کتاب سوم فصل دوم: نا مُدارا ترین‌ ها پیروز می‌شوند: سلطه‌ی اقلیت یک‌دنده

Book 3: That Greatest Asymmetry.

Chapter 2 The Most Intolerant Wins: T he Dominance of the Stubborn Minority

Why you don’t have to smoke in the smoking section—Your food choices on the fall of the Saudi king—How to prevent a friend from working too hard—Omar Sharif’s conversion—How to make a market collapse The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will almost never give us a clear indication of how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters are the interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules.

The rule we discuss in this chapter is the minority rule, the mother of all asymmetries. It suffices for an intransigent minority—a certain type of intransigent minority—with significant skin in the game (or, better, soul in the game) to reach a minutely small level, say 3 or 4 percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer (who looks at the standard average) would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for this. (Fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work, and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though your grandmothers’ wisdom doesn’t.) Among other things, many other things, the minority rule will show us how all it takes is a small number of intolerant, virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly.

This example of complexity hit me, ironically, as I was helping with the New England Complex Systems Institute summer barbecue. As the hosts were setting up the table and unpacking the drinks, a friend who was observant and ate only kosher dropped by to say hello. I offered him a glass of that type of yellow sugared water with citric acid people sometimes call lemonade, almost certain that he would reject it owing to his dietary laws. He didn’t. He drank the liquid, and another kosher person commented, “Around here, drinks are kosher.” We looked at the carton container. There was a fine print: a tiny symbol, a U inside a circle, indicating that it was kosher. The symbol will be detected by those who need to know and look for the minuscule print. As for myself, like the character in Molière’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme who suddenly discovers that he has been speaking in prose all these years without knowing it, I realized that I had been drinking kosher liquids without knowing it.

CRIMINALS WITH PEANUT ALLERGIES

A strange idea hit me. The kosher population represents less than three tenths of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it appears that almost all drinks are kosher. Why? Simply because going full kosher allows the producers, grocers, and restaurants to not have to distinguish between kosher and nonkosher for liquids, with special markers, separate aisles, separate inventories, different stocking sub-facilities. And the simple rule that changes the total is as follows: A kosher (or halal) eater will never eat nonkosher (or nonhalal) food, but a nonkosher eater isn’t banned from eating kosher.

Or, rephrased in another domain:

A disabled person will not use the regular bathroom, but a nondisabled person will use the bathroom for disabled people.

Granted, sometimes in practice we hesitate to use a bathroom with a disabled sign on it owing to some confusion—mistaking the rule for the one for parking cars, believing that the bathroom is reserved for exclusive use by the handicapped.

Someone with a peanut allergy will not eat products that touch peanuts, but a person without such an allergy can eat items with peanut traces in them.

Which explains why it is so hard to find peanuts on U.S. airplanes and why schools are often peanut-free (which, in a way, increases the number of persons with peanut allergies, as reduced exposure is one of the causes behind such allergies).

Let us apply the rule to domains where it can get entertaining:

An honest person will never commit criminal acts, but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts.

Let us call such minority an intransigent group, and the majority a flexible one. And their relationship rests on an asymmetry in choices.

I once pulled a prank on a friend. Years ago, when Big Tobacco was hiding and repressing the evidence of harm from secondary smoke, New York had smoking and nonsmoking sections in restaurants (even airplanes had, absurdly, a smoking section). I once went to lunch with a fellow visiting from Europe: the restaurant only had availability in the smoking section. I convinced my visitor that we needed to buy cigarettes, as we had to smoke in the smoking section. He complied.

Two more things. First, the geography of the terrain, that is, the spatial structure, matters a bit; it makes a big difference whether the intransigents are in their own district or are mixed with the rest of the population. If people following the minority rule lived in ghettos with a separate small economy, then the minority rule would not apply. But when a population has an even spatial distribution, say, when the ratio of such a minority in a neighborhood is the same as that in the entire village, that in the village it is the same as in the county, that in the county it is the same as in state, and that in the sate it is the same as nationwide, then the (flexible) majority will have to submit to the minority rule. Second, the cost structure matters quite a bit. It happens in our first example that making lemonade compliant with kosher laws doesn’t change the price by much—it is a matter of avoiding some standard additives. But if the manufacturing of kosher lemonade costs substantially more, then the rule will be weakened in some nonlinear proportion to the difference in costs. If it costs ten times as much to make kosher food, then the minority rule will not apply, except perhaps in some very rich neighborhoods.

