Why Beating Authoritarianism Takes the One Thing Americans Might Not Have Anymore
What’s the Opposite of a Hero? A Chain Reaction
“What can I do?!” Or, the other version: “I’m doing all I can! What do you expect me to do!” I point out America’s collapsing — and Americans (at least some of them) are doing terrible, terrible things( to little children, no less). And the answer comes in, fast and furious, indignant, surprised, unhappy, sometimes a little offended.
Here’s a secret. Sorry. I don’t want you to be a hero. Fighting authoritarianism isn’t done by heros. Authoritarianism is defeated by the opposite of heros. What’s the opposite of a hero? No, not a villain — he’s just the hero’s shadow, his foil, a hero in drag. The opposite of a hero is something else entirely. A chain reaction.
So I don’t expect you — in fact I don’t want you — to “do” anything. If anything, I want you to calm down, let this strange American need to “do something!” go for a second, and reflect on a paradox, which cuts to the heart of American collapse. Then we can come back to what to “do”.
To stop what’s going on in America right now will take collective action. But Americans can’t take collective action. Not only have all the mechanisms for collective action been eradicated, removed, and excised from American society — most Americans don’t even seem to know what the phrase means. And that is because they subscribe to myth of personal responsibility, which has broken them as a people, with the ability to act collectively, but I’ll come back to that.
What would it take to stop all this — and by “this”, I suppose I mean something like a rogue government in the hands of supremacists and extremists putting infants on trial? Self-evidently, a march on the weekend twice a year hasn’t done anything at all. What does that tell us? It’s not powerful enough. But in what sense? Well, it doesn’t crash or disrupt anything much, does it? Monday morning — everyone back to work. But what power is, at a bare, raw minimum, is the ability to deny what at least you cannot change.
So. It will probably take what it always taken. Something like this. Life coming to a grinding halt. People walking out of work — and not going back. Trade ceasing. The gears of commerce screeching into silence. Participation in basic civic life simply stopping, whether school, church, and so on. All that is what it means for a society to respond to social-scale malfunction with social-scale refusal. What does social scale refusal do? It revokes consent. It says: “not in our names. We didn’t agree to this, we don’t endorse this, and we will simply shut society down until it stops, too.” Would you agree with all that, roughly? So: collective action — a chain reaction that can stop a society, and also, therefore, stop the dysfunctional things in it.
Am I calling for national walkouts and strikes and boycotts? Not at all. I’m not “calling for” anything. I am simply observing, so let me make my observation clearer and sharper.
When I say, “Hey! Things are going badly wrong in America. You guys are going to be judged by history as a terrible and foolish people!”, and you reply, “hey! I’m trying to take responsibility for it! I’m doing all I can! What else do you want from me!?” — while you might think you’re doing something noble and useful and wonderful, the truth is exactly the opposite. You have missed the point, the lesson, and the problem entirely, totally, and absolutely.
Social scale malfunction isn’t your “individual responsibility”. Therefore, it isn’t something that your “individual action” can either fix, mitigate, or resolve, either. Exactly the reverse is true. Social scale malfunction is a society’s responsibility — only collective action can undo it. So no amount of random, disjointed, jumbled up individual action, responsibility, whatever, will do anything at all — it’s like trying to fight a tsunami with white noise. With me so far? The problem is that when I say that, I’d bet, 99.9% of Americans will have no clue whatsoever what I mean. Probably, you still don’t. I don’t mean that in a judgmental way — just an observational one. So let me make it clearer.
Societies have currents. Moods. Sentiments. Trends. Tides are larger and greater than individuals. But Americans don’t really believe this. Do you? Americans think that the weight of everything rests upon their shoulders as individuals — and so they have forgotten that collective action exists at all. Collective action isn’t just the sum of individual action — it is a whole far greater than the sum of its parts.
Let’s do the simplest example. Unions. Now, one of my close friends is a doctor in London. Do you know what doctors do, when things happen that they don’t like? They strike! Have you ever heard of doctors striking in America? The idea is laughable, absurd, isn’t it? But that’s only because unions barely exist in America anymore — one of the key mechanisms of collective action in a society. When a union coordinates some kind of collective action — a strike, boycott, whatever — the whole is shatteringly greater than the sum of the parts, isn’t it? Americans are back in the stone age though — they lack the advanced social technology of collective action. In fact, they even seem to lack the memory of it.
Nobody says: “it’s my individual responsibility that the whole nation’s wages are so low!!” But that’s precisely how Americans — many of them, anyways — appear to be thinking of putting infants in concentration camps, or about authoritarianism in general. “If only there was something I could do!” Rest easy. There’s nothing you can do. It’s a problem of collective, coordinated action, of many people acting as one, in concert, a point I’m about to return to — individual action is besides the point. Yes, really.
So the issue is that there are no mechanisms left to coordinate collective action in America. Unions, as I noted, have been shattered — the libertarian’s wildest erotic fantasy is now a grim reality. But all the other ones are dead, too. Civic organizations — clubs, benevolent societies, leagues, and so on. Communities. Networks in the true sense — everything that LinkedIn isn’t. Universities, professional organizations, guilds, societies of all kinds. All these are mostly dead and buried as mechanisms of collective social action — while some exist in name, they exist mostly as capitalist profit centres, not as true social actors, who can reach beyond the profit motive.
