One act of bravery can transform an ordinary person into a hero in the blink of an eye, disrupting the status quo and prompting admiration (or condemnation) from those who witness it. It can take just one act of courage by a lone revolutionary or a small group to start a movement. Examples abound: the 12 Lebanese women whose protest outside a government building in 2016, dressed as brides in white stained with red paint, led to a change of the decades-old law that allowed rapists to be acquitted of their crimes by marrying their victims; Greta Thunberg showing the world that you are never too young to make a difference, growing from a solo disruptor sitting outside the Swedish Parliament in 2018 into a global climate movement leader who galvanises millions around the world; most recently in Russia, TV producer Marina Ovsyannikova breaking the obedient silence of millions on none other than live TV, risking her freedom, her safety, her very future. In the space of 10 seconds, she became a hero in the eyes of the world and a villain in the eyes of her government. Ovsyannikova’s act was to hold up a banner during a live broadcast on the main Russian state TV channel, appealing to the nation to stop the war in Ukraine and not believe the propaganda they are being fed. These 10 seconds reverberated around the world, bringing hope to millions that the Russian nation would soon rebel against the Kremlin. While it has not to date done so, Ovsyannikova’s act of defiance highlighted (and has led to) a string of resignations by journalists from the heavily censored Russian state TV.
What makes some people capable of taking a huge risk to their safety, freedom and even their lives to align their behaviours with their values while billions of others just follow the norm? What turns ordinary people into heroes? And why are dictatorships maintained by millions of individuals who relinquish their power to a few individuals? Many of us have fantasised about how splendid it would feel if millions of Russians unleashed their power against a bunch of autocrats in the Kremlin, have we not? Yet, they do not do it. Why not?
Cass Sunstein, a behavioural scientist and co-author of the highly acclaimed “Nudge”, dedicated his 2019 book “How Change Happens” to examining exactly this question of how revolutions are started. He points out that revolutions happen rarely and are essentially unpredictable, be they Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution or the Arab spring. No one knows their own true tolerance of unjust experiences and it is impossible to predict in advance at what point a random event will trigger a mass reaction that is carried out by large groups of people.
Sunstein talks about our “true” preferences vs the “falsification” of preferences, which is essentially the gap between what we really want but hide for fear of breaking the social norm and what we state that we want. Preference falsification is especially prevalent in authoritarian regimes such as Putin’s. The “zeros”, as Sunstein calls them, are the rebels like Ovsyannikova, who are courageous, even foolhardy, and who are first to express their true preferences, breaking the norm. They are followed by the “ones”, who need a little validation from another before they act, followed by the “twos”, “threes” and so on to infinity. The catch, Sunstein argues, is that we do not know our own thresholds for action or the threshold of those around us, until trigger events bring those out.
According to Sunstein, whether the behaviour of the “zeros”, the revolutionaries, is taken up more broadly by the masses depends on whether people can interact with each other freely. The more intensely like-minded people interact with each other, the more likely they are to become polarised against the existing social norm. Therefore, for example, to prevent collective polarisation, the Chinese government allows individual expressions of concern, but not group meetings. Similarly, Putin recently quashed protests on the streets, making them illegal, thus preventing powerful social interactions from taking place that would galvanise the “zeros”, “ones”, “twos” and “threes” into challenging the war and the regime in a more organised way. Instead, Putin is keen to maintain what Sunstein calls “pluralistic ignorance” where no one knows the true preferences of anyone else. Indeed, none of us truly knows what the Russian people think and this is a very deliberate strategy that Putin employs to stay in power. Fear acts as the glue that binds the population to pluralistic ignorance and maintains mass silence.
Before appearing on Russian state TV with her banner, Marina Ovsyannikova recorded a video which was released on social media after her short stint on live TV. In it she explained that she had been ashamed to work for a channel that was spreading Russian propaganda. A child of one Russian and one Ukrainian parent, at some point Ovsyannikova decided that she could no longer compromise on her values, she could no longer falsify her own experiences, she could no longer live in shame. So Ovsyannikova did what she had to do: she closed the gap between what she really thought and what she had been saying. And in so doing, she transformed her shame into dignity.
