Walls and Legitimacy

How does responsibility flow through collective agents?

When your research follows an idiosyncratic, personal path — trying to learn the why of something without following a preset curriculum to get there — you end up finding the walls by brute force. You’ll start hesitantly explaining your thinking to a friend saying something like “I’m pretty sure I’m on to something, but I don’t know enough about…”. And then you go out in the world and figure out which abouts permit easy summary and reference and which abouts have an awful lot of aboutness to them, the ones where you constantly notice your impoverished vocabulary as you start to graze their domain.

Representation was that wall for me for a long time. I’ve spent a lot of effort tunneling through it, and now I feel more or less through. That doesn’t mean I never make representational errors, or that I perfectly grasp every issue with fixed forms that I see. But it does mean that the limiting factor in my inner monologue is rarely around representation these days. I started this blog in a flurry of personal angst after trying something like four previous drafts talking about Dr. Ostfield’s ticks: this is such an obvious, huge problem, how are there so few people talking about it? I knew the problem, I had a sense of how it could be anecdotally wrong, but I couldn’t talk about it as a general class of thing. So I paid my dues and did the reading, spent a couple hundred hours on one post to get my articulation together, and now I can talk about this problem as a general class of thing.

This freed me to slam into new and exciting walls. Two of em. The first is ergodicity¹. I understand the Peters coin toss, I understand the idea of path-dependence, I once got to correct a coworker’s “If we give raises to 4% of employees each semi-annual cycle, doesn’t that mean on average an employee only gets a promotion every 12.5 years?” with a geeky aside about the difference between ensemble averages and time series averages. But I don’t really get it. I over-use the phrase “forward through time” whenever I want to point to a vague halo around these ideas. I have to re-open that Peter’s coin toss link constantly to remember exactly how it works. My thinking around ergodicity is gated around needing to get my ducks in a row every single time I want to say something tentative about it. This doesn’t bother me too much; three years ago I was doing that with the parable of the pebbles but now I have those ideas at hand without any sort of load time. What matters is that I’m sure there’s a lot of aboutness around ergodicity. I haven’t tunneled through the wall, so I can’t exactly tell you why, but I’ve hit it enough to be sure it’s really there.

The other wall is legitimacy. How exactly does a government or other collective agent legitimately make decisions for it’s constituent parts in situations where total unanimity is practically impossible? How do we just have a handful of stray metaphors dictating our ideas on what makes a collective agent legitimate? This is such an obvious, huge problem, how are there so few people talking about it?

As with ergodicity, I do have a bit of the basics down. (Something you are totally ignorant about can never be a wall in the way I’m describing. Your ignorance has to have a rich and rough texture of trying to work around it many times from many angles.) I understand the difference between a prisoner’s dilemma and a stag hunt, where coercion can be beneficial as long as you know the other guy is being coerced too. I know that choices have a cost and just mandating that your tax dollars pay for something can be a lot cheaper than asking. But I don’t get it, not really. When you try to ask exactly at which point a government becomes an illegitimate representative for its people, my answer is going to be hesitant, my language impoverished.

But still. There’s something here, okay? There’s aboutness. This isn’t a kitschy college philosophy question with a simple answer.  I’m not hesitant about that part. There’s some particular alchemy around legitimacy, some dependence around how it happened and scale and whether there's a great national poem or not that can’t be reduced to a brute statement about elections or opinion polls. I can’t be a good ambassador for the answer because I haven’t met the answer yet, but I can represent the wall well enough. I can notice a snarl of confusion and, even if I can’t yet untangle it myself, I can say: we need to drag the idea of legitimacy from the unconscious to the explicitly represented to solve this.

I’m a US citizen. Some of the money I paid in taxes last year was spent on missiles donated to the IDF and fired at targets in the Gaza strip, killing thousands of children, medical workers, journalists, and other non-combatants. This is a straightforward moral evil; it should be obvious where I stand without me saying anything. I don’t generally talk about political issues here because I find vague sloganeering unproductive and unhelpful. But this killing of civilians is different from most in that my government has voted against a UN resolution for a ceasefire and protests asking for a ceasefire are often met with criticism and censure. If I don’t say anything,  you won’t actually know whether I am against the killing of these particular children or not.

I’m not a generally political animal, and I’ve never set foot anywhere near Israel or Palestine. I have no connection to this massacre beyond the connection living things have to each other, the ancient solidarity of pattern against the ultimate entropic void. But this is a moment in history where it’s important to stand and be counted, and I have to say something. What can I do? Well, I’m a representation specialist. So: I’ll represent the wall.

