So what proportion (or
percentage) of a population must be engaged with a campaign in order for it
to be successful?
Lynne McTaggart
cites, in Chapter Six of “The Power of Eight” (Amazon
- author page here),
a figure of “the square root of 1% of a population”, from studies by the
controversial Transcendental Meditation
movement which - surprisingly (to me) - apparently appeared to have a sound methodology,
and sets out to test this, with some good results.
Dr Steven M Greer
and the CE-5 movement
cite 1% (I haven’t tracked down the source of that yet - will add it here if
I do [I’m fairly sure the source has been mentioned in at least one of the
films] ).
Erica
Chenoweth and Maria
J. Stephan
have looked at statistical aspects of violent and non-violent campaigns, and
found that violent campaigns have ~26% chance of success, but nonviolent
campaigns have ~53% chance of success. In their book, “Why Civil Resistance Works”
(pub. Amazon),
they discuss a number of aspects contributing to this, and one is the size of
the campaign, with non-violent campaigns having larger numbers of participants.
Figure 2.1 provides a great illustration of this, but the units (“per
capita, logged”) make no sense to me whatsoever - I think it is based on
the statistical distribution of the data that was analysed, but it doesn’t
address my question here, which is: what proportion (or percentage) of a
population must be engaged with a campaign in order for it to be successful?
Erica Chenoweth’s
data is available through her website
(at https://www.ericachenoweth.com/research),
and I have downloaded two of the sets of data, and done my own analysis of one
of the sets of data, with the results tabulated below.
The overall data,
based on only those campaigns that were non-violent and had at least partial
success, indicates that the average of those movements engaged around 2.6% of
the populations they were working in (the book explains some of the
restrictions and assumptions of this data), and a median of 0.5% - which I
will describe, using a grossly simplification, as being that engaging 0.5% of a
group gives you around a 50% chance of success.
However, there are
some very large proportions in some of those movements: since I’m interested in
the lower end of this proportion, I’ve excluded the larger groups, and it now
looks like:
·
average 0.8 - 1.2%, so both Lynne McTaggart and
Steven Greer are probably reasonable in the bases that they have adopted;
·
the 50:50 mark is around 0.4 - 0.5%.
Reports
on this
work comment that civil resistance movements that engage at least 3.5% of
the population have never failed to topple a dictator - so that tells us what
the upper limit probably is.
What does all this -
particularly the lower percentages - suggest in terms of numbers. Well, see
the table below, based on my my nation, my home state, my home city, and a
combination of those who decided to identify themselves as Pagan or Wiccan in
the 2016 Census (see here).
The optimistic view
is that we could need as few as 9,000 people to change the world. My opinion is
that it is more realistic to plan on changing smaller groups, and then working
up to changing the world. The upper limit is 1 in 28 (i.e., 3.5%) - by that stage, if the
work is properly coordinated and organised (and on that, read this
book), successful change should be inevitable.
For some context,
most writing I’ve seen on the participation of women in Parliaments suggest
that at least 30% need to be female for change to happen. I’ve included that to
suggest we don’t get hung up on numbers, and, as Winston Churchill once said,
occasionally look at the results.
In any case, it
starts with YOU, Dear Reader. I would suggest that you don’t
proselytise, however (that tends to be very off-putting) - just be the change
you want to see, but be honest about problems along the way in order to
maintain your credibility.
And remember: we're in this for the long hail that it is.
