What Are You Willing to Do?

Revolution, Trade-Offs, and the Price of Hope

When I was young, I was inordinately fond of the Star Wars movies. That was in the eighties and I was in rural Spain, meaning I couldn’t just watch the movies whenever I wanted. I had a movie storybook of A New Hope which I couldn’t actually read (my family had moved back from the UK to Spain when I was 2 and they rather foolishly did nothing to keep alive my knowledge of English). I imagine they were actually emitted in the only existing television channel we had back then some time before 1992, but I have no recollection of having watched them until my early teens. Still, I had some Star Wars toys (including a Tie fighter¹!) and a Return of the Jedi duvet which alternated on my bed with a cartoon one depicting Spiderman battling with the Green Goblin. As a teen and a grown-up, I still retain an affection, even if it was watered down by my increasing aesthetic sophistication and by how much I disliked both the prequel (which I went to the cinemas to watch) and the sequel trilogy. I did enjoy two products a lot, though: Rogue 1 and Andor.

Yesterday, an X post by Left Spinozist got me thinking, and led me to a thread which I have decided to bring here as well, with a little bit of polishing. Here it goes:

I think the reason why I like both Rogue 1 and Andor (the latter arguably better) is a tad prosaic: they are just designed for an adult audience, and I am an adult now. I’d say one way to do this is by exploring the rich and thought-provoking complexities of political trade-offs in an authoritarian world. In this, they depart from your typical pop fictional narratives for kids in which these scenarios don’t have trade-offs: Robin Hood steals the gold from the Sheriff of Nottingham and rescues Maid Marion with no casualties; the A-Team empties rounds of bullets and overturns cars in explosions, but nobody dies or is seriously injured.

It’s appealing, flattering, and childishly naïve.

One of the things you (are meant to) learn as an adult is that Reality is not a simple checkerboard of white and black squares, but rather a messy, painful landscape of trade-offs. Popular culture and even many intelligent people have a tendency to ignore this (at least in the simpler cultural products they consume), but, taking the Stars Wars background of a rebellion against what are effectively Space Nazis, one thing that should get you thinking is that when you really start an insurgency against a tyrannical government, bad things are going to happen. Even worse, you are going to be responsible for many of those bad things happening. And if, like most, you’ve internalized a deontological framework of sacred rules you believe must never be broken, then this is going to suck. Badly. Because you will be placed in the very situation that deontologists most loathe: “These are your sacred principles, but how much horror and badness has to happen before you’re willing to break them?”.

And the tragic truth is, not even your most dogmatic deontologist will be able to deny that there’s some threshold that will lead them to break the rules. How much should one be willing to do against a fascist state? Passive resistance? Violence? Killing people? Killing many people? Lying, cheating, betraying, and sometimes ruthlessly murdering your own? There is no simple, easy, or safe answer to these questions. Sometimes, life just sucks.

One way of thinking about this is to be careful around liminal thresholds. Things that feel deeply unacceptable before crossing a line can suddenly become necessary, mandatory, even virtuous afterward. But it is an extremely non-trivial and rarely obvious problem to determine where to draw the line in the sand, when that threshold is finally met. In fact, it’s even worse than that: nothing is really fixed. There’s a dynamic relationship between the severity of a given injustice and the reactions we consider proportionate or justified, so the lines just keep moving. People weigh both sides differently. And even beyond that, there’s a deep reservoir of tragedy in all of this whatever choices you make.

I think this was very effectively portrayed in Andor, especially through the character of Luthen Rael. You might justify your actions to yourself -tell yourself it's all for the cause- but you can’t help ruining yourself in the process. Once you’ve made the calculation that the current state of affairs is unacceptable and warrants all-out violence, terror, and moral compromises, once you’ve decided the good end outweighs the bad means, you’re kinda screwed.

Part of the reason you’re screwed is that you will push yourself to do things some deep, unsilenceable part of you will never forgive. Call it the Raskolnikov effect: you do horrendous things and justify them to yourself, but unless you’re a total psychopath (which most people aren’t), they will come back to haunt you. And they will diminish, or outright destroy, your chances of personal flourishing. I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me.

You’ve burnt yourself for the cause. There may be redemption for the world, but not for you.

But there’s another, more epistemic reason you’re doomed: humans must act with uncertainty and limited knowledge. You don’t know if what you do will help achieve the good you want. In fact, you don’t even have any serious way of knowing whether your initial calculation—that "good outcome A outweighs bad actions X, Y, and Z in the context of currently existing, overall bad B" is true.

Often, it isn’t. “Then we’re stupid, and we’ll die.”

This reminds me of the calculations I used to wrestle with when I was a Marxist. In fact, all of this tragic logic -the moral compromise, the doubt, the costs- is explored by one of my favorite writers back then: Bertolt Brecht. His poems and plays return again and again to these dilemmas. “To Those Born Later” (An die Nachgeborenen) is a haunting reflection on the moral compromises and bleak choices forced on those who lived through dark, oppressive times. Its implicit undertones, though, are quite sinister: all the bad things Communism is doing, the worst policies of Stalinism and terror, are justified “for the greater good”:

And yet we know:
Hatred, even of meanness
Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.

But you, when the time comes at last
And man is a helper to man
Think of us
With forbearance.

This is the stuff of Greek tragedy: people led into disaster while still having the best of intentions. It also makes for some hideous politics: De me ipso fabula narratur.

What can one say? The universe sucks, yes. We do what we can with our primitive, limited brains. We fall, and fall, and fall again.

And yet, perhaps, there is hope.

I obviously haven’t committed any crimes myself, or had to make moral trade-offs in the face of Fascism; but I was once a young Marxist who accepted, matter-of-factly, that it was okay for the wheels of Utopia to be greased by blood -even innocent blood. I am not original in this respect; I was simply following the lead of Marxist intellectuals and politicians before me whom I respected and admired.

Still, I think I will never forgive my younger self for his moral callousness. Every day, I feel I should devote at least a moment to remembering one of the millions of victims -most of them anonymous- who were cruelly crushed and murdered with my past tacit assent.

I still wrestle with the specters of my past, but sometimes I also wonder: will some future self look back on me, here and now, and feel the same contempt? Will he see my current moral choices -my compromises, my passivity, my small evils- as equally damning?

I’m not a moral realist, but I do have moral preferences: I care about truth, individual rights, freedom, the avoidance of suffering, and the dignity of others. In that sense, I overlap with the more classical-liberal wing of Effective Altruism. I don’t share their broader ambitions, their global maximization, their faith in quantifying the good. But I didn’t always care about the victims of communism either - not until I forced myself to really look. And that makes me pause. Because maybe one day, I’ll learn to see some present indifference of mine -some quiet failure to act- as part of the same pattern. Maybe what feels like moral modesty now will turn out to be cowardice, or even complicity. That possibility is why I try to keep a sliver of moral uncertainty alive. I don’t know what’s best for the world. But I know it’s worth staying open to the fear that I might be wrong.

1. As a side note, even then I had a greater appreciation of the aesthetics of evil than of the dullness of good. Vader, the Stormtroopers and Tie fighters looked cool; rebel ships and fighter were just… guys in everyday-looking clothing? Same thing with the He-Man toys. The only ones I collected and played with were Skeletor and his minions.