I made up the “Zani score” as “… a measure of how concerned one should be about nascent entities or organizations. It tries to measure social structures that, 999/1000 times go nowhere, but 1/1000 times lead, given chance and circumstance, to very bad things…”
I imagined it in the context of an industrial society, but I asked a friend who’s an expert on the Rwandan genocide to try to apply the metric to that setting:
- A belief that the ends justify the means, or, in other words, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”. NOT SURE.
- A sense of grievance and injustice. YES.
- A charismatic leader. NOT REALLY. NO ONE WAS CHARISMATIC, BUT AUTHORITY WAS TOTAL.
- Celebration and admiration of violence. WELL, SINCE 1990. IT WAS SPECTACLE FOR SOME.
- Tribal or ethnic boundaries; a division into the “chosen” and the “other”. YES.
- Anti-intellectual, in particular anti-geek. YES, INTELLECTUALS WERE AMONG THE FIRST KILLED.
- Denial of skepticism. Skeptics are outcast, dissent is forbidden. NOT SURE.
- Welcoming and affirmation of the convert. NONCONFORMITY WAS NEVER ENCOURAGED GENERALLY.
- Membership alone is proof of virtue. IN TERMS OF ETHNICITY.
- Scorn for the weak; denial of pity or sympathy for the other. NOT SURE.
The only real conflict to the model was that the leader of the genocide was not particularly charismatic — but since he had total authority that wasn’t much of an obstacle. There are a number of unknowns, but not bad for something that was designed with a very different society in mind.
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