Against "Stochastic Terrorism"

“Stochastic terrorism” is the idea that if you spread fear and mistrust against a target, then eventually people will commit violence against that target, and it will be your fault, even if you never specifically said the words “you should commit violence”.

Some other popular examples of the concept:

• Nativists spread fear and mistrust about Muslim immigrants, and then racists go on shooting sprees in mosques.

• The #Resistance insists that Donald Trump would destroy democracy, and then various people try to assassinate Donald Trump.

• Conservatives spread fear and mistrust about transgender people, and then bigots commit hate crimes against transgender people.

• Woke people say the police are racist and brutal, and then other woke people murder police officers.

• Socialists call health insurance companies greedy and accuse them of blocking life-saving treatment, and then Luigi Mangione murdered a health insurance CEO.

• AI safety activists say that Sam Altman’s AI could destroy humanity, and then a guy threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house.

• Liberals said that Charlie Kirk was a hatemonger who was driving Americans apart, and then an assassin murdered Charlie Kirk.

• The pro-life movement describes abortion as murder, and then pro-life activists assassinated abortion doctors and pro-choice politicians.

The “stochastic terrorism” concept is near-unique in how effectively it can be discredited merely by listing many examples of its use together in the same place. Almost no one supports a blanket prohibition on criticizing of all of these different groups of people. “Stochastic terrorism” mostly gets deployed opportunistically, by people who either are too blinkered to realize that the same argument could be leveraged against their own speech, or who hope you’re too blinkered to realize that.

(in fact, one could argue that accusing someone of stochastic terrorism is itself stochastic terrorism! Here in America, we consider it justified to kill terrorists before they can threaten us further. Reclassifying criticism as terrorism implies it is potentially legitimate to apply the same norm to any especially harsh critics!)

Still, a sliver of concept-users make some fig-leaf argument that the cases they approve of are different than the cases they disapprove of. Some proposed principles:

You’re allowed to criticize these groups, but not to criticize them harshly. Again, I challenge anyone to fully own up to the implications of this. You’re not allowed to criticize Donald Trump or police brutality harshly? You’re not allowed to criticize abortion doctors or Muslim immigration harshly? Even if you bite all of these bullets, I still think you disagree with the general case. Tomorrow, some lunatic could shoot up a KKK meeting, and then you wouldn’t be allowed to criticize the KKK harshly.

You’re allowed to criticize these groups harshly, but not using special emotional or dehumanizing words. Maybe there are some things you shouldn’t say even about the KKK - “they are Satanic cockroaches unworthy of life” might cross that line. But this is a motte-and-bailey: most claimed examples of ‘stochastic terrorism’ don’t come close to that bar. Nor does this match what really leads to violence: Luigi Mangione didn’t kill an insurance executive because he heard the word “cockroach” too many times. He killed an insurance executive because he had strong opinions about what insurance executives do wrong, and these opinions didn’t hinge on slight changes in the emotional resonance of the words being used.

You’re allowed to criticize policies, but not individuals. Okay, so somebody says that allowing immigration from the Middle East is destroying America, but avoids saying the specific words “and I hate individual Muslims”. Then someone else listens to their message and shoots up a mosque. Or somebody says abortion is murder, but avoids criticizing individual abortion doctors, but someone else listens to them and kills an abortion doctor. How has this made things any better? It totally misses the point of what the phrase “stochastic terrorism” is intended to describe and why it’s bad. Also, I want to criticize individuals! I don’t like Donald Trump, and I understand some conservatives didn’t like Joe Biden. How can we express those dislikes if we’re not allowed to criticize individuals?

You’re allowed to criticize people harshly, but certain categories of complaint - that they’re trying to end democracy, or they’re literally Hitler, or that they’re destroying the world - ought to be out of bounds. Some people propose this as a special protection for Donald Trump or Sam Altman - it’s okay to say people are bad, but saying that Trump is becoming a dictator, or Altman risks destroying the world, are such strong statements that they naturally suggest violence as a response.

This ignores the actual pattern of violence. Trump and Altman are both still alive, but plenty of police officers, Muslims, and abortion doctors are dead - not to mention Charlie Kirk. None of these people were accused of seeking tyranny or destroying humanity, just of normal crimes like brutality or extremism or having a dumb bad podcast. It seems strange to rule out forms of criticism which have not resulted in death, while granting a pass to the forms that result in death regularly, on the grounds that perhaps the former could result in death.

