Over the past couple of days, I've been increasingly seeing best friends fighting over who to support in the Student Protest in India. People supporting the movement cannot justify the leadership's actions. The people not supporting the movement cannot justify why the cause itself is not valid. Supporters are calling non-supporters Idiots and slaves, while the non-supporters are calling the supporters Anti nationals. There's a third type of people too, the ones who try to be in the center. These poor people are unfortunately the most pathetic, according to the above two.
In the hopes of getting the hate from just one side, rather than both, I picked sides too. Which side I picked is not relevant to what I am about to share, but how different minds perceive it. I guess for this article, I am going to try to put myself in the third and most hated category, so here we go. Spoiler alert, no side is an idiot. So if you are not talking to your friends over this debate, call 'em up.
The act of supporting a movement is not that straightforward. There are a lot of factors to take into account. Among those, let's focus on the two major ones - Leadership and the Cause.
Leaders act as a proxy for the movement. As I stated earlier, evaluating a movement is difficult. One must already have a lot of context about the past and the present, and then have some intuition about the consequences of the movement. Most people don't have it. So they use some simple rules to do it.
One of the strongest is: "If I can't evaluate the movement directly, I'll evaluate the people leading it." Psychologists call this source credibility. If the messenger appears dishonest, people infer that the message itself is less trustworthy even when the message is objectively sound. Nearly every person in the pre-independence wanted the country to be independent. However, they often differed on whether leaders like Mahatma Gandhi or Subhash Chandra Bose best represented that cause. Some people see Greta Thunberg as an authentic advocate, while some dismiss the movement by criticizing her.
Supporting a movement is also a social signal. People know others may interpret "You support this movement" as "You support these leaders." If they strongly dislike or distrust the leadership, they may avoid public support to avoid that association.
Different people have different mechanisms for risk calculation. Supporting a movement always involves uncertainty. One person asks: "If I don't support this movement, a good cause may fail." Another asks: "If I support this movement, bad leaders may gain power." Both agree on the cause. They disagree about which risk is greater.
Politics is not only about goals. It's also about how power will be used, who will benefit, and whether promises will be kept. A questionable leader is risky. Even if the cause is right, people tend to think whether they can trust the leaders to fight for it. This does not mean, they are rejecting the cause entirely. Their evaluation leans more towards weighing the leaders.
The cause-centric group, on the other hand, deliberately tries separate the messenger from the message. They believe that leaders are temporary while causes are permanent. A flawed leader does not automatically invalidate the underlying principle. Many people around the world supported ending apartheid in South Africa regardless of whether they agreed with every decision or leader within the movement. One more rather nerdy example is the FOSS (Free Open Source Software) movement. Millions of developers continue contributing to free software like Linux because they believe in open-source software even though they might not personally admire the project's founders. Leadership changes, maintainers come and go, but the underlying philosophy keeps the community together.
Cause-centered individuals perform a different risk calculation. They understand the possibility of flawed leadership, but believe that abandoning a worthy cause might produce even greater long-term harm. To them, leaders can be replaced, corrected, or held accountable, whereas opportunities for social progress may be much harder to recover once lost. Cause-centered supporters recognize that if they waited for flawless leaders, many worthwhile causes would never gain momentum.
I would deliberately try not to conclude anything from this since it fundamentally depends on the evaluation criteria you have for supporting any political movement. Any movement is built on top of motive and leadership. To me, a good balance for both set of people is a mark of a thriving community.