Muslims have kosher laws, so to speak, but these are much narrower and apply only to meat. Muslims and Jews have near-identical slaughter rules (all kosher is halal for most Sunni Muslims, or was so in past centuries, but the reverse is not true). Note that these slaughter rules are skin-in-the-game driven, inherited from the ancient Eastern Mediterranean Greek and Levantine practice of economically burdensome animal sacrifice, to only worship the Gods if one has skin in the game. The Gods do not like cheap signaling.

Now consider this manifestation of the dictatorship of the minority. In the United Kingdom, where the (practicing) Muslim population is only 3 to 4 percent, a very high proportion of the meat we find is halal. Close to 70 percent of lamb imports from New Zealand are halal. Close to 10 percent of Subway stores carry halal-only meat (meaning no pork), in spite of the high costs of losing the business of ham eaters (like myself). The same holds in South Africa, which has about the same proportion of Muslims. There, a disproportionately high share of chicken is halal certified. But in the U.K. and other nominally Christian countries, halal is not neutral enough to reach a high level, as people may rebel against being forced to abide by others’ sacred values—accepting and respecting the sacred values of other religions might signal some type of violation of yours, if you are a true monotheist. For instance, the seventh century Christian Arab poet Al-Akhtal made a point to never eat halal meat in his famous defiant poem boasting his Christianity: “I do not eat sacrificial flesh”: Wa lastu bi’akuli lahmal adahi.

Al-Akhtal was reflecting a standard Christian reaction from three or four centuries earlier—Christians were tortured in pagan times by being forced to eat sacrificial meat, which they found sacrilegious. Many Christian martyrs took the heroic stance of starving to death rather than ingest impure food.

One can expect the same rejection of others’ religious norms to take place in the West as the Muslim populations in Europe grow.

So the minority rule may produce a larger share of halal food in the stores than warranted by the proportion of halal eaters in the population, but with a headwind somewhere because some people may have a taboo against the custom. But with some non-religious kashrut rules, so to speak, the share can be expected to converge closer to a 100 percent (or some high number). In the U.S. and Europe, “organic” food companies are selling more and more products precisely because of the minority rule, and because ordinary and unlabeled food may be seen by some to contain pesticides, herbicides, and transgenic genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, with, according to them, unknown risks. (What we call GMOs in this context means transgenic food, entailing the transfer of genes from a foreign organism or species that would not have occurred in nature). Or it could be for some existential reasons, cautious behavior, or Burkean conservatism (that is, following the precautionary ideas of Edmund Burke)—some may not want to venture too far too fast from what their grandparents ate. Labeling something “organic” is a way to say that it contains no transgenic GMOs.

In promoting genetically modified food via all manner of lobbying, purchasing of congressmen, and overt scientific propaganda (with smear campaigns against such persons as yours truly, much about which later), big agricultural companies foolishly believed that all they needed was to win the majority. No, you idiots. Your snap “scientific” judgment is too naive for these types of decisions. Consider that transgenic-GMO eaters will eat non-GMOs, but not the reverse. So it may suffice to have a tiny percentage—say, no more than 5 percent—of an evenly spatially distributed population of non-genetically modified eaters for the entire population to have to eat non-GMO food. How? Say you have a corporate event, a wedding, or a lavish party to celebrate the fall of the Saudi Arabian regime, the bankruptcy of the rent-seeking investment bank Goldman Sachs, or the public reviling of Ray Kotcher, chairman of Ketchum the contemptible public relations firm, the enemy of scientists and scientific whistleblowers. Do you need to send a questionnaire asking people if they eat or don’t eat transgenic GMOs and reserve special meals accordingly? No. You just select everything non-GMO, provided the price difference is not consequential. And the price difference appears to be small enough to be negligible, as (perishable) food costs in America are largely, up to about 80 or 90 percent, determined by distribution and storage, not the cost at the agricultural level. And as organic food is in higher demand, thanks to the minority rule, distribution costs decrease and the minority rule ends up accelerating in its effect.

