[marklgr]

"If this swamps the courts, all the better, because that will force legislators to act, which will then cause a debate, which will be useful to society."

Considering the amount of problems that currently exist and that forced nobody to do much, I don't think the "if <bad thing>, then <debate> and <better society>" idea is a particularly good bet.

[schoen]

It's akin to the originally Marxist notion of "heightening the contradictions".

http://acceleratethecontradictions.blogspot.com/2010/04/acce...

The theory is that some system is inherently bad or broken but people in general don't quite realize it, so if it gets worse it will be more obviously bad and then they'll then actually deal with it. Although sometimes this kind of behavior does happen (for example, someone choosing to go to a doctor only after an illness takes a serious turn for the worse), it seems like a risky theory of social change.

Maybe the powers or institutions you oppose are more entrenched or more adaptable than you expect, or maybe the public is less sympathetic to your analysis of the situation than you expect, or less motivated or more defeatist.

[jerf]

"it seems like a risky theory of social change."

It implicitly and falsely assumes that everybody will agree on what the solution is. In the presence of differences brought on not merely by "false consciousness" but by legitimate differences in opinions and desires, it fails the basic Kantian imperative to not do something that breaks society if everybody does it, because it means that everybody who disagrees with some policy, which is always somebody, should try to break things, rather than fix things. In the local vernacular, this "scales poorly".

(I am really tempted to say that Marxists are prone to this, but it would be an over-specific adjective. Truth is, almost everybody "knows" that deep down, everybody else is secretly really like them, and it's just a lack of knowledge or external influence that leads to apparently disagreements. However, the evidence overwhelmingly contradicts this belief. Even in the presence of hostile external actions or lack of knowledge, well, how do you know that you are not the one lacking knowledge or subject to external influence? And many people's value systems legitimately differ.)

[hga]

Truth is, almost everybody "knows" that deep down, everybody else is secretly really like them, and it's just a lack of knowledge or external influence that leads to apparently disagreements.

That's actually the liberal (in the US sense)/Left conceit, than man is very malleable, that simply by supplying the correct knowledge and/or external influence (AKA environment in the non-strictly biological sense) can be changed. In practice, at the extreme, those who refuse to be changed end up in a forced labor camp if they're lucky.

The position of the right was well expressed by one of my favorite history professors, who said to my and my fellow STEM students' great applause that "Original sin is an empirical observation."

As you say, "the evidence overwhelmingly contradicts this belief."