Are you beginning to see my point a little? Let me make it a little clearer still. Fighting authoritarianism isn’t about a tiny band of heroic individuals. This isn’t the Matrix, my friends. This is Planet Earth. Fighting authoritarianism is about social-scale collective action. Chain reactions. That rip through a broken society until it pulses with an electricity that can’t be denied, opposed, or beaten.
Let’s do a few examples, to make it clear. How was communism fought? With tiny resistance cells? All of those were shattered and left for dead by secret police forces easily, almost laughably. Communism began to fall when the mood and tone of society shifted. When the chain reaction began. As people stood up for themselves. When mass protests and civil unrest broke out — as a result of many different kinds of social institutions coordinating social scale action, universities, professional organizations, civic societies, leagues, and so forth. But see the point: it was a kind of massive, jolting electric current surging through society. “Individual action” wasn’t summed — it built upon itself, accumulated, multiplied, resonated, fed back.
So the logic of individual action is linear and additive — and in that way, it’s easy for authoritarians to control. All they have to do is slap a few people on the wrist — and everyone runs scared. But the logic of collective action is nonlinear and multiplicative, exponential, combinatorial — and therefore, unpredictable, too. Like an explosion. Like an epidemic. Like an eruption. Like a chain reaction in at atom bomb. Do you see the difference in power? Do you know what really threatens authoritarians most? What no one can control.
Now. Some brave and noble souls are trying to build new mechanisms of collective action in America. An example that springs to mind is Indivisible, and their framework. There are now many organizations like it. But none have really reached a kind of “critical mass” yet, which simply means that they haven’t spread far or wide enough to really be able to coordinate collective action at a large enough scale for authoritarians to care or worry about.
So Americans are in a double bind. Their old mechanisms of collective action are dead and gone, buried, turned to dust. Unions and leagues and civic societies and so on. But new ones haven’t emerged yet. Maybe they never will. Or maybe they will — people are trying to build them, and that’s good. That’s one half of the bind. There’s nothing whatsoever to coordinate collective action, and so atrocities multiply, worsen, and harden by the day, no matter how much individual responsibility any one of you noble heroes tries to take, because no one person alone has the strength to crash a society, to bring it to a careening halt, which is the only way that social-scale malfunction begins to halt.
The other half, though, is the really problematic one. Americans don’t seem to even understand, remember, or know that collective action exists. They think that social scale dysfunction is to be met with individual action, responsibility, heroic acts that emblazon newspaper headlines — because they’ve been brainwashed by decades of crackpot economics and failed social thought to believe that everything in society is a matter of atomistic individualism. It isn’t.
So when I say: “things are going badly wrong in America, and history is going to call you fools and cowards,” I’m not asking you — you — to be a noble hero, some kind of knight in shining armour, rescuing the frail, and handing out kittens. Quite the opposite. I’m suggesting you see that no one can be that person. That fighting authoritarianism, whether corporate, economic, financial, or political, has always taken collective action — and always will.
(When a nation is so supine, so powerless, so weak, that it will tolerate, one by one, a list of growing offense to its health, sanity, prosperity — first school shootings, then no healthcare, and then infants on trial — then of course soon enough authoritarianism has arisen. Because when a society cannot take collective action, a tyrant will rule, where a democracy should be. Because democracy is just a name for collective action — and such intolerable things being tolerated tell us that a democracy isn’t working. Either that, or people have gone bananas.
But even democracy is a relatively weak kind of collective action. It can only happen once every few years, like a weird ritual, on an appointed date, for a few hours, at a set time. The other kinds of collective action are more fluid, flexible, spontaneous, in technical terms, “emergent.” They are the ones you need when an emergency arises — not democracy, per se. But if you don’t have even democracy, then collective action is probably missing entirely in a society — and that society is going to be ruled by a tyrant, soon. Because when people can’t stand together, do you know what happens to them? They fall apart.)
That is what’s happened to America, unfortunately . Americans are a broken people, now, collectively. They cannot act in concert anymore. They have no joint hands, limbs, or mind — they don’t even seem to retain the memory of collective action anymore. They are just individuals — and individuals are weak, easily broken things. Hence, Americans cannot multiply their power, give it to one another, feed it back, amplify it, resonate it, until it grows strong enough to bring down the house, with a great earthquake, which says: “not in our names!!” Collective action is the only thing that can defeat authoritarianism, but Americans lack this capability now, almost entirely. How ironic, it all is. That the final price of atomizing individualistic capitalism might have been to reduce Americans to subjects and pawns, by denying them not just the mechanisms — but even the idea of — collective action.
So the truly funny, sad, and ironic thing isn’t just that Americans think I’m asking them to be individualistic heros, each one a cowboy, riding out to save the kids from the savages — when they need to act together, to join hands, to be several, to collect themselves together, and that way multiply their power until it resonates wide enough to crash the system. It’s not even that they don’t have the social technology to ignite that chain reaction anymore. It’s that when I say all that — many of them probably won’t be able to understand, process, grasp, anymore, what it even means. Do you think that’s unfair? Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s not. I don’t know. You’ll have to judge.
Remember when I asked what the opposite of a hero is? Now you know. It’s just a person, ready to join hands with another. Enough of those are more powerful than Odysseus, Hercules, and Spartacus. Because even an atom bomb is just a chain reaction.
Umair
July 2018
