Enforce Common Norms On Elites

In my experience, elites tend to differ in how they adhere to social norms: their behavior is more context-dependent. Ordinary people use relatively simple strategies of being generally nice, tough, silly, serious, etc., strategies that depend on relatively few context variables. That is, they are mostly nice or tough overall. In contrast, elite behavior is far more sensitive to context. Elites are often very nice to some people, and quite mean to others, in ways that can surprise and seem strange to ordinary people.

The obvious explanation is that context-dependence is gives higher payoffs when one has the intelligence, experience, and social training to execute this strategy well. When you can tell which norms will tend to be enforced how when and by whom, then you can adhere strongly to the norms most likely to be enforced, and neglect the others. And skirt right up to the edge of enforcement boundaries. For weakly enforced norms, your power as an elite gives you more ways to threaten retaliation against those who might try to enforce them on you. And for norms that your elite associates are not particularly eager to enforce, you are more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt, and also second and third chances even when you are clearly caught.

One especially important human norm says that we should each do things to promote a general good when doing so is cheap/easy, relative to the gains to others. Applied to our systems, this norm says that we should all do cheap/easy things to make the systems that we share more effective and beneficial to all. This is a weakly enforced norm that elite associates are not particularly eager to enforce.

And so elites do typically neglect this system-improving norm more. Ordinary people look at a broken system, talk a bit out how it might be improved, and even make a few weak moves in such directions. But ordinary people know that elites are in a far better position to make such moves, and they tend to presume that elites are doing what they can. So if nothing is happening, probably nothing can be done. Which often isn’t remotely close to true, given that elites usually see the system-improving norm as one they can safely neglect.

Oh elites tend to be fine with getting out in front of a popular movement for change, if that will help them personally. They’ll even take credit and pretend to have started such a movement, pushing aside the non-elites who actually did. And they are also fine with taking the initiative to propose system changes that are likely to personally benefit themselves and their allies. But otherwise elites give only lip service to the norm that says to make mild efforts to seek good system changes.

This is one of the reasons that I favor making blackmail legal. That is, while one might have laws like libel against making false claims, and laws against privacy invasions such as posting nude picts or stealing your passwords, if you are going to allow people to tell true negative info that they gain through legitimate means, then you should also let them threaten to not tell this info in trade for compensation.

Legalized blackmail of this sort would have only modest effects on ordinary people, who don’t have much money, and who others aren’t that interested in hearing about. But it would have much stronger effects on elites; elites would be found out much more readily when they broke common social norms. They’d be punished for such violations either by the info going public, or by their having to pay blackmail to keep them quiet. Either way, they’d learn to adhere much more strongly to common norms.

Yes, this would cause harm in some areas where popular norms are dysfunctional. Such as norms to never give in to terrorists, or to never consider costs when deciding whether to save lives. Elites would have to push harder to get the public to accept norm changes in such areas, or they’d have to follow dysfunctional norms. But elites would also be pushed to adhere better to the key norm of working to improve systems when that is cheap and easy. Which could be a big win.

Yes trying to improve systems can hurt when proposed improvements are evaluated via naive public impressions on what behavior works well. But efforts to improve via making new small scale trials that are scaled up only when smaller versions work well, that’s much harder to screw up. We need a lot more of that.

Norms aren’t norms if most people don’t support them, via at least not disputing the claim that society is better off when they are enforced. If so, most people must say they expect society to be better off when we find more cost-effective ways to enforced current norms. Such as legalizing blackmail. This doesn’t necessarily result in our choosing to enforce norms more strictly, though this may often be the result. Yes, better norm enforcement can be bad when norms are bad. But in that case it seems better to persuade people to change norms, rather than throwing monkey-wrenches into the gears of norm enforcement.

So let’s hold our elites more accountable to our norms, listen to them when they suggest that we change norms, and especially enforce the norm of working to improve systems. Legalized blackmail could help with getting elites to adhere more closely to common norms.