Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → is there any point in trying?

Yesterday and the day before I started to ramble on a bit about how I first came to be scared of Nazis and why they still have me looking over my shoulder today. Today is part three of Nazis Creep Me Out, subtitled: The Road to Auschwitz is Paved with Good Telemarketers

Maybe it’s a little phobic to worry so much about the possibility of your neighbors turning into cogs in a mass killing machine. Maybe not. One estimate was that (as of 1987), governments had organized people in such a way as to murder about 170,000,000 noncombatants off of the field of war (typically their own citizens) in the 20^th Century. An additional number of people, about a quarter as large a total, were killed in the course of warfare in that timespan.

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations show that that comes to about two and a half million each year, about 6,500 per day, about one every 13 seconds.

Even as a public health problem, that’s big: Compare it to, say, malaria, which kills over a million people each year, or tuberculosis and AIDS, which kill some two million each, for instance. But there’s something worse about a calamity that’s deliberately inflicted — worse and at the same time something that requires attention: it seems to be not only something that people might hope to prevent, but something that people might be convinced not to commit. That at least gives us another angle than we’ve got, say, on tuberculosis.

There’s a huge preexisting canon of poetic “why?”s about “man’s inhumanity to man” that I didn’t really intend to try to add any more redundancies to, so I’ll stop there.

Just about everybody has thought about this problem at some point or other, maybe even dwelled on it. And then most of us just kind of give up. The giving up is accompanied by a resigned commemoration that goes a little something like this:

The human race — so full of noble aspirations, so capable of warm emotions, uniquely gifted in our capacity for communication and altruism — and yet ironically so brutal, so unrepentantly savage, so war-loving. We’ve always been this way, and we always will be, in the absence of some science-fiction solution, until (chances are) we finally wipe ourselves out. The cost of this is so high, and has been for so long, that this desperation I feel to find a solution is surely not new, and if our good intentions and our cleverness and reason were enough to solve the problem, surely we would at least have a solution in sight by now… but we don’t. We can continue to chant “peace” until we’re blue in the face, but it isn’t going to change this fact. Wars, massacres — nobody wants them to happen, but they will, and it’s a fool’s errand to try to bring us a world without them.

This outlook may be as true as it is pessimistic. But it really misses the point that it pretends to be addressing so soberly, and becomes an unhealthy evasion. I see two related catches: First, it poses the problem of these two and a half million deaths per year as a problem demanding an all-or-nothing solution. Second, and because of this, it can only imagine a utopian, top-down solution.

The first catch comes from looking at the pile of mangled bodies from a century, or from a war, or from a policy and, being overwhelmed, wanting to come up with something that would prevent them all at once. For example: What if we had a world-wide government, democratic of course, that guaranteed political freedoms, and had a universally respected judiciary that peoples and countries could turn to to resolve grievances? Then we wouldn’t need wars and massacres to solve our problems! And pigs could perch on phone lines instead of taking up valuable real estate!

(Some darker utopian visions stem from a similar urge: What if instead of our tribe and their tribe always going to war over this and that, there were only our tribe and theirs had become extinct?)

If in looking for a solution you find none that promise to more-or-less completely solve the problem except for grandiose sci-fi utopian schemes you have no hope of implementing — the next step isn’t to give up, but to back up.

The point is that a proposal that lessens the problem, or a small first step that doesn’t do much in itself but is the first step in slowly, incrementally or gradually solving the problem, may be a good proposal. Even something that merely prevents things from getting worse is worth listening to when the stakes are so high! Humanity may not ever find an on/off switch for this horror, but perhaps it can learn to turn the volume down.

The second catch is in assuming that because the solution is necessarily so gigantic and universal in its nature that it must be something that is implemented top-down — from the headquarters of the United Nations, or via Pax Americana, or from a spacecraft sent by benevolent aliens, or from God.

I think there may be a solution that’s admittedly gradual and slow, but also promises to be practical and to show returns more than proportional to the extent that it is applied. Furthermore, it’s not top-down — it isn’t even bottom-up — it’s anybody-out. It necessarily, crucially, begins with and within individual people. (And no, it’s not tax resistance, but for me that’s part of how it’s blooming).

It comes down to this: I don’t think there are enough sufficiently angry people in the world, or enough cruel psychopaths in the world, to murder two and a half million people a year all by themselves. They need help and they need accomplices — people who aren’t themselves inclined to do these things but are willing to do them anyway by convincing themselves they’re doing something else, be it “following orders” or “doing my duty” or “earning a living somehow.”

As Hannah Arendt demonstrated in her examples, where enough of these people can be found, the wheels of what she calls “administrative massacre” are greased. But she also found that where enough counterexamples are found, they become monkeywrenches in this same machinery. And where they’re especially numerous, they can break the machinery entirely.

Every “administrative massacre” will be a little different — the victims will be chosen differently, and different methods will be used. What will the gas chambers look like next time — a mushroom cloud, a virus released on a subway, a gulag archipelago for terrorist suspects?

Who is stacking the bricks? Who is conducting the trains? You’ll know them by their excuses — “what can you do?” “I’ve got nothing against them personally” “it’s my job” “somebody else would do it if I didn’t” “I’ve got a family to feed” “I don’t make the rules” “they don’t pay me to think about that.”