“Big Ag” (the large agricultural firms) does not realize that this is the equivalent of entering a game in which one needed to not just win more points than the adversary, but win 97 percent of the total points just to be safe. It is strange to see an industry that spends hundreds of millions of dollars on research-cum-smear-campaigns, with hundreds of these scientists who think of themselves as more intelligent than the rest of us, miss such an elementary point about asymmetric choices.

Another example: do not think that the spread of automatic shifting cars is necessarily due to a majority preference; it could just be because those who can drive manual shifts can always drive automatic, but the reverse is not true.

The method of analysis employed here is called a “renormalization group,” a powerful apparatus in mathematical physics that allows us to see how things scale up (or down). Let us examine it next—without mathematics.

RENORMALIZATION GROUP

Figure 2 shows four boxes exhibiting what is called fractal self-similarity. Each box contains four smaller boxes. Each one of the four boxes will contain four boxes, and so all the way down, and all the way up until we reach a certain level. There are two shades: light for the majority choice, and dark for the minority one.

Assume the smaller unit contains four people, a family of four. One of them is in the intransigent minority and eats only non-GMO food (which includes organic). The color of this box is dark, and the others light. We “renormalize once” as we move up: the stubborn daughter manages to impose her rule on the four and the unit is now all dark, i.e., will opt for non-GMO. Now, step three, you have the family going to a barbecue party attended by three other families. As they are known to only eat non-GMO, the guests will cook only organic. The local grocery store, realizing the neighborhood is only non-GMO, switches to non-GMO to simplify life, which impacts the local wholesaler, and the system continues to “renormalize.” By some coincidence, the day before the Boston barbecue, I was flaneuring in New York, and I dropped by the office of Raphael Douady, a friend I wanted to prevent from working, that is, engaging in an activity that, when abused, causes the loss of mental clarity, in addition to bad posture and loss of definition in facial features. The French physicist Serge Galam happened to be visiting, and chose the friend’s office to kill time and taste Raphael’s bad espresso. Galam was first to apply these renormalization techniques to social matters and political science; his name was familiar, as he is the author of the main book on the subject, which had then been sitting for months in an unopened Amazon box in my basement. He elaborated on his research and showed me a computer model of elections by which it suffices for some minority to exceed a certain level for its choices to prevail.

So the same illusion exists in political discussions, spread by political “scientists”: you think that because some extreme right- or left-wing party has, say, the support of ten percent of the population, their candidate will get ten percent of the votes. No: these baseline voters should be classified as “inflexible” and will always vote for their faction. But some of the flexible voters can also vote for that extreme faction, just as non-kosher people can eat kosher. These people are the ones to watch out for, as they may swell the number of votes for the extreme party. Galam’s models produced a bevy of counterintuitive effects in political science—and his predictions have turned out to be way closer to real outcomes than the naive consensus.

THE VETO

What we saw in the renormalization group was the “veto” effect, as a person in a group can steer choices. The advertising executive (and extremely bon vivant) Rory Sutherland suggested to me that this explains why some fast-food chains, such as McDonald’s, thrive. It’s not because they offer a great product, but because they are not vetoed in a certain socio-economic group—and by a small proportion of people in that group at that.

To put it in technical terms, it was a best worse-case divergence from expectations: a lower variance and lower mean.

When there are few choices, McDonald’s appears to be a safe bet. It is also a safe bet in shady places with few regulars where the food variance from expectation can be consequential—I am writing these lines in the Milan train station and, as offensive as it can be to someone who spent all this money to go to Italy, McDonald’s is one of the few restaurants there. And it is packed. Shockingly, Italians are seeking refuge there from a risky meal. They may hate McDonald’s, but they certainly hate uncertainty even more.

Pizza is the same story: it is a commonly accepted food, and, outside a gathering of pseudo-leftist caviar eaters, nobody will be blamed for ordering it.

