrayed in popular movies!

China of the same period, also according to Scheidel, shows remarkably similar patterns of wealth and income distribution.?The money all went to and stayed at the top.

Fast forward several centuries to feudalism in Europe and Russia and we find people, as described by Acemoglu and Robinson in their tome, Why Nations Fail, living again at barely subsistence levels, while their kings, queens, and the few others at their courts, lived in relative luxury.?The peasants lived (and died) doing the work for the lords and ladies who reaped the benefits.

Why was it, that these people, over the centuries, with so little to lose, accepted their lot of grinding poverty??Was it simply the presence of royal or czarist military or Roman Centurions to enforce regal decrees??Was it alternatively, a sheepish mindset carried forward from day one??Or, perhaps it is as simple as the fact that the wealthy and beneficiaries of the Roman, Chinese, and feudal societies are the ones for whom records are kept and that we have no understanding of lower-class society?

Perhaps by looking into these questions, we can get a better understanding of why it is that men do rebel!

But wait.?There is more.?Fast forward another 500 or so years.?Now we are in the present.?Thomas Piketty, a renowned French economist, discusses in his book, Capital and Ideology, the huge and widening gaps in both income and wealth inequality that we see today. Some few live in unequaled splendor, while the remaining overwhelming majority of us just get by.?Why is it that members of today’s economically developed societies, at least these, do not riot daily in the streets to relieve Jeff Bezos, who thanked the working class for his wealth, and his ilk of the massive fortunes that were earned for him?

There is something in the nature of mankind, and in the societies and institutions he has created, that keeps him from always and everywhere rebelling.?That societal structure, as Scheidel argues, goes back to our ape predecessors.?Have the majority of us, of humankind, been sheep from the very beginning?

This is a question that I think is worthy of pondering.?By looking into this question, perhaps we can gain insight into what situations will prompt us to throw off our sheepish cloaks and turn into wolves that, at least, try to change our lot.

Starting out, I thought it was strictly an economic question.?I thought the line lead directly from inequality of wealth and income to political upheaval.?That was the position I took in my thesis.?I used macro-economic indicators is try and explain when and where political violence would occur. That was very early in the study of political violence.?The thesis was well-received, but as an explanatory model, it left some to be desired.

I now see that the answers to the questions of political violence causality are much deeper and much more complex.?I intend to shed as much light on them here as I can.?I hope to go here from the simplistic today to the more complete as time goes by.

For the record, I am not calling here for a revolution.?One may be needed, and I ponder the morality of Jeff Bezos and his billions, but I am not here calling for his economic skewering. I leave that to other, better-armed men than me.?Nor am I some sort of Marxist theorist praising the valiant peasant uprisings that have occurred, some of which led to the formation of communist states. That’s not me.?Frankly, reading Marx (and Lenin too for that matter) puts me to sleep.?The solutions lie elsewhere.