Dissent and the power of two

I've done some good things in my life. But I also made a terrible mistake: I created Jeff Bezos.

Addicted to convenience and low prices, I shoveled thousands and thousands of dollars onto Jeff Bezos's pile over the years. I count at least 60 Amazon purchases within eyeshot of my office chair, including more than 30 books, plant pots, art, frames, a whiteboard and markers, two lamps, my keyboard, mouse, and webcam, dog bed, dog collar, incense sticks, power strips, treadmill, desk, and drapes, plus my shirt, T-shirt, slacks, belt, socks, shoes, boxer briefs, and hair gel.

Plus my office chair.

In the process of all that lazy acquisition, I did my part to create one of the festering oligarchic tumors that is now killing our national life. I helped him shutter uncountable other businesses. I helped him enrich himself at the expense of his workers.

And then, a few weeks ago, the long-overdue tipping point: Bezos, in his role as owner of the Washington Post, dictated new restrictions to the Post's editorial board.

It is a longstanding principle of journalism (Society of Professional Journalists, the American Society of News Editors, etc.) that a firewall must be maintained in media between the editorial staff and the owners. That this standard is inconsistently met across the profession is no less reason to howl when it isn't met. Following on the heels of an earlier improper Bezos intervention (ordering the editor to 86 a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris), the new guidelines woke me up. So I made the decision to quit supporting the baby that gave him his power: Amazon.

My 62nd birthday was approaching, and I shared my thoughts about Bezos and my decisions to quit my addiction with my Facebook friends, wondering aloud if I could get 62 friends to join me in quitting Amazon and all of its affiliated properties.

I didn't expect to bring Bezos to his knees. I mostly wanted to live my values a little more, always an incomplete process. And sure enough, in the weeks since then, I've begun to be more conscious of where my money and support go.

But I also find the actual math of these things compelling. The first six weeks of this year notwithstanding, I usually averaged about $100 a month on Amazon. If I got 62 friends to quit, each of whom also spent $100, that would be $6300 less going into the coffers. And each of those people got 62 more to quit, and each of those got 62 more, and each of those got 62 more — that's slightly more than 15 million people from a challenging but comprehensible process. If they each spent $100 a month, Amazon would be out $18 billion a year.

When I posted that on February 27, I got 22 people to quit in 24 hours. Many said they had been thinking about it forever and just needed a push. Several of them shared the post and got others to do it.

Over the next five weeks I got a drip, drip, drip of messages. I just needed some time to think about it, now I've pulled the plug. I can't quit the whole thing, but I quit Prime. I quit everything but Audible. As of yesterday, I'm up to 47 who have quit some or all.

And the message I heard more than any other is that they just needed to see someone else do it first to jolt them into action.

This is a trivial example compared to what's coming.

The (very) near future will be positively choking on reasons and opportunities for protest and dissent. In addition to taking the risks inherent in speaking up in a time of growing authoritarianism, the dissenters will have to put up with the constant buzzing of people around them offering reasons to do nothing. They've got all the power. There are too few of us. That never works. You're not going to change any minds.

The point of this post is the third-person push. When I argue a point online, I'm thinking less about the person I'm arguing with than about those listening in, those waiting for permission from some, anyone else. Some classic studies have been done on the effect a lone dissenter can have in getting others to join the dissent. And then the math begins.

Will you believe me, or your lying eyes?

The Solomon Asch experiment is one of the great studies in conformity. In a room full of people whose opinion differs from yours, the pressure to conform is enormous.

Four subjects were shown a sample line segment, followed by two segments marked “A” and “B.” Segment A was clearly the same length as the sample segment; Segment B was clearly either longer or shorter. The researcher asked each person which segment matched the sample. At first they were all in agreement. But in the third round, three of the four started giving the obvious wrong answer: B.

Spoiler: There was only one real subject. The other three, the ones giving the wrong answer, were secretly working with the researcher.

Eventually, 70% of the real subjects defied the unambiguous evidence of their own senses at least once, making an error in their rush to conform to the majority. But when individuals were tested separately without group consensus pressures, fewer than 1 percent made any errors at all. The lesson of Solomon Asch is that most people at least some of the time will defy the clear evidence of their own senses or reason to follow the herd.

