Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

20 Years ago a friend took me to visit Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. For almost 6,000 years the people in the area were able to exploit the behavior of buffalo to stampede - they would startle the buffalo into stampeding over a cliff, and then just harvest the crippled or dead animals below. It was a lucrative amount of profit for surprisingly little effort.

By taking advantage of the predictable nature of majority of individuals, a minority of individuals was able to compel the majority to act against their own self interests, in fact their very survival.

Now try to imagine a handful of humans going up against a hear of buffalo on more evenly matched terms, who would you normally expect to win?

This is such a successful competitive strategy it is still in common use today. Imagine a minority of people who want a majority of people to act against their own self interest, in order to benefit the goals of the minority. To make the game more challenging assume the majority and minority belong to a democracy in which generally the majority of people get to vote on how things are decided - in principle you expect the majority to vote in their own best interests. I mean if there were an election and people and buffalo each got to vote on whether the buffalo should jump off the cliff, and the buffalo had a majority, how would you expect the vote to go?

In the real world minorities of people often face this dilemma - how to convince a majority of people to act against their own self interests; how to undermine their common sense or better judgment and actually act in a way that benefits the minority at the expense or disadvantage of the majority.

For example, lets say you and ten friends are exceedingly wealthy. How do you get a huge majority of people to vote in favor of lowering taxes on the wealthy while raising taxes on the not wealthy? How do you get the majority of peoples' to give up their personal or collective influence in society in order to give more personal or collective influence to the minority or wealthy people? In particular, how do you avoid the mechanisms of democracy to favor your own personal goals at the expense of the rest of society?

One way is to view the majority of people as buffalo. What in their nature can you use to make them act against their own interests or survival. If you scare enough buffalo, group mentality can be exploited to make the buffalo exercise poor judgment and leap before they look. Can this strategy be used on people?

What if the economy was so bad you could scare people into believing the ones in charge of the economy were incompetent and should be voted out of office, and they should vote your party in to office instead. You could literally promise them anything because they are scared. Once your party was in office in control of legislation, well then you could do pretty much as you pleased then (in spite of any promises) - raise taxes on the poor and lower them for the rich, cut funding for social programs which benefit the poor but not the rich, vote away peoples' rights to form unions and collectively bargain, etc. What if once you got into office you lowered taxes on the corporations and the wealthy, creating an economic crisis - well you could foster that contrived crises to scare the masses even more, and try to get them to support even more stupid decisions against their own self interests.

Welcome to politics in Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, Arizona, and other right-wing states in 2011. You see, it's all really quite simple to understand when you just take it all step-by-step.