How to think about enemies: the example of Greenpeace
Recognising opposition without demonisation.
A large number of nice smart people do not have a good understanding of enmity. Almost on principle, they refuse to perceive people and movements as an enemy.1 They feel bad about the mere idea of perceiving a group as an enemy.
And as a result, they consistently get screwed over.
In this article, I’ll walk through the example of Greenpeace, who I wager is an enemy to most of my readers.
As an example of enemy, Greenpeace is quite an interesting one:
Many (likely most?) Greenpeace supporters are regular nice people. Few are cartoonish eco-terrorists / turbo-antisemites / hyper-accelerationists / violent-communists and whatnot.
Greenpeace cares about a few nice topics, like Climate Change and Pollution.
It consistently takes terrible stances, like against growth, nuclear energy and market solutions.
It fights its opposition, groups who don’t agree with its terrible stances.
A good understanding of enmity is needed to deal with Greenpeace.
A group of nice people will always get stuck on the fact that Greenpeace is made of nice people. It thus may be wrong, but not an actual enemy. And so, while they are stuck, Greenpeace will still fight against them and win.
A group of mean people will get tribal, and start becoming reactionary. They will make opposing Greenpeace the centre of their attention, rather than one strategic consideration among others. They will start going for reverse stupidity, and go “Climate Change is not real!”
In this essay, I’ll try to offer an alternative to overcome these two classic failures.
Greenpeace
Let’s assume that, as one of my readers, you may be hopeful in helping climate change with solutions based on technology and market mechanisms, like nuclear power, offsets or carbon capture.
If that’s you, I have bad news: Greenpeace is most certainly your enemy.
This may come as strong language, but bear with me. When I say “Greenpeace is your enemy”, I do not mean “Greenpeace is evil.”
(I, for one, do not think of myself as the highest paragon of virtue, rationality and justice. Certainly not so high that anyone opposing me is automatically stupid or evil.)
What I mean by enmity is more prosaic.
“We and Greenpeace have lasting contradictory interests. Neither side expects reconciliation or a lasting compromise in the short-term. In the meantime, both sides are players of The Game. Thus, they should predictably work explicitly against each other.”
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You may not know that Greenpeace is your enemy, but they sure do know that you are theirs. For instance, in 2019, Greenpeace USA, with +600 organisations, sent a letter to the US Congress. Their letter stated:
Further, we will vigorously oppose any legislation that: […] (3) promotes corporate schemes that place profits over community burdens and benefits, including market-based mechanisms and technology options such as carbon and emissions trading and offsets, carbon capture and storage, nuclear power, waste-to-energy and biomass energy.
From their point of view, market-based mechanisms and technology options are “corporate schemes”, and they “will vigorously oppose” them.
This is not an isolated incident.
Greenpeace doesn’t merely think that Nuclear Energy or Carbon Offsets are not the best solutions to address Climate Change.
It consistently fights against them.
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It may sound stupid to you, and you may want to make excuses for them, but this fight is a core tenet of their beliefs.
Dissing these solutions is part of their goal when they lobby policy makers. It is what they decide to invest their social capital when they work with hundreds of organisations.
They do not merely believe that our solutions are worse. They explicitly try to work against them.
In their understanding, they have enemies (which include us), and they naturally work against their enemies.
Opposing opponents (it’s in the name, duh!) is a major part of playing The Game.
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And Greenpeace has been playing The Game for quite a while.
Greenpeace is huge, its impact must not be underrated!
For green parties, the support of Greenpeace is critical. Beyond green parties, most political parties on the left fear facing too much backlash from Greenpeace.
However, I find that Greenpeace’s strength is more pernicious.
It lies in the fact that most environmentally aware people support Greenpeace. When they go work at the EPA and its non-US counterparts, they will push Greenpeace’s agenda.
This means that as they are employed there, they will purposefully slow down nuclear energy, technological solutions and market mechanisms. They will use their job to do so. I keep this in mind when I read articles like this one from the BBC, reporting on why a safety barrier for bats induced a hundred million pounds extra-cost to a UK high speed rail project.
That Greenpeace is a Player is an important fact of the world. It helps understand why nuclear power is so uncommon, why various technologies are so under-invested, or why policy makers consistently go for terrible policies around environmental topics.
Without this fact in mind, one may resort to overly cynical explanations like “It’s because people are stupid!” or “It’s because policy makers are corrupt!”. In general, I believe these are the desperate cries of weak people who understand little of the world and need excuses to keep doing nothing.
The much truer answer is that Greenpeace has been playing The Game better than us, and as a direct result, it has been winning. We should get better and stop being scrubs.