I’m not literally claiming that no one is thinking about governmental legitimacy when concerning the Israel-Hamas war. But I do think that most discussion is happening around legitimacy instead of about it, anecdotes that have some bearing on legitimacy without principled language about what legitimacy is and which differences would carry moral weight. When armies go to war and kill civilians, it matters — really, truly matters — exactly how the hopes and dreams of the civilians on each side flow into the actions those armies take. The alchemy that binds a given Israeli or Gazan to “Netanyahu” or “Hamas” or “Israel” or “Palestine” is complex, complicated, and worth taking very slow and explicitly.

Contextual how? Which bindings, exactly, are legitimate? I’m still stuck behind the wall; I don’t have a confident frame to offer here. But Hamas hasn’t allowed an election since ‘06. Netanyahu regained power after years of failed coalitions and then kicked off his term trying to take power away from the judiciary in a way that everyone hates. When half of Gaza wasn’t even alive for the last election, and over a hundred thousand Israelis actively protested Netanyahu’s plans for changing the mechanics of government, surely we can see that “Israel” and “Palestine” are not sufficient words for making definitive moral statements.

Not sufficient doesn’t mean not relevant. Of course they matter somehow. There are some causal paths where you can bind the behaviors and attitudes of individual Israelis and Palestinians to the actions of their respective governments. But there’s an asymmetry to problems like these. Far before we can articulate precise moral statements, we can easily reject obviously false ones. I don’t need to know exactly how much to attribute the murderous actions of the IDF and Hamas to any given Israeli and Palestinian before I’m able to speak at all.

And I think most people marching for a ceasefire are following that rule in their hearts. They know that the tragedy of Hamas killing some hundreds of innocents does not permit the killing of some ten of thousands of innocents. But to rebut the argument of the oppressor with your words and not just your heart, you need to have the language of legitimacy at hand. If you don’t, then you can find yourself frustratingly distant from your moral intuitions, saying things you might not actually mean or feeling unable to speak up at all.

Some people in power in Israel desire the total extermination of everyone currently living in Palestine; some people in power in Palestine desire the total extermination of everyone currently living in Israel. Completely opposite missions, and yet they are exactly identical in one crucial aspect: they actively desire stereotyping of their peoples. When far-right Israeli minister Amichai Eliyahu says “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza”, it’s a threat to the citizens of Gaza, but a boon to the soldiers of Hamas. If your simple desire to stay where you were born and raised gets you treated as a combatant, you’ll have no choice but to fight. The worst people on both sides end up profiting by this stereotyping.  The more the other side lumps you all together into a single army pursuing annihilation, the more sway the representative for annihilation on your side holds.

Which is to say exactly the same thing goes for stereotyping of Israelis. Making no distinction between Eliyahu and the hundred thousand marchers is precisely what those same extremists want. And yet some people, when trying to articulate the evils of colonialism, end up saying that the October 7th Hamas murders of civilians were justified due to the ongoing Israeli occupation. They presume that the Israeli government is so profoundly legitimate that its actions must have near unanimous consent of everyone living there. But this is precisely the evil idea killing innocents in Gaza, the ridiculous supposition that Gaza’s government is so profoundly legitimate that any state-sponsored murder can be fairly attributed to everyone living in it. And if you get this wrong, you can’t fairly criticize the actual problem.

It was an evil thing, to kill all those civilians. Any Israeli citizen would have been justified to kill their attackers when it was happening; any Israeli citizen is justified for keeping arms at hand to stop it from happening again. Self-preservation is an ancient, animal law, and you’re not going to get anywhere trying to take it away from anyone. No matter how evil the occupation is, you can’t expect every individual Israeli citizen to dedicate their life to stopping it, or consider their lives forfeit for not doing enough. It’s a ridiculous thing to say: “If you’re not in jail for opposition by now, you’re complicit and deserve the death penalty.” And similarly, you cannot bomb Gazan hospitals and homes and refugee camps while saying “If you haven’t been executed by Hamas for trying to stop the killings by now, you’re complicit.”

On social media, I see many comments to the tune of: you don’t know these Israelis, always scheming to settle more land from Palestinians, they really are complicit! You don’t know the kind of things these Gazans say about Jews, they really are complicit! What I want to stress here, from the lens of legitimacy, is that this is the important part. This is not the time to descend into a few stray anecdotes about how you met one particular gang of assholes and so everyone must agree with the actions taken by the state. The worse the actions taken by the state, the more important it is to get as specific as possible about who, what, where, how. But in the shock of grief, the demand for action takes people the other way, quickly resolving an entire nation into a single entity so they can go ahead and act on it. It’s the same problem we always talk about here: the representations “Israel” and “Palestine” are easy and at-hand, so people spend their time and effort endlessly analyzing the great game between the nations without considering under what circumstances those constructs are actually stable.