Rory wrote to me about the beer-wine asymmetry and the choices made for parties: “Once you have 10 percent or more women at a party, you cannot serve only beer. But most men will drink wine. So you only need one set of glasses if you serve only wine—the universal donor, to use the language of blood groups.” This strategy of seeking the optimal among not necessarily great options might have been played by the Khazars when they were looking to choose between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Legend has it that three high-ranking delegations (bishops, rabbis, and sheikhs) came to make the sales pitch. The Khazar lords asked the Christians: if you were forced to chose between Judaism and Islam, which one would you pick? Judaism, they replied. Then the lords asked the Muslims: which of the two, Christianity or Judaism? Judaism, the Muslims said. Judaism it was; and the tribe converted.

LINGUA FRANCA

If a meeting is taking place in Germany in the Teutonic-looking conference room of a corporation that is sufficiently international or European, and one of the persons in the room doesn’t speak German, the entire meeting will be run in…English, the brand of inelegant English used in corporations across the world. That way they can equally offend their Teutonic ancestors and the English language. It all started with the asymmetric rule that those who are nonnative in English know (bad) English, but the reverse—English speakers knowing other languages—is less likely. French was supposed to be the language of diplomacy, as civil servants coming from aristocratic backgrounds used it, while their more vulgar compatriots involved in commerce relied on English. In the rivalry between the two languages, English won as commerce grew to dominate modern life; the victory has nothing to do with the prestige of France or the efforts of their civil servants in promoting their more or less beautiful Latinized and logically spelled language over the orthographically confusing one of trans-Channel meat-pie eaters.

We can thus get some inkling of how the emergence of lingua francas can come from minority rules—and that is a point that is not visible to linguists. Aramaic is a Semitic language that succeeded the Canaanite language (that is, Phoenician-Hebrew) in the Levant and resembles Arabic; it was the language Jesus Christ spoke. The reason it came to dominate the Levant and Egypt isn’t because of any particular imperial Semitic power or the fact that they have interesting noses. It was the Persians—who speak an Indo-European language—who spread Aramaic, the language of Assyria, Syria, and Babylon. Persians taught Egyptians a language that was not their own. Simply, when the Persians invaded Babylon they found an administration with scribes who could only use Aramaic and didn’t know Persian, so Aramaic became the state language. If your secretary can only take dictation in Aramaic, Aramaic is what you will use. This led to the oddity of Aramaic being used in Mongolia, as records were maintained in the Syriac alphabet (Syriac is the Eastern dialect of Aramaic). And centuries later, the story would repeat itself in reverse, with the Arabs using Greek in their early administration in the seventh and eighth centuries. For during the Hellenistic era, Greek replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca in the Levant, and the scribes of Damascus maintained their records in Greek. But it was not the Greeks who spread Greek around the Mediterranean, but the Romans who accelerated the spreading of Greek, as they used it in their administration across the Eastern empire, as well as the coastal Levantines—the New Testament was written in the Greek of Syria.

A French Canadian friend from Montreal, Jean-Louis Rheault, bemoaning the loss of the French language among French Canadians outside narrowly provincial areas, commented as follows: “In Canada, when we say bilingual, it is English-speaking, and when we say French-speaking it becomes bilingual.” GENES VS. LANGUAGES

Looking at genetic data in the Eastern Mediterranean with my collaborator the geneticist Pierre Zalloua, we noticed that both invaders, Turks and Arabs, left few genes, and in the case of Turkey, the tribes from East and Central Asia brought an entirely new language. Turkey, shockingly, is still inhabited by the populations of Asia Minor you read about in history books, but with new names. Further, Zalloua and his colleagues claim that Canaanites from 3,700 years ago represent more than nine-tenths of the genes of current residents of the state of Lebanon, with only a tiny amount of new genes added, in spite of about every possible army having dropped by for sightseeing and some pillaging.

There is a also current controversy in the United Kingdom as the Normans left more texts and pictures in history books than genes there.

While Turks are Mediterraneans who speak an East Asian language, the French (North of Avignon) are largely of Northern European stock, yet they speak a Mediterranean language.

So:

Genes follow majority rule; languages minority rule.

Languages travel; genes less so.