And you can hear these excuses around you today, right where you live. People who are doing rude, anti-social, dishonest things but who insist that they aren’t rude, or anti-social, or dishonest people — it’s their job, or it’s the rules, or it’s just a part they’re playing.

I try very hard never to make these kind of excuses. Which is to say that I try not to put myself into the sorts of positions where excuses like these might seem reasonable to me. I think I may avoid killing a Jew some day this way.

And when telemarketers call I tell them, politely but firmly, that it is rude to call up a stranger just to try to sell them something, and won’t they please consider another line of work. “What can you do?” “it’s my job” “somebody else would do it if I didn’t” “I’ve got a family to feed” “I don’t make the rules” “they don’t pay me to think about that.” I’m as persistent as they are, and eventually they hang up. Still, I think I may save a Jew some day this way.

I make up aphorisms for myself, sometimes paraphrasing from others when my creativity isn’t up to it. Here’s one: “Have the courage to fight for what you believe in, the stubbornness not to fight without believing, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Usually, like this one, they aren’t very good, either not very catchy or too glib, but it keeps me thinking about it.

And steps like this are my solution, anyone-out. We’re anyone. Over and out.

Today’s inspiring read: Against All Odds by Adam Hochschild from this month’s Mother Jones magazine.

“You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering that you could have avoided.” ―Franz Kafka

Last night I ventured into San Francisco to exchange some books at a used book store and to take in a panel discussion called The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear at the New College of San Francisco.

You may remember the New College as the place where I took in a disappointing panel discussion about direct action back in February. I decided to brave it again.

Leading the panel was Paul Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time and more recently The Impossible Will Take a Little While, and several of the audience of fifty or so people had copies for him to autograph.

Joining Loeb on the panel were Susan Griffen and Toni Mirosevich, each of whom contributed to the The Impossible… volume.

The purpose of Loeb’s books, and of this panel’s discussion, was to combat feelings of burnout and powerlessness amongst activists who are frustrated that they were unable to stop the war on Iraq and that they are unable to make much political headway in a country without a functioning opposition party.

Myself, I didn’t walk away particularly reinspired or reenergized, in part I think due to the soothing NPR-voices everyone was using. I think I’m in what Loeb called “the global fraternity of the cynical.” He mentioned in this regard Milan Kundera, who refused Václav Havel’s request that he sign a petition requesting that the Czech government release political prisoners. Kundera thought the petitioning was useless and was essentially a self-promotion stunt on Havel’s part.

Havel responded that although individual petitioning efforts often did come to nothing, the process of petitioning helped to build a movement and “people’s civic backbones began to straighten again.” Loeb suggests that other actions, like these large protest marches that seem to change nothing, have beneficial effects like these that can be hard to see at first.

Susan Griffen read her essay To Love the Marigold: The Politics of Imagination. One excerpt reads:

Even in the grimmest of circumstances, a shift in perspective can create startling change. I am thinking of a story I heard a few years ago from my friend Odette, a writer and a survivor of the holocaust. Along with many others who crowd the bed of a large truck, she tells me, Robert Desnos is being taken away from the barracks of the concentration camp where he has been held prisoner. Leaving the barracks, the mood is somber; everyone knows the truck is headed for the gas chambers. And when the truck arrives no one can speak at all; even the guards fall silent. But this silence is soon interrupted by an energetic man, who jumps into the line and grabs one of the condemned. Improbable as it is, Odette told me, Desnos reads the man’s palm.

Oh, he says, I see you have a very long lifeline. And you are going to have three children. He is exuberant. And his excitement is contagious. First one man, then another, offers up his hand, and the prediction is for longevity, more children, abundant joy.

As Desnos reads more palms, not only does the mood of the prisoners change but that of the guards too. How can one explain it? Perhaps the element of surprise has planted a shadow of doubt in their minds. If they told themselves these deaths were inevitable, this no longer seems inarguable. They are in any case so disoriented by this sudden change of mood among those they are about to kill that they are unable to go through with the executions. So all the men, along with Desnos, are packed back onto the truck and taken back to the barracks. Desnos has saved his own life and the lives of others by using his imagination.

Loeb says he hoped in his most recent book to avoid sentimentality, and “stories that offered hope but didn’t ring true,” but he gave into temptation and included Griffen’s story of surrealist poet Robert Desnos, and it’s hard to blame him since it’s such a nice story, almost made for Hollywood. But it made me skeptical of his other success stories, like when he told us that the U.S. peace movement, while it was failing to stop the war in Vietnam, succeeded (though it didn’t know it at the time) in preventing Nixon from following through on his inclination to turn Vietnam into a nuclear war.

I liked Toni Mirosevich’s story about dockworkers helping to smuggle contraband jazz into the Soviet Union better. Not only did it sound more likely, it also was more down-to-earth and easier to cast myself into in imagination. I tried to picture myself risking a trip to the gulag to make a samizdat bootleg of Miles Davis.

