Their hate makes us strong · 8:12pm Dec 30th, 2014
From a blog post by Connor Wood, quoted by Scott Alexander:
In the early 1990s, a political economist named Laurence Iannaccone claimed that seemingly arbitrary demands and restrictions, like going without electricity (the Amish) or abstaining from caffeine (Mormons), can actually make a group stronger. He was trying to explain religious affiliation from a rational-choice perspective: in a marketplace of religious options, why would some people choose religions that make serious demands on their members, when more easygoing, low-investment churches were – literally – right around the corner? Weren’t the warmer and fuzzier churches destined to win out in fair, free-market competition?
According to Iannaccone, no. He claimed that churches that demanded real sacrifice of their members were automatically stronger, since they had built-in tools to eliminate people with weaker commitments. Think about it: if your church says that you have to tithe 10% of your income, arrive on time each Sunday without fail, and agree to believe seemingly crazy things, you’re only going to stick around if you’re really sure you want to. Those who aren’t totally committed will sneak out the back door before the collection plate even gets passed around.
And when a community only retains the most committed followers, it has a much stronger core than a community with laxer membership requirements. Members receive more valuable benefits, in the form of social support and community, than members of other communities, because the social fabric is composed of people who have demonstrated that they’re totally committed to being there. This muscular social fabric, in turn, attracts more members, who are drawn to the benefits of a strong community – leading to growth for groups with strict membership requirements.
I wonder how much of the strength of the brony community is because only people who care about it are willing to walk up to a teenager at McDonald's and ask for a Twilight Sparkle.
That's a good thought, now it has me wondering.
"Let us here observe, that a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation" -Joseph Smith (He knew what he was doing. Or God did, whichever way you believe.)
I was just talking to a bit of a weirdo the other day, who had posted this sort of... call it a brony manifesto, about dedicating our lives to the show's values. I told him it sounded like he was trying to found a religion. Because it really did. The intensely dedicated in any particular group tend to become rather cult-like, I think.
I don't buy the argument because there really is no 'weeding out' process for our community. No one cares if you're willing to ask a McDonald's burger drone for a Twilight Sparkle, let alone whether you even want to do so in the first place. Those of us closet cases are just as much members of the community as the unabashed die-hards.
2688788 But how many Denver Broncos fans would be fans if they had to keep it secret?
I wouldn't limit this line of thought to religion. You know the phrase "If anyone could do it, it wouldn't be special?" Well guess what: anyone can sit at a desk and whomp up a heap of fiction. That's why 99% of all fan-fiction is crap: because almost anyone can do it. There's no strict gate for entry. But only a few people have the dedication required to develop their skills and produce GOOD fiction. The obstacles are there to keep out the people who don't want it badly enough. But sometimes, the sacrifice itself does have a practical reward.
The question I ask is "Who actually benefits from this sacrifice and hardship?" Dangerous cults benefit from a strong, determined, loyal flock. They don't ask questions. That doesn't make it a virtue. But I would consider voluntary abstinence from drugs and alcohol, even for purely non-religious reasons, to be a virtue. The abstinence is its own reward.
I'm not sure that this is a valid analysis; most religious movements fail, after all, and the various new-agey type things, which appear to be growing in popularity, seem to generally require very little from their members.
As for the brony question: the social cost of asking a random teenager at a McDonalds for a Twilight Sparkle seems to be very small to me relative to tithing 10% of your income. The cost of watching 30+ hours of children's cartoons seems like a far greater investment than that.
Of course, seeing as I don't own any pony merchandise, just some DVDs, I'm not sure if I'm the model of a brony.
Different but similar. Buying Happy Meals is not a prerequisite to being a brony. However, going into S5 here, the fandom has certainly broadening and attracted all sorts. I could definitely see a possible correlation-not-causation in effect here. Someone who was willing to join in S1 might have a stronger affinity, not to say that S4 joiners are "less brony", but that there was more social stigma to overcome before the Internet begrudgingly acknowledged our existance. Someone willing to buy merch in person or physically attend a con is probably more confident in themselves and is less uptight. I do feel like there's some correlation between how heavily invested someone is in this fandom, and how genuinely nice of a fellow they are.
On the other end of the spectrum, 4chan's /mlp/ has a reputation for being a cesspool, and any of those individuals who self-identify as only joining the fandom because of the metric tons of R34 can usually be caustic. You know the kind of people I'm talking about: the ones whom you wonder if all this talk about Friendship is just going in one ear and out the other, considering how much shit spews from their mouth.
