By Jesse D. Palmer
At times like these as mainstream institutions fall in line like dominos and people stare into screens feeling overwhelmed, bleak and powerless, the underground and a broad-based popular uprising is the last guardrail left — this is our moment!
Authoritarians can seize control of governments, corporations, universities, the non-profit industrial complex and mainstream media, but they can’t control the leaderless rabble. Autocratic power isn’t infinite — their power depends on convincing everyone it is. Bullies pretend to be strong and tough, but ultimately they’re weak and scared. As the screws tighten, we’re all faced with a choice: stay silent to try to avoid retribution, or rise up before it gets even worse and we have nothing left to lose.
Retreating into isolation, depression and fear — tuning out the news, withdrawing into personal life, indulging cynicism and denial — only makes you feel worse, more afraid, more immobilized. A spiritual and psychological race to the bottom.
Despots take the power people give them. Each act of anticipatory obedience further decreases liberty and consolidates their control. Only solidarity and collective defiance can stop tyranny.
To build solidarity, we need to start with the basics — building and strengthening day-to-day interpersonal relationships with those around us based on trust, cooperation and sharing. We’re out of practice spending time face-to-face, which is crucial to authentic connections. Fuck smartphone communication and connection. We need to throw more parties, drop by after work, hang out, invite folks to dinner, strike up conversations with strangers, go out more often. From personal relationships comes complex overlapping webs of community — leaderless, grassroots and vast.
And yet community isn’t enough. Even with community it’s easy to flounder about — submerged under a flood of simultaneous atrocities and distractions.
To converge, we need to start being for something rather than just being against whatever our oppressors try. Solely being a resistance allows our enemies to ambush us at our weak points rather than allowing us to attack on our own terms. Defending the status quo and its institutions is a demoralizing dead end when our lives have grown worse and worse under the existing order. We demand something new and better.
To articulate a positive vision, we need to emphasize values and a way of being that is heartfelt and simple. A 15 point program of single issues and demands won’t bring us together.
What we’re for isn’t misery or blaming shit on vulnerable people or dividing the world up between who is really human, who is really American, who matters and who doesn’t matter. It isn’t about having power, wealth, speed, efficiency, spaceships, computers, mansions, shopping malls, the finest clothes or any of that shit.
Uniting around fairness, tolerance, pleasure and delight can counteract oligarchy. Not because life is always lovely but because it isn’t, but it should be. We need a reclaimed people’s populism that blames billionaires, landlords and bosses for our problems.
These values are normal and reasonable — trying to make yourself a king who celebrates cruelty is creepy and bizarre. How about we ridicule, pity and laugh at these fools, not fear them? Let’s figure out outlandish ways to do so in public with high visibility, with our friends and neighbors, at work — all the time so everyone can see — spreading contempt that can help reverse dread and panic. These bozos don’t have a coherent world view except that they should have all the power. And by the way, nature bats last — climate change doesn’t care who believes in it.
We need to try new things, communicate what we learn to others and pay attention to what others try that is working. We are a network like an ecosystem. In an ecosystem different creatures fill different roles, but they complement each other and they relate to each other so the sum is greater than the parts. Rather than infighting and thinking we have a monopoly on the best strategy, let’s be humble, tolerant and loving of other rebels who are trying different things. None of us has to do it all ourselves. It’s not all about going to fucking boring meetings, but it’s not all about going to fun parties either. We need both. (Okay, the meetings shouldn’t be so stifling. We should serve yummy food and make them social events.)
There’s no way to build a free world without taking personal risks because we can’t unite broadly with others only in a secret, security-culture-based fashion. Looking at the terrible trends that feel ascendant, radicals have to look in the mirror about the ways we’ve grown so timid — not to make ourselves feel bad but to figure out how to do better. Thirty years ago, we demanded total system change and revolution — sure, doing so may have been unrealistic. But more recently, talented communities shoot too low — mostly pouring energy into local reformist feel-good projects. Let’s demand the world we want and need — fundamentally reorganized without artificial scarcity and arbitrary hierarchy — where everyone is free to develop their full potential as they see fit and where we understand ourselves as part of nature.
Mutual aid means collaborative sharing of resources and services — not charity efforts directed at the poor that end up emphasizing class divisions and dynamics. I love the idea that we begin to disconnect from the collapsing economic system by sharing what we have while simultaneously meeting more of our own needs accepting what others are sharing — from each according to ability, to each according to their needs.
We can best push back when we create a world worth living in — that heals toxic masculinity and all its rotten offshoots. In all this, I want to build up my tenderness, my emotional vulnerability and my ability to stay present, not wallow in fear. The repressed, hard, unfeeling version of masculinity has got to go. Otherwise, we’re just going to replace one form of dystopia with another.
Even feeling grief can be good because it means we’re feeling. But I’m not interested in a world full of grief. What I want is wonder and awe. And love. You can call me a Berkeley hippie but it really does all come back to love, which is the glue that can hold us together and which corporations and computers can never steal, commercialize or even understand.
Courts, Congress and other institutions will not save us. We have to stop waiting and hoping and take matters into our own hands. Uprisings and general strikes come out of the blue with no warning like earthquakes. History is full of rebellions that defeated seemingly all-powerful tyrants. They weren’t organized by leaders or groups but arose spontaneously from the collective consciousness.
Millions of people are struggling with tough emotions and choices — “do I keep my head down to protect my career and my family?” If you want to protect the people, places and ways of life you love, you need to gather the courage to fight. If we stay silent hoping to avoid danger, it’s just going to make the next terrible thing worse and more likely.
Let’s act together with ferocious love for ourselves, those around us and the earth.