On the frequently daunting blog How to Save the World, Dave Pollard confesses how he sometimes nurtures plausible deniability and helplessness in order to avoid doing what he knows needs to be done:

That’s the ultimate bad news we don’t want to hear: That if we were willing to give up everything, risk everything, drop everything we’re doing, radically and immediately change our life style, agree not to do some things we really want to do (have another child, or buy that house we’ve been saving for) it would have an impact. We could, if we all acted fast, collectively, now, change the world, end poverty and suffering and global warming and crime and restore biodiversity and create a sustainable and harmonious world. But we don’t want to hear that news either. Like the Ten Years After lyrics say: “I’d love to change the world but I don’t know what to do, so I’ll leave it up to you.” So we find solace in the belief that it’s all bigger than us, that it would be impossible to coordinate such an effort, that most people don’t know and don’t care and so wouldn’t participate so it wouldn’t work, that the powers that be wouldn’t allow it, and mostly that it’s really not that bad, is it?

I’m sorry, dear reader. You didn’t want to hear that. Who the fuck am I sitting here in my easy chair doing nothing more than anyone else and telling people that they should be doing something drastic? What kind of hypocrite am I to be trying to deprive you of your plausible deniability that your inaction and your unawareness of how bad it really is, is complicit in all the horrors going on in this world, and the much worse horrors that our inaction will doom our children and our children’s children to? This idiot Chicken Little Pollard is running around telling us the sky is falling, but we’ve read the fable, and everything turns out just fine. Somebody shut that guy up.

I’m no leader. I learned that long ago. I haven’t the charisma, or the articulateness for that job. I’m a coward, with insufficient courage to go with my convictions. GI Gurdjieff said that civilized man lives in a dream, and needs to learn, through a very difficult process, how to awaken and live in the real world. You know that state when you first wake up in the morning, especially if it’s really cold outside, and you know you have to get up but you don’t want to, you kind of go into denial, pretending it must be Saturday, or that you’re still dreaming and when you really wake up everything will be warm and beautiful and peaceful? Well I think that’s where I am. I’m just awake enough to know I have to get up and do something, something important, but not yet awake enough to know what that is, or who I need to do it with, and I’m still kinda hoping someone else will call and say “Don’t worry, it’s done, go back to sleep.” But now I’m a little more awake than I was, enough to be aware of the fact that something must be done, and I can’t depend on others to do it for me. And, for the first time, my denials of that imperative, that need for action, have become implausible. And those of us who care enough to have to do something are calling each other up, in our half-awake state, making their denials implausible too.

But wait. It’s really not that bad, is it? Just let me lie here another five minutes, OK?

One of Pollard’s examples of denial and deniability concerns the work of Bjørn Lomborg, who is best known for his book The Skeptical Environmentalist (“Using statistical information from internationally recognized research institutes, Lomborg systematically examines a range of major environmental issues that feature prominently in headline news around the world, including pollution, biodiversity, fear of chemicals, and the greenhouse effect, and documents that the world has actually improved.”)

I haven’t read the book, and have only superficially followed the controversy surrounding it, but I did pay attention when Lomborg embarked on his next project, “The Copenhagen Consensus.”

The idea was that a group of eminent economists would look at priorities for assisting poor countries and try to rank them in terms of costs and benefits. The planned procedure was that an advocate would present a case for each of a number of possible global projects. Two “opponents” would then provide a critique. The panel of eminent economists would then distill the arguments and rank the possible projects.

Why economists? Lomborg believes that much of the public debate about what to do about pressing global issues suffers from being economically uninformed. Every choice made to address an issue in a particular way is one that has costs and trade-offs; attempting to solve one problem one way may necessarily mean not having the resources to attempt to solve another problem another way, for instance. He thinks we would all benefit from trying to rigorously quantify the costs and benefits of various approaches.

That, anyway, is the charitable point of view. Lomborg’s critics frequently complain that all of this is a smokescreen designed to hide his real purpose, which is to discredit environmentalist concerns like global climate change by using questionable data and prejudicial techniques.

Be that as it may, this group of eminent economists (including four Nobel Prize winners) did meet, and heard the arguments for 32 different proposals on how to attack some global problem — everything from adopting the Kyoto Protocol to reducing trade barriers to launching new initiatives for combating malaria. Their favorite?

Combating HIV/AIDS should be at the top of the world’s priority list… About 28 million cases could be prevented by 2010. The cost would be $27 billion, with benefits almost forty times as high.

I told you that so I could tell you this: The population of Iraq is roughly 25 million people. This week, president Bush asked Congress for another $80 billion in war funding.

Perhaps Lomborg and his crew can compare the costs and benefits of bringing Diemocracy to the long-suffering Iraqi people with those of some of the other proposals on their list.

(And yes, you caught me, I’m recycling this idea from my Picket Line entry of 3 June 2004. It’s still pretty fresh, isn’t it?)

What am I doing this for? Is it just so I can feel aloof from an evil I don’t feel like I can affect? Am I hiding in a cave when I should be on the barricades? From TomDispatch, the transcript of a speech by Susan Sontag, from which I’ve excerpted a bit below, looks at the importance of taking a stand even when it doesn’t seem like it will make any difference:

…the bearer of the moral principle seems like someone running alongside a moving train, yelling “Stop! Stop!”