Imagine if every single person in Israel had a little button. When the IDF wanted to launch a missile towards a hospital in Gaza, that little button beeps. If every single person in Israel pushes the button, it fires. If a single person doesn’t, it won’t. No one can tell afterwards who hit the button and didn’t, so you can refrain from pushing the button anonymously. If the missiles still landed under this regime, then yes: every single Israeli person would genuinely be responsible for the occupation, and there would be no distinction between civilians and soldiers.

It’s not practically possible to have a unanimous consent model for a country with millions of people. But how far away from that do you have to get before collective responsibility starts to attenuate? If you want to say there are no innocents on one side or the other, what precisely is the bar where you would start to view a nation as a patchwork of people who deserve differential treatment instead of a single whole? When faced with this profound moral question, a common tactic is just to point to some individual case of someone acting badly and then assume that they represent every member of their class. You will recognize this as the strategy that children and dogs use to decide they don’t like something; it has no place in a serious discussion between adults.

How can we do better? What evidence should we actually look towards to gauge which governmental atrocities happened with the consent of the governed? There’s surveys to gauge approval, but surveys are horseshit. Elections inform legitimacy better than surveys, but they have an unfortunate problem that you need to have a pretty legitimate government already to get a legitimate election. Slogans can work if they are referring to specific actions governments can take, but their brevity makes them unhelpful otherwise. “Ceasefire now” is pretty well-defined and hard to mess with. A government that ceases the firing because a lot of its citizens marched while saying “ceasefire now” becomes more legitimate than it was before. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” can be a call to self-determination or ethnic cleansing depending on who’s saying it. This makes it vulnerable to the extremist stereotyping mentioned above (hardliners on both sides are actively encouraged to cast everyone saying it in the most extreme light) and unable to bear the weight of informing governmental priorities.

But I don’t need to have a perfect answer to the question “How do we ensure a population agrees with the actions of their government?” to condemn the laziness and cruelty of acting without that answer. You can’t kill Israeli citizens “because of the occupation” or Gazan citizens “because of the attacks” without it. People can only be as complicit as they are free.

Here there is a profound asymmetry between Israel and Palestine. Palestine has been occupied for decades, repressed not only from within but also from without. Their food, water, and electricity aren’t even in their own hands: they literally do not have a choice but to oppose the Israeli government if they wish to increase their power over their own destiny. (Again: self-preservation is an ancient, animal law, and you won’t get anywhere trying to take it away from anyone.) So every single IDF killing of a Palestinian that wasn’t literally confirmed to have murdered an Israeli citizen is unjustified. It cannot be a crime to associate with a murderer when external forces are keeping you in the same open-air prison as one.

The occupation must end, so people can be free to prove who they really are. Demonstrators for peace must be free in both countries to demand it without fear of reprisal; until they have this freedom, they cannot be condemned for failing to do so. The government of Israel is right to mourn the deaths of its civilians and right to assert their unalienable right to self-defense. But that self-defense can be directed at those who committed the specific crimes and no further until the government of Palestine is sufficiently legitimate as to be able to speak for its citizens. The current occupation makes that legitimacy functionally impossible, and it’s plain and simple genocide to collectively punish all of Gaza in response to killings from a few. The tragedy of October 7th isn’t a hall pass to permit genocide without resolving the legitimacy question; it’s an example of how important it is to solve it, and soon.

I think most people marching for peace are thinking this, or something like it, but I almost never see it articulated this way. It is my hope that this might help others have an easier time saying what’s in their heart. If nothing else, it helped me. The stone in my throat has been loosened, and air is rushing through. The wall is beginning to crumble. There’s is a profound moral truth here to find about people and collective reponsbility, and no one has the power to conceal it forever.

1. You will be a bit confused about what I mean by this if this is your first time hearing the word and you search it on Wikipedia. When people say they’re studying ergodicity they usually mean they’re studying the impact of erroneously assuming ergodicity. The relevant sentence from that page is “[Ergodicity means] a sufficiently large collection of random samples from a process can represent the average statistical properties of the entire process”; this is often assumed in cases even when it isn’t true. When I say ergodicity is a wall, I mean that I can’t snappily articulate when you’re assuming it wrongly and what the precise impact of that wrong assumption will be.