Again though, merely correlation. Plenty of perfectly lovely people browse /mlp/ or EQAD. And that one guy who married Twilight Sparkle is certainly involved in the fandom, intimately.
But BH, I don't want to be a Mormon!
2688862
I get what you're trying to say, but I don't see how it applies in the case of MLP fans. In my experience, no one actually cares as long as you're not obnoxious about it. Much of the perceived 'hate' I see comes from outsiders' reactions to those who take it too far.
Bad Horse, have you (or anyone else here) read Stephenson's The Diamond Age? It's set in a future where political/state power has become almost entirely divorced from geography due to communications technology and nanotech-induced affluence (it's a distant sequel to Snow Crash, where conventional states have collapsed and been replaced with anarchocapitalist mini-government/housing developments based on business franchising). The stateoid groups instead define themselves culturally: neo-Victorians, techno-Confucians, that sort of thing. One of the stateoid groups in Diamond Age uses similar high-cost group-maintenance: they're an outgrowth of a vaguely defined, hippieish group that attempted to have few cultural requirements but was too dissolute as a result. The outgrowth survives by having what are essentially lethal trust exercises: one member will leave a loaded gun unattended in a pre-ordained location, a second will unload it, and the first will return, point it at their head, and pull the trigger. Or one will leave rappelling gear unsecured at the top of a cliff, the second will set it up, and the first will jump off the cliff without checking it. The exercises are ordained by a computer program or something like that, and neither participant knows who the other is. It's written as kind of the ultimate form of this sort of practice, and intended as such by the group in question.
2688979 There doesn't have to be "hate" for there to be a social cost to being public about your involvement with the fandom. I'd consider anyone who actually hates bronies for being bronies to be a massive dickhead whose opinion is not worth my consideration, but I wouldn't tell my family or coworkers about it. I had someone ask me about it in person the other day and I found it extremely awkward and uncomfortable to discuss, whereas I'd've been quite open about it through IM or something similar. I suppose some of that is internalized shame or what-have-you, but some of it's a desire to keep ponies in the online, imaginary space where they make sense to me; either way, the social cost is real to me, although since I go out of my way to avoid paying it it doesn't say anything about my in-group participation.
2688709
I'd think it's more that if you draw up a list of qualities found in a cult (e.g. several people in a room at once) you'll find that every group resembles one to some degree and it's only after everybody is being handed rifels to train for the days foretold you can become preeety sure on whats happening. Theres a wkuk sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oRb99OkDv0.
2689272 Every group venerates a single leader, requires their members to isolate themselves from outsiders, practices mind-altering behavior, and discourages questioning? Wow, I never knew!
(That's the usual "is it a cult" checklist, just so you know.) "Is a group" or even "is a passionate group" is not the same as "is a cult" at all. That the most extreme members in any large enough group can resemble a cult yes. That every group does, no, that's going a bit too far.
2688931
Depends on your level of social anxiety. For me, for instance, tithing 10% of your income is much easier, especially if you believe it is for a good cause. If my salary was marginally bigger I'd gladly join the Giving What We Can thing and donate 10% of my income to effective charities. Hell, I might do it anyway, if I can make the numbers work out.
Point is, depending on who you are, where you are, and how well you handle social anxiety, the price of being a brony, even a secret one, is quite high.
2688977 Yes you do. Science says so.
Ha! I sure know that feeling xD
I think there are many reasons for why the brony community is strong (or at the very least used to be, according to some). One of them is, I believe, the same reason why the gay community is strong, along with the civil rights movement of the 60's, or the early christians, or a million other "strong" groups of people: suffering and ridicule. The existential crisis which I think is safe to say struck the majority of fans upon the entrance into bronydon likely plays a large roll in strengthening their connection with other fans. The deeper the realization that "I like mlp" alters their identity, the closer they feel to others who have had a similar, identity-defining experience with pony.
I don't think the professor has quite hit the nail on the head. The biggest psychological draw of religion, in my opinion, is empowerment. And difficult membership requirements are useful to a religion insofar as they contribute to that.
I think it goes like this. Everyone wants to be a good person, but no one really knows how. Well, religion has a way! You can be a good person if you do this, this, and this. Now you know what's required, so it's in your power to follow through on it. The difficulty of following through on those things creates a feeling of achievement for those who do them, which helps give them a stronger sense of personal identity. "I did this, that's who I am." You know you are doing good in the world, and because of that, you're more free to love whatever is good.
I think most religions fall apart because they can't give convincing reasons why their idea of the good life is the correct one. These kinds of reasons are necessary in order to make the sacrifices they require seem meaningful.