Can the train be stopped? No, it can’t. At least, not now.

Will other people on the train be moved to jump off and join those on the ground? Maybe some will, but most won’t.…

The dramaturgy of “acting on principle” tells us that we don’t have to think about whether acting on principle is expedient, or whether we can count on the eventual success of the actions we have undertaken.

Acting on principle is, we’re told, a good in itself.

But it is still a political act, in the sense that you’re not doing it for yourself. You don’t do it just to be in the right, or to appease your own conscience; much less because you are confident your action will achieve its aim. You resist as an act of solidarity. With communities of the principled and the disobedient: here, elsewhere. In the present. In the future.

Thoreau’s going to prison in 1846 for refusing to pay the poll tax in protest against the American war on Mexico hardly stopped the war. But the resonance of that most unpunishing and briefest spell of imprisonment (famously, a single night in jail) has not ceased to inspire principled resistance to injustice through the second half of the twentieth century and into our new era. The movement in the late 1980s to shut down the Nevada Test Site, a key location for the nuclear arms race, failed in its goal; the operations of the test site were unaffected by the protests. But it directly inspire the formation of a movement of protesters in far away Alma Ata, who eventually succeeded in shutting down the main Soviet test site in Kazakhstan, citing the Nevada antinuclear activists as their inspiration and expressing solidarity with the Native Americans on whose land the Nevada Test Site had been located.

The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.

“Have peace activists ever stopped a war?” asks Lawrence S. Wittner, a history professor and author who specializes in the history of the peace and nuclear disarmament movements.

He starts by admitting that it’s hard to tell: “we know much more about peace movements’ organizational history than we do about their impact upon public policy.” But he suggests that, in the United States, the Mexican War of the 1840s, the Vietnam War, the proxy war in Nicaragua in the 1980s, and the Cold War were all either significantly dampened or brought to an end due to anti-war sentiment and activism.

In addition, he believes that some otherwise likely wars were prevented because of the actions of the anti-war movement, and that the anti-war and nuclear disarmament movements were able to bring the idea of using nuclear weapons into such disrepute that they prevented any nuclear powers from using their arsenals in other than a passive deterrent role after World War Ⅱ.

So that was your “don’t get discouraged” moment, and now for your “get your ass in gear” moment, courtesy of Cindy Sheehan:

My son Casey was in the first 1000 to be killed in Iraq. We reached that dismal mark by September 2004. MoveOn.org conducted candlelight vigils for that occasion. Then a little over a year later, MoveOn.org conducted candlelight vigils to commemorate the 2000^th soldier.

If we don’t get off of our collective apathetic and complacent backsides to stop the barbaric killing in Iraq, when will the next candlelight vigil be? George Bush and the evil neocons are killing our precious soldiers at the rate of 2.78 per day. By my calculations, we should be lighting our candles again and singing “Kum bah ya” by October.…

If I hear one more rendition of “We Shall Overcome” and then watch the vigilers or marchers go home and turn on their TVs and crack open a brewsky, content in the fact that they have done something for peace that day, I am going to scream! We can’t overcome unless we take the proverbial bull by the horns and overcome!…

Change will not happen until we make it happen. We can’t make change happen by wishing or praying that it will happen.

On Tuesday while I was trying to come up with a cost/benefit analysis of my self-employment tax resistance method, I mentioned as one of the benefits:

Making the tax collector seize the money from me, rather than handing it over voluntarily, more authentically represents the sort of relationship I feel we have.

Kind of droll, but there’s something behind this that’s more than tongue-in-cheek. It wasn’t until yesterday that I thought about it more carefully.

I was about half-way in to Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future where she starts to discuss the nature of political “authority”:

Since authority always demands obedience, it is commonly taken for some form of power or violence. Yet authority precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used, authority itself has failed. Authority, on the other hand, is incompatible with persuasion, which presupposes equality and works through a process of argumentation. Where arguments are used, authority is left in abeyance. Against the egalitarian order of persuasion stands the authoritarian order, which is always hierarchical. If authority is to be defined at all, then, it must be in contradistinction to both coercion by force and persuasion through arguments.

It seems to me that political authority typically evolves from an origin of mixed coercion and persuasion. It is the pinnacle of political achievement, and almost all political bodies strive for it (with the exception of a few totalitarian systems which are content to rely mostly on coercion). A political system of 100% persuasion — the anarchist ideal — is what takes place in non-state settings: a group of friends deciding what sort of pizza to order will typically use persuasion, even if this results in setting up a democratic or monarchical decision-making process by temporary consensus.

But at the large-scale political level, even a 100% persuasive origin can evolve (or devolve) into an authority-based state. This is the mythical origin of Hobbes’s Leviathan, of Robert Nozick’s minimal state, and various others in-between.

Outside of philosophy, things are typically more mixed: The Federalist Papers were a measure of persuasion, the repression of various unpersuaded Americans was a measure of coercion. Mixed together with many other ingredients, of such a recipe was the republic made, and it is the relatively high proportion of persuasion in that mix that gives its founding such a good reputation.