This shows us the recent mistake of building racial theories on language, dividing people into “Aryans” and “Semites,” based on linguistic considerations. While the subject was central to the German Nazis, the practice continues today in one form or another, often benign. For the great irony is that Northern European supremacists (“Aryan”), while anti-Semitic, used the classical Greeks to give themselves a pedigree and a link to a glorious civilization, but didn’t realize that the Greeks and their Mediterranean “Semitic” neighbors were actually genetically close to one another. It has been recently shown that both ancient Greeks and Bronze Age Levantines share an Anatolian origin. It just happened that the languages diverged.

THE ONE-WAY STREET OF RELIGIONS

In the same manner, the spread of Islam in the Near East, where Christianity was heavily entrenched (remember that it was born there), can be attributed to two simple asymmetries. The original Islamic rulers weren’t particularly interested in converting Christians, as these provided them with tax revenues—the proselytism of Islam did not initially address those called “people of the book,” i.e. individuals of Abrahamic faith. In fact, my ancestors who survived thirteen centuries under Muslim rule saw clear advantages in not being Muslim: mostly in the avoidance of military conscription.

The two asymmetric rules are as follows. First, under Islamic law, if a non-Muslim man marries a Muslim woman, he needs to convert to Islam—and if either parent of a child happens to be Muslim, the child will be Muslim.

There are some minor variations across regions and Islamic sects. The original rule is that if a Muslim woman marries a non-Muslim man, he needs to convert. But in practice, in many countries, both need to do so.

Second, becoming Muslim is irreversible, as apostasy is the heaviest crime under the religion, sanctioned by the death penalty. The famous Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, born Mikhael Demetri Shalhoub, came from a Lebanese Christian family. He converted to Islam to marry a famous Egyptian actress and had to change his name to an Arabic one. He later divorced, but did not revert to the faith of his ancestors.

Under these two asymmetric rules, one can do simple simulations and see how a small Islamic group occupying Christian (Coptic) Egypt can lead, over the centuries, to the Copts becoming a tiny minority. All one needs is a small rate of interfaith marriages. Likewise, one can see how Judaism doesn’t spread and tends to stay in the minority, as the religion has weaker rules: the mother is required to be Jewish. An even stronger asymmetry than that of Judaism explains the depletion in the Near East of three Gnostic faiths: the Druze, the Ezidi, and the Mandeans (Gnostic religions are those with mysteries and knowledge that are typically accessible to only a minority of elders, with the rest of the members kept in the dark about the details of the faith). Unlike Islam, which requires either parent to be Muslim, and Judaism, which asks for at least the mother to have the faith, these three religions require both parents to be of the faith, otherwise the child and the parents say toodaloo to the community.

In places such as Lebanon, Galilee, and Northern Syria, with mountainous terrain, Christians and other non-Sunni Muslims remained concentrated. Christians, not being exposed to Muslims, experienced no intermarriage. By contrast, Egypt has a flat terrain. The distribution of the population presents homogeneous mixtures there, which permits renormalization (i.e. allows the asymmetric rule to prevail).

Egypt’s Copts suffered from an additional problem: the irreversibility of Islamic conversions. Many Copts during Islamic rule converted to the dominant religion when it was merely an administrative procedure, something that helps one land a job or handle a problem that requires Islamic jurisprudence. One did not have to really believe in it, since Islam doesn’t conflict markedly with Orthodox Christianity. Little by little a Christian or Jewish family engaging in a Marrano-style conversion becomes truly converted, as, a couple of generations later, the descendants forget the arrangement of their ancestors.

So all Islam did was out-stubborn Christianity, which itself won thanks to its own stubbornness. For before Islam, the original spread of Christianity in the Roman empire was largely due to…the blinding intolerance of Christians; their unconditional, aggressive, and recalcitrant proselytizing. Roman pagans were initially tolerant of Christians, as the tradition was to share gods with other members of the empire. But they wondered why these Nazarenes didn’t want to give and take gods and offer that Jesus fellow to the Roman pantheon in exchange for some other gods. What, our gods aren’t good enough for them? But Christians were intolerant of Roman paganism. The “persecution” of the Christians had vastly more to do with the intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon of local gods than the reverse. What we read is history written by the Christian side, not the Greco-Roman one.