One variation in the design of the study provides a profound lesson about dissent. And it’s a crucial bit of knowledge for any parent wishing to raise an independent thinker and courageous dissenter.

In this version, all but one of the researcher’s confederates would give the wrong answer. The presence of just one other person who saw the evidence in the same way the subject did reduced the error rates of subjects by 75 percent.

This is a crucial realization: If a group is embarking on a bad course of action, a lone dissenter may turn it around by energizing ambivalent group members to join the dissent instead of following the crowd into disaster. Just one other person resisting the norm can help others with a minority opinion find their voices.

On April 17, 1961, the US government sent 1,500 Cuban exiles to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. The idea was to give the US plausible deniability—barely plausible, but still. It was supposed to look like the exiles did it on their own.

Well, it did end up looking like that. The invasion was a mess of lousy planning and execution. Most of the 1,500 were killed or captured by a force of 20,000 Cuban soldiers, and the US government was forced to essentially pay a ransom of 53 million dollars for the release of the prisoners. And that’s in Mad Men dollars—it would be $510 million today. Cuba’s ties with the Soviet Union were strengthened, and the stage was set for the Cuban Missile Crisis six months later.

In short, it was a complete disaster. And in retrospect, that should have been obvious to those who planned it. But among President Kennedy’s senior advisers, the vote to go ahead had been unanimous. Why? It came out later that several of them had serious doubts beforehand but were unwilling to express those doubts since they thought everybody else was on board. It was the height of the Cold War, and nobody wanted to look “soft.” The climate of the discussions made real dissent too difficult to articulate, so a really bad idea went unchallenged.

The presidential historian Arthur Schlesinger was there for most of the discussions, and he later said that he was convinced that even one dissenter could have caused Kennedy to call off the invasion. ONE. He said he wished most of all that he had found the strength to be that dissenter.

At least Kennedy learned his lesson. During the Missile Crisis later that year, he made a point of fostering dissent and encouraging the collision of ideas among his advisers. The resulting policy led to the peaceful conclusion of what may have been the most dangerous crisis in human history (so far).

Rosa Parks. Greta Thunberg. Colin Kaepernick. Alexei Navalny. The women of Iran in 2022. Christopher Smalls, who organized the Amazon walkout that created the Amazon Labor Union. Senator Cory Booker. In every case, a single person stood up first and stood out, giving others permission to do the same.

No time for unity

Many think that times of crisis and war are the worst possible times for argument and dissent. Hitler certainly thought so. He often said the mess of conflicting opinions in democracies would cause the Western powers to crumble before the single-minded focus of his military machine. He got the difference right but misdirected the praise. Military historians are pretty much agreed that the stifling of dissent in the Third Reich’s military decision-making was its fatal flaw. It was entirely top-down. Only if Hitler’s plans were flawless could that system be stronger than one in which ideas contend for supremacy.

So Montgomery and Patton’s pissing contests, MacArthur and Truman’s showdowns, and the constant whirl of debate among the Allies and even among the branches of the American service was a better approach to running a war than the single-minded dictates of dictators, from Napoleon to Hitler to Saddam Hussein. Crush dissent and you will most often end up shooting yourself in the foot. United We Stand is bad policy, even in wartime.

Dissent is often discouraged in the corporate world as well. Research by management guru Jeffrey Sonnenfeld found that corporate boards that punish dissent and stress unity among their members are the most likely to wind up in bad business patterns. It’s corporations with highly contentious boards that tend to be successful. Not always—it depends on the nature of the contention—but when boards generate a wide range of viewpoints and tough questions are asked about the prevailing orthodoxy, they tend to make better decisions in the end. All ideas have to withstand a crossfire of challenge so the bad has a chance of being recognized and avoided.

A list of corporations with boards that valued conformity and punished dissent reads like a Who’s Who of corporate malfeasance: Tyco, WorldCom, Enron, Madoff Securities, Wells Fargo, Theranos, Boeing, Volkswagen.

There’s something counterintuitive about all this. It seems on the face of it that uniting behind an idea or position or plan is the best way to ensure success. It can be, if the idea or position or plan is good in the first place. The best way to ensure that it is good is by fostering dissent from the beginning — and that process is helped most profoundly by the first person to stand up.