[Epistemic status: tentative]
If someone is in a position of weakness, I expect them to welcome peaceful dialogue that gives them the opportunity to improve their lot. If someone who claims to be weak nevertheless prefers hostility (whether literal or metaphorical), they may see themselves as powerful enough to gain from it, so I question whether they’re as weak as they depict themselves. “I’m weak, let’s fight” is a weird thing to say.I think this is true in a broad sense, but there are a lot of “buts”; it really gets nickel-and-dimed to death on the way to specific situations.
You have to make a distinction between tactical violence and cathartic-but-self-destructive violence, because stuff like running amok is definitely not an expression of power, and I guess there’s also weird stuff like civil disobedience where it’s like, okay I’m going to get my shit wrecked here but it will arouse public sympathy. And of course there are cases where a preemptive strike from a position of weakness is still better than waiting, like if you have a strong belief that you’ll get attacked in a worse position later on.
But okay, those are kind of edge cases. The broader problem you run into is that “position of weakness” is really contextually subtle because it involves a huge number of overlapping and interlocking contexts, and we’re strong in some and weak in others and we may misjudge which of those contexts is more relevant. Like, you can basically always demand that someone leave your house if they don’t normally live there, even if it’s for refusing to endorse an opinion that society hates, but that doesn’t mean that you’re stronger than society in your house. So even when the principle applies it may not extend to a slightly different context.
More generally, this doesn’t work well as a way to tell whether people are actually strong or weak even in a specific context because it’s actually telling you what they think, which has similar failure states to assuming people know what they’re doing if they act confident. This should be obvious insofar as initiating hostilities is not a great predictor of winning. It’s common for rabble-rousers to motivate people in a position of weakness by convincing them that they have some “secret advantage”, like they have a superior national character or God is on their side or whatever, and honestly people readily come up with those beliefs on their own. But that’s just the really egregious cases; more common is simply that the overlapping contexts are so confusing that nobody really knows where the ultimate power rests until it’s been fought out – there was a case here recently where the city flip-flopped several times on a minor construction issue, with media wars and citizen groups and multiple levels of government involved, and I’m still not completely sure it’s settled; I’ve seen that sort of thing go to the courts or the provincial government.
So it’s complicated. But one thing that can be done immediately to improve the model is to think not about hostility but about costs and benefits relative to other options. The world is full of opportunities for dirt cheap hostility, and when you’re mad about something hostility is highly therapeutic while peaceful dialogue is infuriating, and that in itself explains 99% of what happens online. In a broader sense, a lot of the stuff I mentioned above makes more sense when you view it in cost-benefit terms rather than in terms of “hostile or not”.
Like, you can basically always demand that someone leave your house if they don’t normally live there, even if it’s for refusing to endorse an opinion that society hates, but that doesn’t mean that you’re stronger than society in your house.
…it kinda does mean that, actually.
Like, sure, it’s a metaphor and the metaphor has limits. It doesn’t translate to something stupid like “you can take on an arbitrary number of armed federal agents so long as you’re within your home.” But it does mean that, to anyone for whom “your house” represents an important resource, your opinions matter more in some ways than do the contrary opinions of other people, even many other people combined.
This is most obvious when you’re talking about children. A parent with eccentric or widely unendorsed opinions, who is willing to take a hard line on those opinions, can do an awful lot to make his kids suffer if they don’t play along – even if literally everyone else in the world disagrees.
But it’s also important to remember when you’re talking about normal adult social circles. Your little band of five like-minded misfits, despised outcasts though you are, nonetheless probably has all the power in an interaction taking place on your turf. If you want to humiliate someone who’s there alone trying to engage with you, you probably can. If you want to scare someone who’s there alone trying to engage with you, you can probably do that too – maybe in theory he has some kind of recourse, maybe he can call the cops or try to summon up a Twitter mob or whatever, but those are unreliable weapons in all sorts of ways and there’s a reason that people don’t reach for them casually.
There’s always a bigger fish. There is also always a smaller fish. And the relationships are not linear. Context is king.
But that’s a quibble.
The broader point, of course, is: if someone’s logic and rhetoric is dependent on the claim that he is an oppressed underdog who deserves sympathy and support for being so weak, but he’s nonetheless obviously spoiling for a fight, this is in itself good reason to treat his argument with suspicion. Either he’s irrational and running amok, in which case he’s hurting both himself and others and you shouldn’t be contributing – or he’s rational, and deceiving you about his level of weakness in order to accrue allies or status in preparation for a fight that he thinks he can win, in which case you should treat him the way you would treat any other deceptive agent.