Collective Action

Big change almost always requires many people to work together.

Imagine you're in a game of tug-o-war, trying to pull the other team across the line. You can't tell if your strength is making the difference. But you know that if you don't help pull, your team is that much weaker.

Imagine you just helped a candidate win an election by 10 votes (like in Bernie Sander's first race). How important was your vote? You weren't technically the "deciding" vote, but it seems hard to argue that turnout wasn't important.

Now imagine that you not only contributed to that 10-vote win, but you also convinced five friends to come out and vote as well: enough to swing the race either way. Did your vote change the outcome? Or was it the votes of the people who switched? What about all the other people who intended to vote for the winner from the start? Who, really, changed the outcome?

Big changes in history usually rely on lots of people showing up and participating. No one person NASA is solely responsible for the U.S. landing men on the moon. Plenty of people made vital individual contributions, but all of them relied on the contributions of many more people.

There's some great work in philosophy which argues that anyone who had a part in making a majority caused that result in some sense. So, in a close election, you are almost guaranteed to be the cause of your preferred candidate's victory: