Visible Personal Sacrifice (VPS) is the phenomenon of people first getting enthusiastic about a cause and then showing off their enthusiasm by engaging in highly visible ways of sacrificing to support it. A 21st century example is supporting recycling campaigns by putting recycling bins everywhere.
The bright side of VPS is that it is a grassroots way of bringing attention to and supporting new causes that modern day conditions call for. The dark side of this enthusiasm happens when it ignores both tolerance and circumstance. When VPS enthusiasts get too evangelical they want everyone in the community to sacrifice as they are doing, and want their government to put teeth behind that desire. This is VPS gone wild.
Visible Personal Sacrifice is when a person is very public about the sacrificing they are doing. Note that the public element is important. If the sacrifice is being done quietly and personally it is personal sacrifice, but not the visible personal sacrifice this section is about.
When I studied history I encountered a graphic version of VPS: the “Buy Bonds” posters from both WWI and WWII. The goal of these posters, of which there were hundreds, was to have Americans of the day sacrifice some immediate pleasure in order to purchase war bonds and help our boys fighting overseas. In addition to the bond buying exhortations, there were various rationing and recycling programs to do the same. Although an inconvenience, people of those eras tolerated rationing and recycling as a way to help the boys. When the wars ended Americans were quite delighted to be done with all the rationing, garbage sorting, and walls covered with patriotic posters.
Fast forward to the 1980's and these same kind of recycling programs started to become popular again. This time to save our world, first from pollution, then from resource exhaustion. It was kind of eerie for me, watching the ecology movement produce campaigns similar to those used 40 to 60 years earlier. Fast forward to the 2010's - these campaigns have become even more vigorous in some segments of the American community.
Well, the intention is good, and the feeling is good. But the resurgence of recycling programs is a text book example of where good intentions and good feelings are not automatically producing good results. This next section outlines some disconnects between good intention and harsh reality.
The first indication I had that heart-thinking was controlling the modern day recycling movement was when then-VP Al Gore complained that companies were cheating when they advertised their product had [X] recycled material when in fact all the recycling had taken place inside the factory. “No, no. Consumers have to touch it before it counts as recycling,” he declared. And that's why today we have odd wording i.e. “this product contains [X] post-consumer waste”. My thought at the time was - why should it matter? If it's recycling, it's recycling!
Another example of heart-thinking is the issue of paper versus plastic shopping bags. The logic behind this is that plastic degrades very slowly and is therefore bad for the environment - use paper bags. But the truth is, paper will last for centuries when it is deep in a landfill where cellulose decomposing bacteria can't live on it. It lasts as long as plastic. (Archeologists will one day be delighted when they find it.) Add to that the fact that paper bags weigh ten times what plastic bags do, and you end up with a net effect of paper bags filling the landfill ten times as fast as plastic bags. In sum, this is a case where heart-thinking is disconnected from harsh reality.
Yet another example is sorting garbage at the wastebasket rather than at the landfill. We now have the technology to sort trash at the landfill just as efficiently as at the wastebasket. The advantage of doing it at the landfill is that what is sorted can quickly be adapted to market conditions. For instance, if demand for a particular kind of paper, or a particular kind of glass, rises or falls, the sorting can be adapted. This can't happen at the wastebasket. Whereas wastebasket sorting is stroking VPS feelings, it is not helping the world.
One last example of VPS is the evangelistic thinking behind outlawing incandescent light bulbs on the grounds that florescent bulbs are so much better. Florescents use less electricity, but because they contain mercury they are a beast to dispose of in a properly green way. This is a text book example of evangelical VPS making a poor choice. It also shows intolerance at work, as in, “Your way is not the right way”.
These are examples of where Visible Personal Sacrifice hasn't been well thought out. These also show that harsh reality has little to do with what is popular in the various movements which pick up VPS traits.
The recycling arena is high-profile VPS. One of the biggest wastes, however, comes from an example that is virtuous, but too low-profile for VPS thinkers to recognize its value.
The VPS universe has a big blind-spot when it comes to seeing the virtue in the on-going improvements in efficiency and productivity that happen all through the business world. Better efficiency and productivity mean that goods and services are made with less resources. This is the same as wasting less. These improvements are going on quietly and steadily all the time. Improvements are encouraged by free market competition because efficiency and productivity are virtues in the business world. But these steady and dramatic improvements in how we use our resources get zero recognition from the VPS crowd. To channel Al Gore from his VP days, “If it didn't go through the recycle bin, it doesn't count.”
This is an example that would greatly benefit from better head-thinking about the goal of the sacrificing. Another form of better thinking is keeping tolerance and circumstance in mind before leaping on an evangelical bandwagon.
The biggest expenses, the biggest goat sacrificing, of the VPS movement concern the loss of tolerance and the lack of recognizing that there are many different circumstances in the world. (Remember the condemned man and the cigarette?) What works well for controlling pollution in the US is not going to work well in China, yet, because Chinese culture has not reached US prosperity levels. As it does, it will be able to afford more protection for its air and water. China is in a different circumstance than the US is. Fortunately, China’s circumstance is changing for the better and pollution is now something Chinese people and governments are paying more attention to. This 13 Aug 14 Xinhua news article, “Beijing Curing ‘Urban Diseases’”, tells of China's growing concern. From the article, “Beijing is making great efforts to cure the “urban diseases,” such as congestion and air pollution, which have afflicted the megacity for a long period of time, the Beijing Daily reported. Beijing launched more than 100 technical transformation projects on environmental protection at the end of June this year, aiming to curb the city's air pollution caused by industrial emissions. These projects cover control of volatile organic compounds, desulphurization, denitration and dust elimination.”
Visible Personal Sacrifice is an emotionally powerful way of thinking. As prosperity grows, giving us all more choices, VPS can be supported in more and more elaborate ways. It gives warm feelings, and it's easy to get evangelical about VPS causes. But it has blind-spots. And if good-head thinking is not employed along with the warm and fuzzy, wasteful choices will be made. Worse, because of its evangelical streak, VPS choices, good or bad, can become intolerance when the rest of the community is forced to act the same way.
Examples of enthusiastic VPS are all around us. Modern forms in the US are often linked with prosperous urban cultures. This 27 Dec 13 WSJ article, “Andy Kessler: Living the California Nanny-State Life”, describes various ways VPS thrives in Silicon Valley. This 19 Oct 13 WSJ article, “De Blasio Would Seek Council Approval for Soda Ban” by Michael Howard Saul, describes the War on Soda in NYC - a high profile example of evangelical VPS happening there. Reason Magazine web site routinely gives examples of Nanny Statism, a form of governing which is spawned by evangelical VPS thinking.