Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.
“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”
As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. “In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks.”
The findings were published in the July 22, 2011, early online edition of the journal Physical Review E in an article titled “Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities.”
Read more.
Sunday 31 July 2011 3:10 pm
Good find. I heard from a militia site that the American Revolution had the support of only 10% of the population when it got started.
Monday 1 August 2011 9:58 am
Wait, what? If an idea held by less than 10% of the population will not spread, how does any idea ever break the 10% barrier?
Monday 1 August 2011 1:04 pm
This is more or less the strategic framework I’ve always operated in.
For the kinds of ideas we talk about here to be successful, my guess is that hard-core anti-state radicals would have to be about one percent of the U.S. population, roughly 3 million people. I don’t know that we are that far from that now, but the problem is that anti-state radicals are divided up into so many factions, ranging from vulgar libertarians, Randians, and “libertarian hawk” idiots like Tim Starr on the Right, and the Infoshoppers and some of the antifa types on the Left. I conceived of anarcho-pluralism and pan-secessionism as antidotes to this problem. Anarcho-pluralism is intended to be a modern version of the “anarchism without adjectives” concept found in classical anarchism which I think is the only workable theoretical framework and one that can incorporate most of the other kinds of anarchism, libertarianism, and radical anti-statism into its paradigm. Some of the more sectarian anarchists will reject this outlook, of course, and the solution to this is to simply recruit new anarchists and grow younger generations of anarchists that don’t carry that kind of baggage.
Pan-secessionism is intended to be strategic framework for anarcho-pluralism, and a means of connecting with regionalist, separatist, decentralist, and autonomist movements that are not specifically anarchist in nature. It’s also a means of reaching the broader masses. My guess is that to have a serious movement in North America we would need about three million anarchists committed to an ecumenical, pluralist form of anarchism and were willing to tolerate forms of anarchism that are polar opposites from their own individual preferences (e.g. the battles between libertarians and anarcho-communists, leftist-anarchists and national-anarchists, syndicalists and primitivists, etc.) and who were committed to some common strategic agenda like pan-secessionism and the “liberty and populism” demographic framework.
For pan-secessionism to work, we would need about ten percent of the US population to be serious believers in the concept, about thirty million people, and the majority would need to be either sympathetic or not actively opposed. It’s simply a question of how do we get there? We’re not as far away as some might think: http://middleburyinstitute.org/zogbysecessionpoll2008.html I’m not sure how much these numbers have changed in the age of Obama. I’d like to see this poll done again and see what the current numbers are and how they break down on a demographic basis.
Monday 1 August 2011 1:31 pm
@Keith
If we look at web traffic statistics the US is at least five million deep on the libertarian Right. Lew Rockwell’s site now receives as much traffic as the National Review.
Take a look at this graph from Alexa showing Ron Paul’s website vs. Mitt Romney’s website: http://benjaminmontgomery.com/2011/06/07/ron-pauls-website-vs-mitt-romneys-website/
And Ron Paul has been doing this for years: http://www.infowars.com/articles/us/ron_paul_leads_gop_web_traffic.htm
Yesterday Alex Jones claimed 2 million views-a-day on his radio show.
The Mises blog recently claimed 69,000 unique visitors in one day: http://blog.mises.org/17916/new-site-data-report/
The Anarchist Department however is hurting. Anarchist sites are much lower in volume.
Monday 1 August 2011 1:34 pm
“The Anarchist Department however is hurting. Anarchist sites are much lower in volume.”
We need to fix that. Meanwhile, we need to be working to incorporate minarchist-libertarians and constitutionalists into the pan-secessionist paradigm.
Monday 1 August 2011 4:33 pm
OK, so other than keep doing what we’re doing, how do we get more traffic? I wish I could dedicate more time to this, and will try.
Cover more “cross over issues?” For instance, TDA is covering a lot of technology stuff, bringing in the tech crowd. Do we need to expand the areas we’re covering? Or focus on one or two?
Areas I am covering or can take on:
AI/AN (obviously)
Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, TOR, etc (we got a favorable response at TDA in this area)
Republic of Cascadia! – In the works
Wednesday 3 August 2011 1:45 pm
Covering more areas is always helpful as it attracts a wider cross-section of readers plus it keeps thing from becoming repetitive. At the same time, we don’t want to dilute the core message, so there’s a healthy balance to be struck. That’s something I struggle with personally: Where do I strike the balance between simply expressing personal opinions and promoting the basic set of ideas this site was designed to further?
For those of you who participate on other blogs and comments threads, posting links to items on this site helps generate traffic a great deal.
It’s a slow process by nature. Eventually, I want this site to have the readership of LRC, Prison Planet, Reason, Counterpunch, Infoshop, UhuruNews, Mathaba, Indymedia, Stormfront, AltRight, and Antiwar.Com COMBINED (yes, I know it’s a lofty goal). But there has to be something to draw in readers from all of those diverse and often diametrically opposed camps. So covering a wide cross section of issues certainly helps with that. There seems to have been an increase in hostile reader comments in recent time. That’s a good thing, because it means that our audience is generally growing and we’re no longer just “preaching to the choir.” It’s means we’re starting to get traffic from leftists who instinctively react to us as “fascists” and from hostile forces from the right who cannot comprehend our approach as well. Plus the angry exchanges from readers to each other seems to be escalating. That’s a good sign also for the same reason.
My goal is for the meta-political framework of anarcho-pluralism to become the dominate consensus of North American anti-state radicals. That doesn’t mean anyone will have renounce their other views. An anarcho-pluralist could still be a syndicalist, an-cap, an-com, NA, primmie, Alex Jones fan, black nationalist, Green, WN, paleocon, Christian anarchist, etc. as far as their own ideological preferences and priority issues go. When the AP consensus becomes dominant it will then mean that our movement’s two greatest liabilities, right-libertarians under the influence of neoconservatism and left-anarchists under the influence of TH, will have fallen by the wayside.
The next goal is for adherents of AP and pan-secessionism to establish a position of influence for themselves in other movements and milieus. That’s what I’ve done with the radical right and it’s what TDA has done with its target audiences. (Btw, you guys are doing a kick ass job with TDA.) We need to continue to establish a presence for ourselves in other such movements. Vince, for instance, seems to be doing that with native peoples’ issues. There are plenty of other routes.
The broader goal is to establish pan-secessionism as the dominant strategic framework for North American dissidents generally. For instance, Paul Gottfried and Richard Spencer are as important to the alternative right as anyone, and both of them seem to be cautiously on board with the idea of decentralization, breaking up massive states, and creating much smaller political units, even if they come at it from a different theoretical perspective than most of us do. Paul said as much in his lecture to the PFS this year, and Richard said the same thing at the last HLMC gathering. The LRC people have long been on board with secession, and even some relatively mainstream commentators like Walter Williams have expressed sympathy. Most black nationalist groups have a perspective not too far from ours. A milieu I’d really like to start cracking would be the kind of alternative left we find around Counterpunch types. There’s enough genuine anti-establishmentarianism there and even enough TH skepticism at times to make that strand of the left worthy of our focus.
Wednesday 3 August 2011 7:11 pm
The “criticism of PC from a leftist perspective” book that Jeremy mentioned he was actually working on ages back will be really fucking important, and could probably benefit from different co-editors and people working on it from different sides of the political spectrum or viewpoints from which to criticise PC.