Skip to content
Tax Strike Tactics

A Personal Revolutionary is More Effective and Harder to Defeat

A personal revolutionary—a person “of good principles” as John Brown put it—is more effective and harder to defeat than that same person would be if they were instead subordinated to a movement. This may seem paradoxical to people who are used to thinking in terms of “strength in numbers” or “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” But this is for two related reasons:

First, as a personal revolutionary you are self-motivated. You don’t get thrown into confusion if the lines of communication down the chain of command are disrupted, and you don’t lose momentum by looking about to check if your comrades are still with you or if they have retreated or surrendered.

And second, this makes it difficult for your opponents to persuade you with threats or with bribes to give up the fight. For example, once when Hennacy was imprisoned, his captors tried to trick him:

Detective Wilson said that the young Socialists arrested with me for refusing to register had all given in and registered. (Later I found out that he had also told them that I had registered.) [But] I felt that if they gave in, someone had to stick, and I was that one.

Because the detective assumed that Hennacy valued his belonging more than his integrity, he stumbled and made a completely ineffective attack.

Thoreau also noted that his captors had failed to understand his motives. They assumed he valued his freedom from confinement more than his freedom of action:

It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State, than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.

I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.… In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.

People often draw the wrong conclusion from the success of the “divide and conquer” tactic that governments use against opposition movements. Some people think it demonstrates that unless we stay united we are weak, but the real lesson might be that to the extent that our strength depends mainly on our unity we are vulnerable.

Notes and Citations