A couple Instagram posts made a bit of a stir this week:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CN-wokhBo1U/

https://www.instagram.com/p/CN_eXOLBVu9/

Both of these come down to civil disobedience, the principled refusal to comply with an unjust law. And that’s controversial, because it requires people to hold two somewhat dissonant ideas at the same time:

1.  It’s socially valuable to have people publicly not complying with unjust laws.

2.  It’s individually costly to not comply.

This is really just a specific instance of the general concept of sacrifice. In economic terms, the name for this is “positive externalities” — an individual’s private choices creating benefits for uninvolved third parties.

The cognitive dissonance comes from the fact that while someone may recognize the social value of civil disobedience, they might not be willing to personally bear the risks of delivering that value. That’s uncomfortable, and potentially even shameful. And as each person in a community navigates that internal discomfort, they each find their own personal risk tolerance threshold. When people with different thresholds try to decide whose threshold is “right”, an argument happens.

And you know what? That’s fine. It’s good, even. People with high risk tolerance forge a path. That’s awesome. Some will pay off and some won’t. That is a discovery process to efficiently identify the best paths forward. People with low risk tolerance will fall in once effective paths are mapped. And sure, it’d be better to have more support earlier, but the other side of that coin is that people need to pick their battles. They can’t sustainably pick fights they’re guaranteed to lose.

So the optimal community-level strategy is that each person picks the (metaphorical) battle where they personally are going to be effective.

A good example of this from recent history: New York’s SAFE Act only achieved a 4% compliance rate because, through an incremental process of civil disobedience, upstate communities decided they just wouldn’t comply.

When people take on personal legal risks in order to peacefully benefit the community, that’s socially valuable. It’s how positive social movements have always worked. Along the way, there are going to be disagreements about the “right” level of risk tolerance. But here’s the thing: there is no one “right” level of risk. It’s a personal thing, and each person thinking about how they’re best-positioned to contribute is a great thing. That’s how we’ll find the best paths as a community.

It’s good to see “ranges shouldn’t ask to see NFA paperwork” becoming table stakes. Onward from there.