One way of looking at political authority is to think of it as a mixture of coercion and persuasion that is held in reserve: an energy that is potential, rather than kinetic — like a battery. Another physical metaphor is to consider authority as the momentum built up through the application of coercion and persuasion, such that the momentum itself has the same sort of power that the original coercion and persuasion did.

Authority allows the government to coast: “we would persuade you, but you are already persuaded, remember?; we would compel you, but you are already compelled, remember?” Meanwhile its subjects feel persuaded without knowing quite which arguments persuaded them, and feel compelled without ever feeling the grip on their shoulders or the bayonet at their backs.

Over time, a government that has reached its maturity in authority, even one that was born largely from persuasion, will tend to abuse this hard-earned authority — to cash it in for all of the various and notorious tempting corruptions of power. This it could not have done originally by persuasion alone, though perhaps it could have if at the beginning it commanded the tools of coercion it now commands as an authoritarian government.

But such a government, because the coercion behind its authority is held mostly in reserve — frozen, invisible — may still hold the esteem that it earned from having evolved through a relatively high proportion of persuasion. Indeed it may insist that its present corruption is fully justified by its humble origins, and it may use its authority to embellish its own origin myth.

If a government’s authority is challenged, it will temporarily retrench into a position from which it can unleash its potential political energy as kinetic political energy and thereby remove the challenge. This involves using the tools of coercion and persuasion that it has kept in reserve.

And this may expose the true mixture of coercion and persuasion that represents the power-behind-the-throne. As Gene Sharp wrote about Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaigns in South Africa:

The original “naked force of conquest” had been translated into the sanctity of law. … [Leo] Kuper points out that civil disobedience brought the violence behind the law and the domination into actual operation. “Satyagraha strips this sanctity from the laws, and compels the application of sanctions, thus converting domination again to naked force.” The nonviolent challenge had not created, but only revealed the violence. “Force is implicit in white domination: the resistance campaign made it explicit.”

In other words, by challenging the authority of the government, you call its bluff and force it to reveal its hand. If it has a strong, persuasive hand, well, there you go, and maybe you’re even persuaded. If it has a strong, coercive hand, suddenly people begin to feel its grip on their shoulders. If the hand is weak on either count, suddenly this too is exposed, and the power-behind-the-throne is revealed to be not so powerful after all.

The point is that it may be important and useful to force the government to retrench from authority to its more concrete basis in coercion and persuasion, even if you do not have the power to overcome it once it has retrenched.

The danger of this approach is that if you demand the government drop its mask of authority and show you the fangs of coercion that lie behind it, it may show them to you good and hard. And the stronger your challenge to authority is, the more vicious will be the government’s reaction.

The more benign the government you challenge, the more it will retreat into a stance dominated by persuasion over coercion. The more malign it is, the more it will bring out the hardware. But the paradox is that the longer you wait and the more malevolent the government becomes, the more dangerous it is to challenge it while at the same time this challenge becomes more imperative.

The way out of this dilemma is to become less averse to challenging political authority (and this means saying “no” to its commands, not merely grumbling “I disapprove” to its heralds) — and to make this challenge at the first sign that authority is misused, rather than waiting until it has become so tyrannical that it knows no limits.

A couple of bits on the importance of taking a stand, even if — especially if — it seems like you’re just one person trying to hold back the tide.

One comes from a review of the war tax resistance film An Act of Conscience. Pete Seeger appears in the film and says:

[There is] a big seesaw. At one end of the seesaw is a basket of rocks that’s down on the ground. At the other end of the seesaw is a basket half-full of sand. And some of us got teaspoons and we’re tryin’ to fill up that basket. Of course, most people are laughing at us. “Don’t you see? The sand is leaking out of the basket as fast as you’re puttin’ it in.” We say, “That’s true, but we’re getting more people with teaspoons all the time.” Some day you’re going to see that whole basket full of sand, and that whole seesaw’s gonna go [the other way] just like that. People will say, “Gee, how did it happen so sudden, us and our goddamn teaspoons.”

The next comes from FSK’s Guide to Reality, which points to another blog’s discussion of The Asch Conformity Experiment.

In this experiment, you’re shown a set of three vertical lines of different lengths, and then a fourth line, and then you’re asked which of the first three lines is the same length as the fourth one. It’s not a hard test. The correct answer is pretty obvious.

The catch is that you’re in a room full of people who, though they all look like test-takers like yourself, are actually confederates of the experimenter. They all give the same wrong answer, out loud. Now it’s your turn. Are you going to buck the popular consensus and give the right answer, or are you going to assume it’s you who’s crazy and give the consensus answer?

“Three-quarters of the subjects in Asch’s experiment gave a ‘conforming’ answer at least once. A third of the subjects conformed more than half the time.” But

Adding a single dissenter — just one other person who gives the correct answer, or even an incorrect answer that’s different from the group’s incorrect answer — reduces conformity very sharply, down to 5–10%.

However:

When the single dissenter suddenly switched to conforming to the group, subjects’ conformity rates went back up to just as high as in the no-dissenter condition. Being the first dissenter is a valuable (and costly!) social service, but you’ve got to keep it up.