We know too little about the Roman perspective during the rise of Christianity, as hagiographies have dominated the discourse: we have for instance the narrative of the martyr Saint Catherine, who kept converting her jailors until she was beheaded, except that…she may have never existed. But the beheading of Saint Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, under Valerian, was real. So there are endless histories of Christian martyrs and saints—but very little is known of pagan heroes. Even the early Christians of the Gnostic tradition have been expurgated from the record. When Julian the Apostate tried to go back to ancient paganism, it was like trying to sell French food in South Jersey: it simply had no market. It was like trying to keep a balloon under water. And it was not because pagans had an intellectual deficit: in fact, my heuristic is that the more pagan, the more brilliant one’s mind, and the higher one’s ability to handle nuances and ambiguity. Purely monotheistic religions such as Protestant Christianity, Salafi Islam, or fundamentalist atheism accommodate literalist and mediocre minds that cannot handle ambiguity.

It is a fact that while Christianity eradicated previous records, it may also have eradicated…its own history. For we are discovering that branches such as the Gnostics had a quite different record of the early religion. But the Gnostics were largely a secret religion—closed to outsiders and secret about their own records. And secret religions, well, bury their secrets.

In fact, we can observe in the history of Mediterranean “religions” or, rather, rituals and systems of behavior and belief, a drift dictated by the intolerant, actually bringing the system closer to what we can call a religion. Judaism might have almost lost because of the mother rule and its confinement to a tribal base, but Christianity ruled, and for the very same reasons, Islam did. Islam? There have been many Islams, the final accretion quite different from the earlier ones. For Islam itself is ending up being taken over (in the Sunni branch) by purists simply because they are more intolerant than the rest: the Wahhabis (aka Salafis), founders of Saudi Arabia, destroyed the shrines in most parts of what is now their country during the nineteenth century. They went on to impose the maximally intolerant rule in a manner that was later imitated by ISIS. Every single accretion of Salafism seems to exist to accommodate the most intolerant of its branches.

DECENTRALIZE, AGAIN

Another attribute of decentralization, and one that the “intellectuals” opposing an exit of Britain from the European Union (Brexit) don’t get: if one needs, say, a 3 percent threshold in a political unit for the minority rule to take its effect, and on average the stubborn minority represents 3 percent of the population, with variations around the average, then some states will be subject to the rule, but not others. If, on the other hand, we merge all states in one, then the minority rule will prevail all across. This is the reason the U.S.A. works so well. As I have been repeating to everyone who listens, we are a federation, not a republic. To use the language of Antifragile, decentralization is convex to variations.

IMPOSING VIRTUE ON OTHERS

This idea of one-sidedness can help us debunk a few more misconceptions. How do books get banned? Certainly not because they offend the average person—most persons are passive and don’t really care, or don’t care enough to request the banning. From past episodes, it looks like all it takes is a few (motivated) activists for the banning of some books, or the blacklisting of some people. The great philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell lost his job at the City University of New York owing to a letter by an angry—and stubborn—mother who did not wish to have her daughter in the same room as the fellow with a dissolute lifestyle and unruly ideas.

The same seems to apply to prohibitions—at least to the prohibition of alcohol in the United States, which led to interesting mafia stories.

Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.

An insight into how the mechanisms of religion and the transmission of morals obey the same renormalization dynamics as dietary laws—and how we can show that morality is more likely to be something enforced by a minority. We saw earlier in the chapter the asymmetry between obeying and breaking rules: a law-abiding (or rule-abiding) fellow always follows the rules, but a felon or someone with looser sets of principles will not always break the rules. Likewise we discussed the strong asymmetric effects of halal dietary laws. Let us merge the two. It turns out that, in classical Arabic, the term halal has one opposite: haram. Violating legal and moral rules—any rule—is called haram. It is the exact same interdict that governs food intake and all other human behaviors, like sleeping with the wife of your neighbor, lending with interest (without partaking of downside of the borrower), or killing one’s landlord for pleasure. Haram is haram and is asymmetric.

Once a moral rule is established, it will suffice to have a small, intransigent minority of geographically distributed followers to dictate a norm in society. The sad news is that one person looking at mankind as an aggregate may mistakenly believe that humans are spontaneously becoming more moral, better, and more gentle, with better breath, when this applies to only a small proportion of mankind.

