Lessons from Gnomes

“Gnomes” is the penultimate episode of the American animated comedy series South Park. It’s mostly a social commentary of capitalism, satirising the trope that large corporations care little for local communities and drive smaller independent competitors out of business. In the episode, smaller business are presented as just as capitalist and greedy as larger ones. A key theme is the tension between laudable goals and the brute reality of how the world works. I think this episode has some good lessons to teach about the tension between professional and grassroots advocacy and the danger of simple sloganeering and purity spirals.

Smugness while helping nobody

This episode challenges the stereotype that small businesses are public servants, selflessly keeping local traditions alive by making it clear that some business owners knowingly take advantage of American nostalgia for an idyllic dream of a simpler past in order to make profit. People might not want to admit it, but they can often get a smug feeling when they shop locally. There are many very good reasons to go to the village cheese monger over the large supermarket: the produce is usually better quality - though more expensive - and there genuinely is a small local economy that has a more wholesome vibe to it and likely will have a connection to the community in a way that larger businesses won’t.

But it does also feel good to think that small decisions can have a big - beneficial - impact. The risk, identified in this episode, is that the story we tell ourselves to justify the decision that made us feel good isn’t true. What if the wholesome local coffee shop is just as unscrupulous as the large chain? Worse, what if the large corporation is actually doing more good for the local community by providing employment, investment, and access to goods that would otherwise be unavailable? None of that could be true - I’m not an expert - but if it were, it might not be wholly appropriate to feel good about where one has chosen to shop.

But the real danger is not in feeling good about oneself; it’s in feeling superior to others. If you have been feeling quite smug about only getting your coffee at the local cafe, looking down on people who frequent that global chain because they are contributing to exploitation and the destruction of local communities and you - in your purity - have promised never to cross that line, you may not want to hear about how the large chain has employed many more people in your community, how it has a global environmental and outreach scheme that seem to genuinely be doing good, or how the local cafe has some questionable business practices and a less than stellar environmental record. It might feel better to disparage the more successful company and defend the local cafe, regardless of what the facts on the ground say.

It might also be comforting to focus only on the decisions that one has control over. If you are comparatively powerless to bring about meaningful change, but still feel strongly about the importance of that change, small decisions are really very important to avoid despair. The reality might be that where shops has no significant impact on the world, or that there is no real difference between the local cafe and the chain, but if that were true then it would make these choices meaningless or ineffectual, and what then? Better to believe the untrue things and forcefully - even angrily - defend them.

Underpants plans

This episode of South Park is probably most famous for the half-baked business that the gnomes come up with. A subplot of this episode involves a group of gnomes that sneak around the town stealing people’s underpants. The main cast have been tasked with coming up with a presentation about whether or not the town should pass a law to ban “Harbucks” a large coffee chain that is competing with a local business. The boys ask the gnomes for help and the gnomes oblige, claiming to be business experts. The have a three-phase plan:

1. Collect underpants

2. ?

3. Profit

In the aftermath of this episode, the “plan lacking a second stage” became widely used as a metaphor for poorly-thought-out business plans or political strategies. It’s pretty obvious when put this way but the world is replete with people advocating for an equivalent of “Profit” without even a first stage. Demanding X without anything approaching a plan to achieve it is nothing more than sloganeering. If X is something good, demanding it can signal to those around you that you have the right moral framework, but it won’t on its own do much to contribute to achieving X.

A separate problem, perfectly encapsulated by the underpants gnomes, is having a half-baked plan. This can be particularly pernicious when one is unwilling to make any changes because to do so would jeopardise the achievement of X, even though this plan has not worked and is unlikely to work.

A good example of this is communist utopia. If you have identified a serious problem in how capitalism leads to alienation and exploitation, you may look to a communist utopia as a goal. If all you do is demand a communist utopia from anyone who will listen, you are unlikely to achieve it. Worse though is if you come up with a half-baked plan that involves:

1. Violent revolution

2. ?

3. Communist utopia

If you can’t explain, in detail, how a violent revolution will actually achieve a communist utopia, your plan lacks a second stage. You may be strongly committed to the view that a violent revolution is necessary to achieve a communist utopia, but that will not be sufficient and it might be wrong. People unconvinced by this plan might strongly agree with the need for a communist utopia, they just haven’t been convinced that violent revolution will achieve it.

In an even more fraught situation, imagine two groups, both of which want to achieve a communist utopia, one has been working effectively to do so from within the existing democratic system, making slow but gradual gains for workers rights and improving their lives. They have a fully thought through plan that involves the creation of advocacy organisations that can work within existing democratic structures to influence law and policy. They see this as a slow and gradual process of undermining the influence of capitalism while making gains for workers rights.

The other group sees the first as a bunch of sellouts because they have abandoned the violent revolution. They will see any argument that violent revolution is not the best way to achieve a communist utopia as a sign that someone doesn’t really want a communist utopia at all. The underpants communists are doing nothing that would actually lead to a communist utopia themselves, nor have they done anything to improve the lives of workers, but they are very good at critiquing others for their language or their choices to work within a flawed system. Worse, their calls for a violent revolution are likely to distract from or frustrate the efforts of those actually making gains for workers rights.

This combination of smugness while helping nobody and underpants planning that actively gets in the way of meaningful change is understandable, but infuriating. Grassroots advocacy is essential. The people engaged in it are the beating heart of any successful political movement. They give up their time, their labour, and their money to raise awareness for pressing social issues. Without them, professional advocacy organisations would be nothing. But without professional advocacy, grassroots advocacy can achieve nothing.

The reality is that the professional advocates are more likely to be aware of and attuned to the political realities that must constrain behaviour if there is to be any real progress towards a shared aim. The last thing that is needed in a social or political movement is for the grassroots and the professionals to turn on each other. That can happen when the professionals get smug themselves, concluding from the fact that they are actively bringing about change that they are better and know better. But it can also happen when purity is valued over prudence. Sometimes it’s more important to be effective than it is to be seen to be right, especially if the charge of impurity is that the person focusing on prudence clearly doesn’t care about the people whose interests are being advocated for. Organised labour movements that work within democratic structures have done more for the rights of workers than any random angry Leninist on social media, no matter how much the Leninist tries to convince you to hold the revolutionary line…