This page has an example of one of the test cards, and a video of the test in progress. FSK’s blog provides and links to some more commentary on the test and its implications for those of us with fringe opinions.

(And on that note, here are a few versions of The Emperor’s New Clothes.)

Here are some more things that have cropped up on the web in recent days that have caught my eye:

• The paleocon site LewRockwell.com seems an unusual home for Jeff Knaebel — a renunciate expatriate tax resister who is trying to retool Gandhi’s satyagraha for the 21^st Century. But they’ve hosted a number of his essays and speech transcripts, including, most recently, “The State Versus the Living Dharma,” in which he examines the proper relationship between a subject of a State and its government in the framework of Thich Nhat Hahn’s “socially engaged Buddhism.” He concludes that because the State violates basic ethical precepts, not just incidentally but by its very nature, and because citizens who support the State take on a portion of the burden of these ethical violations, it is essential for people who want to live ethically to withdraw their practical and moral support for the State. Excerpts:

  I maintain that it is the right of any individual person to reject and renounce a government which violates his moral conscience. I maintain that it is my personal right, in this very body, here and now, to ignore the State, and to refuse participation in its actions which violate humanity and life itself. I also declare that the same is my intention insofar as refusal to pay direct tax to any nation-state. There can be no treason if one’s first loyalty is to humanity and to life itself. Human life is above Nation-State. Personal conscience and individual moral sovereignty is above State sovereignty. How can the question of treason arise when one refuses to murder helpless women and children? He who claims self ownership can never commit treason because the State cannot own him. He is not the property of the State.

• At TCS Daily, Arnold Kling has put forward a proposal for a sort of distributed secessionism that he calls “splinter states.” It sounds something like a loosely-organized set of independent, geographically diffuse, agorist economies, competing with the State without confronting it directly. This proposal has triggered some long-overdue debate in libertarian circles about civil disobedience.
• Lawrence Wittner tells anti-war activists that they shouldn’t be discouraged at how little progress they seem to be making, because a lot of the effects they have are behind-the-scenes and may not be widely noticed until years from now. He gives an example from 1958, in which public outrage and revulsion against atmospheric nuclear weapons testing overwhelmed Eisenhower’s inclinations to support the Defense Department’s desire for more nuclear weapons testing and development, and eventually led to a test ban treaty.
• Wendy McElroy has been sharing her “frugalista” philosophy on her blog. Excerpt:

  …[M]ake spending money into a conscious, deliberate process through which you take control and defend yourself, through which you demand full value. When you are skeptical of people trying to sell you something, then you stop being vulnerable to the incredible bombardment of ads and opinions that urge you to be a fool for “the newest, the shiniest, the sexiest” acme product. Remember… what you are actually trading is not a scrap of government paper but the irreplaceable time it took you to acquire that government scrap. Make sure you receive something equally valuable in return.

  Long before the incident with the swindling computer company, I’d lost the sense of “businessmen as heroic producers of wealth” which I’d absorbed (briefly) from Ayn Rand’s novels. Experience taught that businessmen were no more honest or admirable than the average Joe; indeed, whenever money changes hands, honesty seems to decrease. Moreover, as a libertarian I became acutely aware of how well-connected businessmen embrace the Corporate State and glut themselves on tax-funded contracts and state protections/privileges. (The limited liability of corporations is a perfect example of the latter.)

  Businessmen are often the biggest obstacle to the free market and the staunchest friends of government regulation. In his article What Is The Enemy, Sheldon Richman writes, “the great threat to liberty is the corporate state, otherwise known as corporatism, state capitalism, and political capitalism. (The Therapeutic State falls into this category, because the prime beneficiaries are corporate medical providers.)” And, so, one of the ideological motivations behind my frugal rebellion was/is to remove myself from the role of obedient consumer, a role that helps to legitimize and sustain a system I find morally and politically bankrupt.

• At Vermont Commons, Gary Flomenhoft says that while we’re waiting for Vermont to secede from the Union, we should start defunding the empire. Excerpts:

  The moral necessity of defunding the US Empire is as follows: The Empire is engaged in wars of aggression, the endless war on “terror,” violation of human rights and civil liberties, illegal rendition of terror suspects to foreign countries for torture and interrogation, denial of habeas corpus, denial of the Geneva Convention, torture, wiretapping US citizens, and use of depleted uranium weapons, an indiscriminate weapon of mass destruction. Need I go on? People said it couldn’t happen here, but now we are the “good Germans,” dutifully doing what the IRS tells us to do, while the government commits war crimes in our name with our money.

  …[T]ake the following pledge: “I withdraw my mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual energy from the corrupt US government. I will not give them any financial support, nor will I willingly accept any tax-funded benefits from the US government. I will put my financial resources to better use such as Vermont secession. I will starve the beast.”

• Big surprise:

  Hundreds of pages of recently unsealed court records detail how kickbacks shaped the [Iraq] war’s largest troop support contract months before the first wave of U.S. soldiers plunged their boots into Iraqi sand.

  The graft continued well beyond the 2004 congressional hearings that first called attention to it. And the massive fraud endangered the health of American soldiers even as it lined contractors’ pockets, records show.