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It may feel bad to be united in having an enemy. It is low-brow, doesn’t signal a higher intellect, and makes one look tribalistic. Worse, uniting against an enemy may taint us and infect us with tribalitis.
This is superstitious thinking. Tribalism doesn’t just emerge from having an enemy. It results from not punishing our own when they act badly, and being overly harsh on enemies.
And while we are lost in such superstitions, Greenpeace is not. It is united, and it is united in being our enemy. It is aware that it is our enemy, and naturally, it fights us.
Paradoxically, Greenpeace is more aware of us as a group, than we are ourselves!
This is why, right now, we are losing to them.
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If we want to win, the first step is to recognise the situation for what it is.
We have enemies, and we must be united in fighting them.
These enemies are winning because they put more money in the fight than we do, they are more of a group than we are, they are more organised than we are, and they act more in the real world.
Their victory so far has been trivial. It is always trivial to win against someone who doesn’t know the rules. Let alone one who does not even realise they’re playing The Game. Let alone someone who has been avoiding The Game!
Greenpeace simply just has to push for their things, pour money into them, and they face almost no pushback whatsoever.
Stealing candy from a baby.
Enmity
Enmity is the quality of a situation that is marked by the presence of enemies. It is a core part of social dynamics. Without a solid understanding of Enmity, one will keep getting surprised and screwed over by the world and people.
A toy model of Enmity is playing chess. Assuming away stalemates, in Chess, there is a winner, and a loser. A good move for our opponent is a bad move for us, and vice-versa. Conversely, if our enemy is happy after one of our moves, it’s bad news for us.
At a first approximation, every dollar Greenpeace earns is a loss for us. And Greenpeace earns a lot of dollars. Greenpeace International gets a hundred million dollars per year from its national & regional organisations.2 Said national & regional organisations get even more from their supporters.
It’s not only about dollars. We lose whenever people trust Greenpeace, whenever Greenpeace’s brand gains more public awareness, whenever policy makers come to see it as an authority on environmental problems. In any of these situations, nuclear energy gets undermined.
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By the way, I made a comparison to Chess before. This was not benign. Chess is not a fistfight. It has rules and decorum.
Greenpeace being our enemy doesn’t mean that we should start gratuitously insulting them or destroying their property.
There are rules, and we play by the rules.
Some of the rules are set by the Law. Although it is sometimes warranted to go against the Law3, it is the exception, not the rule. To my knowledge, while Greenpeace has had a bad impact on the world, their actions haven’t been anywhere close to warranting such responses.
Other rules rules are set by the social world. There are many things that are memetic, that people care about, that will gain more attention and reach, etc. And all of these rules constrain our behaviour. For instance, long essays lose to impactful images and short videos. Nerdy unknown Nobel prize winner loses against super famous youtube influencers. Scissors lose against rock.
Finally, our morals set many more rules. It may feel bad and restrictive to not lie constantly, especially when we see Greenpeace being so incoherent and being seemingly rewarded for it. But morals exist for a reason, and it’s beyond the scope of this text to explain why.
More generally, everyone has their own rules. You have different rules than I do, and that’s ok. My point is more that as long as we abide by our rules, we should take our enemies seriously, and actually try to win.
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Quite a few people are weak, meek or cheems. They are pathologically averse to conflict. They reject meanness except when they are truly forced to get there. They will always insist that there are no enemies that must be fought, or that there are always alternatives.
In abstract terms, they will state that we should always assume good faith or the best from people. That it is immoral not to do so. That we never know, and that it would be beyond the pale to ever retaliate against what was a mere accident.
Conversely, they may agree on the principle, that yes, sometimes we theoretically should act against enemies. But coincidentally, they will reject all plans to actually act against enemies, and they will never provide good alternatives.
For them, “morals” is not a consideration to be factored and weighed in. If someone proposes a morally bad plan to attack an enemy, they will not come up with a morally good one, let alone a morally least bad plan.
For them, “morals” is a thought-stopper, a thought terminating cliché. It is an excuse to their cowardice and social awkwardness.
The opinion of these people should be discarded. At best, they will slow us down if given any inch of power in our structures. At worst, they will actually try to screw us over because they can’t handle any amount of Enmity, and they will resent us for introducing it to their pure ivory tower of intellectual and meditative calm.
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Some readers will finish this and go “But what about the costs of thinking in terms of Enmity? And shouldn’t we steelman Greenpeace, what if they have a point?”
This is precisely the meekness I am warning about.
If one’s first response to “You must defend yourself!” when they’re getting utterly screwed over is “What if I accidentally become too aggressive?”, then they are still missing the point. An hypothetical overcorrection is not a worry borne out of a rational analysis of the current situation: the pendulum is swinging too much in the other direction for it to be an actual concern.