But things work both ways, the good and the bad. While some believe that the average Pole was complicit in the liquidation of Jews, the historian Peter Fritzsche, when asked, “Why didn’t the Poles in Warsaw help their Jewish neighbors more?,” responded that they generally did. But it took seven or eight Poles to help one Jew. It took only one Pole, acting as an informer, to turn in a dozen Jews. Even if such select anti-Semitism is contestable, we can easily imagine bad outcomes stemming from a minority of bad agents.

STABILITY OF THE MINORITY RULE, A PROBABILISTIC ARGUMENT

Wherever you look across societies and histories, you tend to find the same general moral laws prevailing, with some, but not significant, variations: do not steal (at least not from within the tribe); do not hunt orphans for entertainment; do not gratuitously beat up Spanish grammar specialists for training, instead use boxing bags (unless you are Spartan and even then you can only kill a limited number of helots for training purposes), and similar interdicts. And we can see these rules evolved over time to become more universal, expanding to a broader set, to progressively include slaves, other tribes, other species (animals, economists), etc. And one property of these laws: they are black-and-white, binary, discrete, and allow no shadow. You cannot steal “a little bit” or murder “moderately”—just as you cannot keep kosher and eat “just a little bit” of pork at Sunday barbecues.

I don’t think that if you fondled the breast of the wife or girlfriend of some random weight lifter in front of him, you would do well in the intervening noisy episode, nor would you be able to convince him that it was “just a little bit.” Now, it would be vastly more likely that these values emerged from a minority than a majority. Why? Take the following two theses:

Outcomes are paradoxically more stable under the minority rule—the variance of the results is lower and the rule is more likely to emerge independently across separate populations.

What emerges from the minority rule is more likely to be black-and-white, binary rules.

An example. Consider that an evil person, say an economics professor, decides to poison the collective by putting some product into soda cans. He has two options. The first is cyanide, which obeys a minority rule: a drop of poison (higher than a small threshold) makes the entire liquid poisonous. The second is a “majority-style” poison; it requires more than half the ingested liquid to be poisonous in order to kill. Now look at the inverse problem, a collection of dead people after a dinner party. The local Sherlock Holmes would assert that, conditional on the outcome that all people drinking the soda having been killed, the evil man opted for the first, not the second option. Simply, the majority rule leads to fluctuations around the average, with a high rate of survival. Not the minority rule. The minority rule produces low-variance in outcomes.

POPPER-GOEDEL’S PARADOX

I was at a large, multi-table dinner party, the kind where you have to choose between the vegetarian risotto and the non-vegetarian option, when I noticed that my neighbor had his food catered (including silverware) on a tray reminiscent of airplane fare. The dishes were sealed with aluminum foil. He was evidently ultra-kosher. It did not bother him to be seated with prosciutto eaters, who, in addition, mix butter and meat in the same dishes. He just wanted to be left alone to follow his own preferences.

For Jews and Muslim minorities such as Shiites, Sufis, and (vaguely) associated religions such as Druze and Alawis, the aim is to be left alone—with historical exceptions here and there. But had my neighbor been a Sunni Salafi, he would have required the entire room to be eating halal. Perhaps the entire building. Perhaps the entire town. Hopefully the entire country. Ideally, the entire planet. Indeed, given the total lack of separation between church and state in his creed, and between the holy and the profane, to him haram (the opposite of halal) means literally illegal. The entire room was committing a legal violation.

As I am writing these lines, people are disputing whether the freedom of the enlightened West can be undermined by the intrusive policies that would be needed to fight fundamentalists.

Can democracy—by definition the majority—tolerate enemies? The question is as follows: “Would you agree to deny the freedom of speech to every political party that has in its charter the banning of freedom of speech?” Let’s go one step further: “Should a society that has elected to be tolerant be intolerant about intolerance?” This is in fact the incoherence that Kurt Gödel (the grandmaster of logical rigor) detected in the United States Constitution while taking the naturalization exam. Legend has it that Gödel started arguing with the judge, and Einstein, who was his witness during the process, saved him. The philosopher of science Karl Popper independently discovered the same inconsistency in democratic systems.