Some bits and pieces:

• Colin Beavan, the No Impact Man, writes about his interesting project, and about the possibilities of ostentatious individual action as a form of activism.
• Metafilter shares some resources about the early-1970s rent strikes by residents of government-run council housing in England.
• Nine years ago, an Oakland police officer beat a suspect, breaking his ribs and puncturing his lungs. The man later died of his injuries, and the officer ordered his subordinates to lie about the beating. The officer was caught during an Internal Affairs investigation of the case. What was the result? The officer was suspended for two weeks and then promoted to be the head of the Internal Affairs division.

One of the reasons why tax resistance for reasons of conscientious objection is so slow to catch on, I think, is that it takes a lot of imagination to trace the path between the effort we expend to earn money, the often subliminal ways in which that money is siphoned away from us by the government, the ways the government spends the money, and the effect of that spending on people.

It’s easy to think of your income as your after-tax income and just ignore the taxes as an inevitable friction loss. And it’s easy to get flummoxed by the diffusion by which all of your tax contributions get churned together in one big pot with everyone elses’ and so it’s impossible to know whose taxes got spent on what. Maybe “yours” were spent on something benign. Hard to say. The connection passes through such a fog that to most people it seems absurd to think that any responsibility passes along with it.

In large-scale evils, the sort that governments enable people to do, this sort of diffusion of responsibility is commonplace, so that in the end there can be mass murders that require the cooperation of thousands of people in which everyone involved can claim that they are not responsible for murdering anybody.

Indeed, engineering this sort of thing has become an art — case in point is the U.S. torture policy, where the torturers cannot be prosecuted because they were told by their superiors that their actions were legal; their superiors cannot be prosecuted because the White House assured them the same thing; the folks in the White House cannot be prosecuted because they were relying on their legal analysts; the legal analysts cannot be prosecuted because they were just giving good faith legal advice. So you end up with a situation in which a chain of easily-identified people doing well-documented acts and leaving smoking guns scattered like cigarette butts, engaged in a conspiracy to repeatedly violate clear national and international laws against torture, and yet nobody is actually responsible for torturing anyone.

I’ve harped on this before. There’s another angle on this, though, too. Just as people fail to understand that it is their small contributions to coordinated evil that allows large projects of coordinated evil to take place, it can also be hard for people to believe that their small, benevolent acts can ever add up to anything worthwhile.

I’ve lately been reading a translation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. In one section of the book, a relatively minor character named Ippolit (or Hippolyte in some translations), a young man dying of tuberculosis, has penned a rambling sort of last testament that he recites to a group of people who have gathered to drink champagne in honor of the title character’s birthday.

Ippolit covers a lot of ground in the testament, which goes on for page upon page like a monologue in an Ayn Rand novel and has a strikingly “existentialist” feel to it. Ippolit is confronting death, which he sees as an approaching brick wall, opaque and impenetrable, and finds himself increasingly unable to engage with a world that seems like it’s no longer his to live in. Even a fly is at home in this world while it’s here, but for him the world is not his home but just the waiting room for his appointment with oblivion.

But among the things he recounts is a recent occasion on which he went out of his way to do a favor for a needy stranger for whom he had no reason to feel any obligation or duty (indeed, if anything, the stranger owed him a favor). A very crucial courtesy from the point of view of the stranger, to be sure, but of no possible meaning to someone who is on the verge of death and who isn’t entertaining any superstitious ideas about getting rewards for his good deeds in the hereafter.

Ippolit speaks to someone about this (as he recounts during his tirade), and says:

There was an old fellow at Moscow, a “general” — that is, an actual state councilor, with a German name. He spent his whole life visiting prisons and prisoners; every party of exiles to Siberia knew beforehand that the “old General” would visit them on the Sparrow Hills. He carried out this good work with the greatest earnestness and devotion. He would turn up, walk through the rows of prisoners, who surrounded him, stop before each, questioning each as to his needs, calling each of them “my dear,” and hardly ever preaching to anyone.

He used to give them money, send them the most necessary articles — leg wrappers, undergarments, linen — and sometimes took them books of devotion, which he distributed among those who could read, firmly persuaded that those who could read would read them to those who could not. He rarely asked a prisoner about his crime; he simply listened if the criminal began speaking of it.

All the criminals were on equal footing with him; he made no distinction between them. He talked to them as though they were brothers, and they came in the end to look on him as a father. If he saw a woman with a baby among the prisoners, he would go up, fondle the child and snap his fingers to make it laugh.

He visited the prisoners like this for many years, up to the time of his death, so much so that he was known all over Russia and Siberia — that is, by all the criminals. A man who had been in Siberia told me that he had seen himself how the most hardened criminals remembered the general; yet the latter could rarely give more than twenty kopecks to each prisoner on his visits.

It’s true they spoke of him without any great warmth, or even earnestness. One of these “unhappy” creatures, a man who had murdered a dozen people and slaughtered six children solely for his own pleasure (for there are such men, I am told), would suddenly, once in twenty years, apropos of nothing, heave a sigh and say: “What about that old general; is he still alive, I wonder?”