It is merely the instinct of meekness to reject conflict, to go for both-sideism and doing the PR of our opponents while they are slandering us and overtly working against us.
Beyond Enmity
The Game is complex, and it cannot be reduced to Enmity. But without addressing Enmity, one doesn’t get access to the later stages.
Si vis pacem, para bellum: if you want peace, prepare for war.
If we want order, we need strong police forces.
If we want an international order, we need a large and efficient military force.
If we want to make the world a more civilised place, a safe place for the weak, the strong must be strong enough for two.
Else, we just get utterly screwed over. People will simply repeatedly exploit and defect against us. Up until the point where we get literally conquered. It is simple game theory.
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The relationship to someone who keeps exploiting us is very one-dimensional. There’s not much to it: we exist, they screw us over, rinse and repeat.
But, once we accept that we must address Enmity, take part in some conflicts, and gain offensive strength, then we can reach more interesting relationships.
The relationship to a proper enemy is not one-dimensional. An enemy isn’t just an enemy. They abide by their own rules, and these rules (for both moral and pragmatic reasons!) involve not constantly nuking and sending terrorists at each other. And the threat of retaliation disproportionately increases the value of helping each other.
Thus, there’s usually ample space to negotiate, debate, or at least talk with an enemy. Sometimes, there may even be a greater enemy (or faceless danger) looming ahead, forcing alliances of convenience.
However, we should never become complacent. The Game is still ongoing.
A wise man once said that asking polite with a gun in your hand is always better than just asking polite. Enemies tend to become much more civilised and willing to come to the tea, debate or negotiating table; when we hold at least a modicum of power.
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I am a great believer in debates and the pursuit of truth. We are respect each other, and are all worthy of respect.
In that world, when I tell people that AI risks our literal extinction, it is enough for them to take me seriously, because they know I am reasonable. That I would never say this publicly if it was not the case.
In that world, when people tell me that either white supremacy or immigration is an existential risk, it is enough for me to take them seriously, because I would know they are reasonable. That they would never say this publicly if it was not the case.
We do not live in such an ideal world.
Thus, we must deal with conflicts. Conflicts that result from differences in values, differences in aesthetics, or differences in mere risk assessments.
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There’s another way in which enemies are not just enemies.
Enemies are very rarely fully misaligned against us. Although I believe that Greenpeace had an overall effect that was negative, there are certainly some nice things that they have done from my point of view.
For instance, they have raised awareness on the issue of climate change. Could they have done it better? Certainly. But I care about many other problems that are missing their Greenpeace. When I look at them, like the fertility crisis or rising rents, I wouldn’t say they are faring better than climate change.
I feel similarly about the Far Right Focus on immigration and demographics. There hasn’t been a Far Right Focus on the problems I care about, and they have been thoroughly ignored as a result.
So, even though I believe that every additional dollar that goes to Greenpeace and Far Right organisations nets out as a loss, I would not say it is a complete loss.
This distinction, between a complete loss and a partial loss, matters! The less an enemy is misaligned against us, the more opportunities there are for compromises, negotiations, alliances, and so on.
I know that my enemies are not moral aliens with whom I share nothing. I know they are not a stupid beast that can’t be reasoned with.
Ultimately, this is how we have maintained long lasting peaces. A few actors were powerful enough to maintain a collective order, and they all understand that they stand to gain more from cooperating than trying to stupidly exploit one another and getting punished as a result.
Conclusion
This piece is addressed to people who tend to forget that they have enemies, who take pride in being quokkas who keep losing and getting exploited.
There are more coalitions that are more enemies than Greenpeace. The reason I am picking Greenpeace is that it is a pretty tame enemy.
This is on purpose: people are truly bad at maintaining a healthy notion of enmity. A notion of enmity that can entertain, at the same time, working explicitly against each other and negotiating.
And the true thing is that enmity is present everywhere to some extent. We always have some misalignment between each other; it is okay to fight based on it if we respect the rules of engagement, and especially so as we collaborate or negotiate on the matters where we agree.
On this, cheers!
To be clear, there’s also a large number of mean stupid people have trouble transcending their tribalistic and black-and-white vision of enmity.
As a result, they also make the world worse for everyone.
I don’t have any hope that this specific piece will help them lol. Thus I will simply ignore them here, and focus on the nice smart people instead.
Greenpeace Germany leads with a third of the contribution, and Greenpeace UK is the second with ~10% of the contribution.
The armed Resistance against the Nazis was justified.
Very interesting article! I'm curious what percentage of the world thinks about The Game on this level.