But also, many past politicians have tried to end democracy; one was even literally Hitler. Part of how Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, and the like took power was that not enough people saw the danger early and spoke out about it. If we ban saying that a politician might be really bad, or destroy democracy, or commit genocide, or even be literally Hitler, simply because it might inspire assassins, then we abandon our early warning system against future tyranny. It seems unwise to institute a rule against ever considering something which could definitely happen, and which in fact happens all the time.

As for the end of the world, it hasn’t happened yet, but it seems like the sort of thing that might happen in the future. Again, it seems unwise to demand that nobody ever point out that there might be potential consequences to handing General Jack D. Ripper full control of the nuclear arsenal.

You should be allowed to criticize powerful people, like Donald Trump or Sam Altman, but not weak people, like Muslims. This makes approximately the opposite recommendation as the last category, but I think is equally pernicious. Some large groups of people are up to no good. You can decide for yourself which ones they are - Trump voters, communists, Boomers, immigrants, racists, police officers, abortion doctors, health insurance executives. Some of these groups might have higher-than-average median income, and others might have lower. Some might be parts of politically-favored blocs, and others politically-disfavored ones. But they all die if you shoot them. It’s vacuous to tell Brian Thompson’s family that they can’t complain about his murder just because health insurance CEOs are a privileged group - especially given that health insurance CEOs now have a higher death-from-political-violence-per-capita rate than Muslims or transgender people.

The liberal solution is none of these: it’s that it’s always legitimate to criticize any person or group however strongly, and never legitimate to use extra-state violence against them; if a violent act occurs, it’s 100% the fault of the perpetrator, and 0% the fault of other people who previously criticized the victim.

(separate from this, I think it’s a useful discussion norm to avoid being too vitriolic or hyperbolic in your language, except perhaps once in a blue moon to make the point that you care about this issue so much that it’s your one exception to your non-vitriol policy. But if someone fails to follow this discussion norm, their penalty is being self-sorted to spaces that have bad discussion norms, not being held responsible for any resulting acts of violence.)

This liberal solution isn’t trivial. It requires the separate liberal norm of always being against extra-state violence - a norm which is currently less than entirely secure. 39% of young people have a favorable opinion of Luigi Mangione, and during the George Floyd protests several mainstream newspapers flirted with condoning violence in the name of racial justice. If your worldview says that it’s acceptable to lynch sufficiently bad people, then yes, accusing people of being bad is equivalent to calling for their murder, and you have no alternative but to make sure nobody is allowed to criticize anyone you like. This puts you in the position that Winston Churchill called “riding a tiger from which you dare not dismount”; you had better invest all your energy into making extremely sure that you and your friends are the ones calling the shots about who can and can’t be criticized. It sounds exhausting, which is why the liberal solution - bilateral controlled tiger-dismounting - is the choice of most functional societies.

I admit there are many intricacies and edge cases, for example:

• Most societies distinguish between simple criticism and true incitement to violence (for example, “so-and-so is a bad person and I suggest you murder him, I hear he will be at 123 Target Street tomorrow, and that Glocks are a pretty good type of gun”). The boundary here is fuzzy, but I think US courts do a good job of navigating it.

• Some European countries distinguish between permitted normal speech and hate speech (for example, “all Examplestanis are ugly stupid vermin”), on the grounds that the latter actually does encourage violence if left alone for too long. As a red-blooded American, I don’t agree with this distinction, but having it be a specific legally-demarcated category at least seems stable and predictable, and so less bad than the “stochastic terrorism” ploy.

• I admitted that there should be a discussion norm against some especially vitriolic criticism; a line beyond which I would think less of a person, even if I didn’t want their speech banned. But most stochastic-terrorism-sayers don’t propose to ban the speech involved, just to create a social norm against it. And “think less of X” and “create a social norm against X” are effectively interchangeable, since social norms are more-or-less defined as things that people think less of you for violating. So am I conceding the whole argument there?

• Probably there are some cases where extra-state violence is acceptable, for example assassinating Hitler or overthrowing an illegitimate government. I don’t want to rule this out by fiat, and I think it’s wise not to discuss the conditions permitting them too specifically; the best I can do is say that at least this limits the damage by only legitimizing attacks against powerful state targets, which can usually take care of themselves.

I think that accepting these edge cases and solving them with normal law and philosophy is a better bet than maintaining the “stochastic terrorism” concept and trying to hold onto some sort of topsy-turvy opinion on what kinds of criticism are vs. aren’t allowed.