A Real Life Example of Strong Emotional Display by Ordinary Citizen
Yesterday (February 12, 2020) I was listening to the NPR (National Public Radio) while driving and heard a woman (her identity unknown as I tuned in in the middle of the show and turned off before the radio interview ended) talking about the Senate Impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. One interesting detail revealed by the interviewee was that another friend of her had broken into tears when she was reading some transcripts from the trial. This unnamed person according to the interviewee is someone struggling to maintain basic respect of the presidency and the institution even though disagreeing the policies, and yet finding it hard to believe how terribly shocking things the President had done.
I then asked myself: How or why would someone whose name was unknown to the public, who was not significant enough for the radio interviewee to mention her name, feel so strong about things done or words said by the President, which presumably do not have any direct and immediate bearing on her personal life?
My answer is that the strong and genuine emotional display illustrates strong, highly internalized preferences of ordinary citizens toward public affairs.
Strong Preferences Raise Voices
When citizens have strong preferences, they become highly vocal in stating and defending their own preferences and challenging those of others. Take election for an example: Citizens take the time and efforts to cast their ballots partly because they have seen the election as the opportunity to express their personal causes. Politics is no longer just for the public but for them individually. Therefore, they have a higher and personal return from casting ballots than purely public duty.
Collectively, these strong preferences make US loud and clear, willing to let the world know what and how they think. In contrast, the rest of the world has been relatively silent or quiet, voluntarily or habitually yielding the world stage to the US as they have implicitly reached the conclusion that they are no match.
How to Have Strong Preferences?
Strong preferences must be accumulated over time, starting from childhood when parents encourage their children to learn, express and grow their opinions into stable preferences and causes. I will come back to this later.
Strong preferences also have a materialistic ground. In this report from Washington Post on why Joe Biden scored a big victory Super Tuesday 2020, the exit polls show that “about 1 in 8 voters in Super Tuesday states were 18- to 29-year-olds, compared to 3 in 10 who were 65 or older.” This has a good reason behind: Young voters do not have as high stake from the presidential campaign as the older folks because they have less properties under their names, less family responsibilities and less knowledge how elections affect their personal lives.
Strong & Contested Preferences Above and Beyond Self Interests
Not all preferences were born equal, and they can be roughly divided into two categories: self-oriented and public oriented. The two are not mutually exclusive and most people have a mixture of both. Having said that, strictly or exclusively self oriented preferences can be frowned on by others and are seldom presentable in public, while those regarding not just one’s own interests but the interests of others and the society in general are more accepted. Simply put, in today’s world, the agents possessing only self-interested preferences sometimes feel the pressure to hide them.
This does not mean self-interests are social “bads” or pure liability to the society. In no society have we seen self interests dead or dying, for the good reason that they serve valuable social purposes. The secret is to work it out through mixed preferences. Even seemingly pure Samaritan motives have partially selfish root: They motivate people partly because they have personally invested in them and therefore made a “selfish” sense to promote them to others. It does mean however a distaste for purely selfish revealed preferences when one can consider both public and self interests. The key is to yield a part of self interest when society calls for its citizens to contribute to a higher cause. A good example is when someone refuses to provide testimony as an eye witness against a suspect for a crime, simply because the person happens to be a relative or friend of her, that would be problematic, although cases like this happen everyday at least in China but also in many other developing countries.
Why Both Strength & Diversity of Preference Matter?
Of course, strong preferences do not just strengthen voices but also drive actions. They provide reliable and stable anchorage for setting directions for private and public ships to sail. They also drive the country up for innovations and value adding activities to grow the economy. Here both diversity and strength of the preferences matter. Consider strength first. Sometimes what a country needs the most is agents who care about different causes, who are self or internally motivated rather than externally or money motivated, and who dare try out different things just for the sake of satisfying their own curiosity and internal drives, fulfilling their own desires and meeting their own agenda. Diversity also matters because it allows different agents to embark upon different tasks or projects instead of all flocking to the same goal, which tends to diminish the returns. Currently we need agents or entrepreneurs directing times and efforts toward fighting virus (like the corona virus) rather than all AI and machine learning, for example.
The China Dilemma
One basic dilemma of China: Its people have very strong and little contested materialistic preference. This collective preference helps shield the country from prematurely following the US examples in anything non-materialistic, like human rights, rule of law, transgender freedom, universal saffrage and personal services in healthcare, travel, eating out and the latest idea of basic income proposed by Presidential candidate Andrew Yang in his campaign. This is the good thing for the most part because a developing country should focus on growing its economy first and foremost, for the simple reason that income growth provides the single most important —- also most efficient —- driver for social changes. South Korea has been a successful example. Many developing countries however have chosen a trapped path of growth to copy and paste everything in the US today, at a wrong time when it is premature to do so. The result is guaranteed failures, sometimes disastrous. They don’t understand the things in the US today came a long way from the past, and are the result of social evolution with a strong materialist backing. No country can grow by simply copy-and-paste others without going through its own path of struggling and trial-and-errors.
On the other hand, China faces the danger of not cultivating diverse preferences that matter in a normal civil society, such as respecting the truth, respecting facts and respecting fellow citizens. This creates huge opportunity costs because without contested and balanced preferences installed the country is highly vulnerable and will not match its economic achievements with other aspects of life. China lacks healthy debates and fights from inside, from looking at issues from different angles and perspectives.
Strong Preferences and Rewards & Penalties
Another sign of the strong preferences is citizens will reward highly to anybody confirming their preferences and penalize those otherwise. In societies with compromised preferences you do not see this very often. The ownership of the object of the preference matters little. The best example is when US consumers protested Coca Cola for changing the ingredients of their favorite drink, and forced the firm to put the original brand and product back to the market — despite the firm created the brand and ingredients all by itself in the first place, without much input from consumers.
Strong & Contested Preferences Drive Up Brand Power
This ultimately affects the brand power of agents and business. The strong preferences bring the world along with them. Chinese business and Chinese brands face many barriers in matching theirs with the US counterparts. The ultimate reason is simply that a brand power requires strong preferences, which in turn drive the creation, feedback. If you look at how the world famous brands were created, you see consumers play a crucial role because they spread the words, they volunteer to be the ambassador of the brand, they form communities around the brand. These things are generally weak or missing in China. and Once again the issue is packaged resources not elementary resources.
Strong and Contested Preferences Are Preinstitutional Accumulations
If institutions are the only thing matters, all societies with long established rule of law should be equally powerful. Yet in reality US is the only super power in the world. One can easily attribute that to its size. But if size matters that much, China would be the first in the world. The truth is to take strength and diversity into consideration. Both require accumulation over generations of time for the society as a whole, and over a lifetime for each individual.
Contests Strengthen Preference
For preferences to get strong the best way is to have contests. However, the big question is how to prevent contests from becoming chaos like we have witnessed in many, if not most, developing countries? First of all, we run the contests within open, transparent and predetermined rules and apply them to all contestants equally. Secondly, contests are better carried out daily than annually, on big and small issues relevant to big and small crowds. This way citizens receive the training by doing. Satisfying these conditions, contests can be self perpetuating and self reinforcing. When agents all want to win the debate and competition for their preferences to prevail, they find it necessary to study their own preferences and to place them on solid reasons that they deeply believe in, putting themselves on better positions of defending their preference.