People in all totalitarian societies are familiar with the distinction between members of the power structure “with” them or merely “in them”.
The first refers to the true believers (or sociopaths) who are the core of the regime.
The second category is the “inner good guys”—basically decent people who, while inside power structures and playing power games, are still well-intentioned pragmatists who make other people’s lives more livable. Often, they are talented and have to join the party and make the right noises to gain professional license – like the fictional and possibly even real Valery Legasov.
The system never fully trusts them but relies on their existence, which is why it must keep them on the defensive continuously.
They are the rational element in a crazy system.
Worse, they’re part of the bad guys’ plans.
By acting rationally and responsibly within an unreasonable and irresponsible system, they blunt the sharpest edges of its madness and protect it from themselves. As aides and enablers, they clean up the leadership’s mess, like a self-destructive celebrity’s personal butler, always cleaning house, paying bail, and looking out for reporters.
Here’s my provocative thought: Maybe not?
The standard narrative is that they are good people who make life in a crazy system bearable. But maybe making the system tolerable will make them complicit in keeping the system afloat. Maybe they are legitimizing and stabilizing it and protecting it from real reform.
Society is stuck in decades-long chronic infections, rather than quick fevers, like when you resist the urge to vomit after eating a bad kebab and feel sick for a few days instead of feeling extremely sick for twenty seconds.
It’s easy for me to say this in a relatively free country, but in this case perhaps the right strategy is accelerationism – making madness complete as quickly as possible, encouraging purity spirals and ideological singularities, Compliance in bad faithallowing the system to push itself over the cliff in the shortest possible time. In order for things to truly get better, sometimes you have to make them worse. Much worse.
Even if there was blood in the streets (and I could easily tell if that wasn’t my thing), a quick dramatic implosion would probably be less painful than allowing the Soviet Union to continue to exist for another 60 years. In the parable of the bad kebab, it’s sticking your finger down your throat because the alternative is worse.
Maybe good people in a bad system are actually helping the bad system exist. Maybe the bad guys at the top of these systems are counting on them. rely Ask them to do it. Thugs and fanatics can’t really do much.
Naming this principle after Legasov may be unfair, as he was reportedly a provocateur and troublemaker throughout his career. Still, naming it will increase clicks and traffic to your website, so take care of it.
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postscript:
This distinction between “with them” and “among them” was central during the Nuremberg trials. It was recognized that many National Socialist Workers’ Party members were not actually Nazis but collaborated for a range of reasons, from opportunism to talent and expertise that they were not allowed to use unless they joined – the typical deal with the devil that all totalitarian systems try to impose on people, and one of their identifying characteristics. That’s why Rudolf Hess was treated differently than Albert Speer, or Werner von Braun. (He was also too useful to be hanged.)
Postscript 2:
There are other types of “joiners” who are not true believers or sociopaths. They may be careerists. These people are different from “Legasov”, who must join to get the career they deserve, and careerists who join to get the career they deserve. No deserve it.
Or they may be “lukewart supporters of the idea overall, hoping we can reform it despite the flaws in its implementation and some bad actors at the top.” These are idiots – bad actors at the top are a feature, not a bug, it’s not a problem of a few bad apples, it’s a problem of fundamental evil in the entire edifice, and such a system is irreformable. No socialism with a human face This is not a hard-core PR strategy.
Postscript 3:
1. The system’s tolerance for dissent is proportional to the dissenter’s value to the system – great scientists can get away with it better than the average worker. That’s how Sakharov dodged a bullet–literally.
2. Every “good person at heart” is constantly balancing a trade-off between self-preservation and higher principles, and this trade-off has breaking points in both directions – at sufficiently high personal risk, most good people will sacrifice all moral principles. I know you think you won’t, but when your child’s future is on the line, try holding on to that idea. But in the face of sufficiently high moral hazard—such as the danger of more nuclear power plants exploding—they are equally capable of noble heroism.