Consider too that religions which actively proselytize have an advantage over those which do not. Elitist religions which either kick out lax members or let them go without a struggle are going to tend to have fewer members. So the proposed culling process seems at least to run contrary to some religions' universal aspirations.
Edit: You know, from an economics perspective, religion might only be strong to the extent that it demands sacrifice. For if you just replace the term "sacrifice" with "opportunity cost" it's pretty clear that as long as a religion actually does anything at all, and isn't just a meaningless label, it must necessarily ask for sacrifices of some kind or other.
Also:
I always saw this element as contributing to a really strong sense of humility. To ask for a Twilight Sparkle doll at McDonalds--at least before bronies became mainstream--you had to either really be willing to laugh at yourself, or be a delusional brony supremacist. ("Ponies are actually manly! PONIES PONIES PONIES SWAG!" etc.) Nowadays I don't see much of the good humor. It's mostly a "bronies vs. haters" persecution mentality which seems to me to be really destructive.
Tying this in to the main topic, "their hate makes us strong"--it always seemed like the strength of the early bronies wasn't in closing ranks against "haters", but in laughing them off and thereby winning them over.
Now that we've got fucking Hot Topic selling us shit, though, the jig is pretty much up.
Edit: I really need to hit the refresh button before posting comments. Part of this is a rehash of what Axis and Honeycomb said, and I prefer Honeycomb's explanation of sacrifice over my own.
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Those are two separate phenomena as far as I can tell.
The first, the sacrifice one, has to do with people associating cost with value. When someone "pays for" something, they feel like they're wasting it by not "using" it. People tend to be reluctant to admit to mistakes, especially costly ones, even to themselves. The second, the hate one, is more closely related to a persecution complex. I'm not going to pretend to understand this at a logical level, but I don't think self-deception is a necessary part of this.
I do think persecution results in a tighter-knit community, just not in the same way as sacrifice. If I like X, and if the bias is strongly in favour of disliking X, then that there's something good in X is undeniable, and the only people I have to talk about X is this community, lest I be accused of being something bad.
Needless sacrifice results in a community that's tight due to mutual embarrassment. Persecution results in a community that's tight due to mutual distrust of "outsiders".
2689809
I don't think the persecution mentality (expectation of opposition) is limited to being against "haters", and I'm not so sure that it's destructive (though I don't know what that means to you). Personal experience tells me that it's not worth trying to explain to people that I have hobbies with no obvious utility, unless those people happen to watch FiM. It's also a lot easier to say that I spent the weekend writing a few programs and reading a few papers than it is to spend hours explaining why I would prefer to read fun short stories rather than Snow Crash, or why I'd prefer to watch a slice-of-life over The Wire or Breaking Bad.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect opposition to certain interests from people outside of a certain group. Not everyone is going to accept that your interests might not be grounded in things they find interesting.
2689045
Social cost is irrelevant. Everything you do or don't do carries a social cost whether you acknowledge it or not. Yeah, you might get some funny looks if you go the 'open and vocal' route, but you miss out on possible connections with others if you keep it all to yourself. It's not a simple matter of, "Their mockery binds us together."
2689415
PRAIS LAUREN FAUST!
2689809 I remember,back in the early days of season one and two, when the bring community really seemed like a group of people who were uniform in their ability to laugh at themselves, people willing to be the butt of the joke so long as it got others laughing. Maybe it was because there were more college-age bronies than high schoolers, and there wasn't such a huge persecution complex that has seemed to grow recently.
J remember going to a meet up back in early 2012 and it was all 20+, with a single 17-year-old, and his exuberance and intensity at that meet up led me to believe he desperately needed vindication for his choice in hobbies.
My existential crisis when I first found pony was quickly resolved with "it's a good topic to start at a house party." Usually I wear a shirt and people approach me with questions. Its an automatic icebreaker (or in a few cases, an ice machine. Some people have internalized the paedophile bit and stay extra frosty), because people now feel that they know some dark secret of mine and are more inclined to share theirs, so to speak.
That's my experience. Talking to younger bronies, I've noticed that most try with all their might to make ponies cool to the mainstream, to try and justify their interest. That's not going to play well, and comes off as pathetic and childish. Its like they are using a Hasbro marketing guide on how to introduce stuff to kids, and trying to apply it to teens and young adults.
I'm not really sure where I'm going with this. I think that ponies have certainly grown in visibility, which has attracted more (and younger) types of people. Its acceptable enough for less self-deprecating to hop on, but still social stigmatising enough to generate a victim complex in those unprepared for the baggage that comes with it. That saddens me.
Of course, this could just be nostalgia talking. They changed it now it sucks!