I wrote about people with logical flaws asking me if one should be “skeptical about skepticism”; I used a similar answer as Popper when I was asked if “one could falsify falsification.” I just walked away.

We can answer these points using the minority rule. Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, it will eventually destroy our world.

So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. Simply, they violate the Silver Rule. It is not permissible to use “American values” or “Western principles” in treating intolerant Salafism (which denies other peoples’ right to have their own religion). The West is currently in the process of committing suicide.

IRREVERENCE OF MARKETS AND SCIENCE

Now consider markets. We can say that markets aren’t the sum of market participants, but price changes reflect the activities of the most motivated buyer and seller. Yes, the most motivated rules. Indeed this is something that only traders seem to understand: why a price can drop by ten percent because of a single seller. All you need is a stubborn seller. Markets react in a way that is disproportional to the impetus. The overall stock markets currently represent more than thirty trillion dollars, but a single order in 2008, only fifty billion, that is, less than two-tenths of a percent of the total, triggered a drop of close to 10 percent, causing losses of around three trillion dollars. As retold in Antifragile, it was an order activated by the Parisian bank Société Générale, which discovered a hidden acquisition by a rogue trader and wanted to reverse the purchase. Why did the market react so disproportionately? Because the order was one-way—stubborn: they had to sell and there was no way to convince the management otherwise. My personal adage is: The market is like a large movie theater with a small door.

And the best way to detect a sucker is to see if his focus is on the size of the theater rather than that of the door. Stampedes happen in cinemas—say, when someone shouts “fire”—because those who want to be out do not want to stay in, exactly the same unconditionality we saw with kosher observance or panic selling.

Science acts similarly. As we saw earlier, the minority rule is behind Karl Popper’s thinking. But Popper is too stern, so let us leave him for later and, for now, discuss the more entertaining and jovial Richard Feynman, the most irreverent and playful scientist of his day. His book of anecdotes, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, conveys the idea of the fundamental irreverence of science, which proceeds through a similar mechanism as the kosher asymmetry. How? Science isn’t the sum of what scientists think, but exactly as with markets, it is a procedure that is highly skewed. Once you debunk something, it is now wrong. Had science operated by majority consensus, we would be still stuck in the Middle Ages, and Einstein would have ended as he started, a patent clerk with fruitless side hobbies.

UNUS SED LEO: ONLY ONE BUT A LION

Alexander said that it was preferable to have an army of sheep led by a lion than an army of lions led by a sheep. Alexander (or whoever produced this probably apocryphal saying) understood the value of the active, intolerant, and courageous minority. Hannibal terrorized Rome for a decade and a half with a tiny army of mercenaries, winning twenty-two battles against the Romans, battles in which he was outnumbered each time. He was inspired by a version of this maxim. For, at the battle of Cannae, he remarked to Gisco, who was concerned that the Carthaginians were outnumbered by the Romans: “There is one thing that’s more wonderful than their numbers…in all that vast number there is not one man called Gisgo.”

The Carthaginians seem to be short in name variety: there are plenty of Hamilcars and Hasdrupals confusing historians. Likewise there appear to be many Giscos, including the character in Flaubert’s Salambo.

This large payoff from stubborn courage is not limited to the military. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has,” wrote Margaret Mead. Revolutions are unarguably driven by an obsessive minority. And the entire growth of society, whether economic or moral, comes from a small number of people.

SUMMARY AND NEXT

So we summarize this chapter and link it to hidden asymmetries, the subtitle of the book. Society doesn’t evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meetings, academic conferences, tea and cucumber sandwiches, or polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere—and someone with soul in the game. And asymmetry is present in about everything.

All it takes is, say, a 3 percent minority, for “Merry Christmas” to become “Happy Holidays.” But I suspect that should the minority rise in numbers, the effect would go away, as diverse societies are more syncretic. I grew up in Lebanon at the time when the population was about half Christian: people greeted one another in the Roman pagan way of sharing one another’s holidays. Today Shiites (and some Sunnis not yet brainwashed by Saudi Arabia) would wish a Christian “Merry Christmas.”

We promised in the Prologue to explain that slavery is more widespread than anticipated—actually, quite a bit more. Let us see next, after the Appendix.