Perhaps he smiles as he says it. And that’s all. But how can you tell what seed may have been dropped in his soul forever by that old general, whom he hasn’t forgotten for twenty years? How can you tell, Bahmutov, what significance such an association of one personality with another may have on the destiny of those associated? … You know it’s a matter of a whole lifetime, an infinite multitude of ramifications hidden from us.

The most skillful chess player, the cleverest of them, can only look a few moves ahead; a French player who could reckon out ten moves ahead was written about as a marvel. How many moves there are in this, and how much that is unknown to us!

In scattering the seed, scattering your “charity,” your kind deeds, you are giving away, in one form or another, part of your personality, and taking into yourself part of another; you are in mutual communion with one another; a little more attention and you will be rewarded with the knowledge of the most unexpected discoveries. You will come at last to look upon your work as a science; it will lay hold of all your life, and may fill up your whole life. On the other hand, all your thoughts, all the seeds scattered by you, perhaps forgotten by you, will grow up and take form. He who has received them from you will hand them on to another. And how can you tell what part you may have in the future determination of the destinies of humanity? If this knowledge and a whole lifetime of this work should make you at last able to sow some mighty seed, to bequeath the world some mighty thought, then…

Of course, this being part of the Depressing 19^th Century Russian Literature genre, Ippolit’s goes straight from this speech to solemnly determining to kill himself. (Though mostly, it seems, as a way of wresting one last consciously-chosen act from life before he dies, rather than just letting death take him passively.)

Anyway, last night when I read this it spoke to me as being a pretty good articulation of its perspective. This afternoon I came to think of it again and decided it was worth posting here. It may be that the novel itself will recapitulate (or transcend) the ideas in this excerpt on a larger scale, but I’m still only ¾ of the way through, so I don’t really know where Dostoevsky is taking me yet.

You see the beauty of my proposal is
it needn’t wait on general revolution.
I bid you to the one-man revolution —
The only revolution that is coming.

—Robert Frost
from Build Soil

Today, instead of dredging up something from the archives about historical tax resistance campaigns and movements, I want to spend some time looking at individual tax resistance in service of what Ammon Hennacy called the “one-man^* revolution.”

Whether Hennacy got the name from Frost’s poem, or Frost from him, or whether each came up with it independently, I don’t know. The idea goes back much further than either, and in particular is especially pronounced in Thoreau’s thinking.

This idea is that, contrary to what the organizers of the world are always telling us, the key to curing society’s ills is not necessarily to organize at all. You don’t need a majority, or a critical mass, or a disciplined revolutionary vanguard. Just get your own house in order and commit yourself to your own personal revolution — that’s the most crucial and practical thing you can do.

“One-man revolution” is the answer to the question posed by radicals and reformers who feel overwhelmed by the task ahead. “What can one person do?” they ask (half-hoping, I suspect, that the answer will be “nothing, so don’t sweat it”). They think the revolution that will finally put things right is scheduled for later — when the masses see the light… when a crisis comes… when we find a charismatic leader… when we unite the factions under one banner… when… when… when…

The one-man revolutionary says: no, the revolution starts here and now. Your first task as a revolutionary is to overturn the corrupt, confused, puppet governor of your own life and to put a more responsible sovereign in its place.

As to what the policies of this new sovereign ought to be, well, that’s up to you. I’m not going to cover the details of how Hennacy’s and Thoreau’s one-man revolutions played out and what specific decisions they made along the way. Today instead I’m going to look at the reasons they gave for why the one-man revolution is practical and effective, in answer to the “What can just one person do?” skeptics.

These reasons can be roughly divided into five categories:

1. With the one-man revolution, success is in reach. It may not be easy, but you can win this revolution with your own effort. Furthermore, whether or not you succeed, the struggle itself is the right thing to do.
2. You don’t need to wait for a majority. You don’t need to water down your message to try to win mass appeal or group consensus. You can start immediately from a firm platform of integrity and honesty. This also makes you more self-reliant so that you can endure challenges better, which makes you more effective and far-reaching than those revolutionaries who always have to check to see if the rest of the pack is still with them.
3. Political revolutions that are not also accompanied by individual revolutions don’t make enduring radical change — they just change the faces of the clowns running the circus while leaving the corrupt structure intact.
4. The world sometimes is changed radically and for the better by the efforts and example of a single, one-in-a-million character. But the first step is not to set out to change the world, but to develop that character.
5. By fighting the one-man revolution, you are not as alone as you may think you are: you “leaven the loaf” and cause all society to rise, you attract other one-man revolutionaries to your side, and you sow the seeds that inspire others.

You can win the one-man revolution

Ammon Hennacy’s theory of the one-man revolution crystallized, appropriately enough, while he was being held in solitary confinement. He’d been sentenced for promoting draft evasion during World War Ⅰ and then thrown in “the hole” for leading a hunger strike of prisoners to protest awful food. Because he refused to name names, he was kept there for several months.

Locked up alone in a cell 24/7, unable to communicate with his comrades in the prison or outside, given the silent treatment by the guard, and overhearing the day-in day-out torture of the inmate in the adjoining cell — this was not the most promising situation for a revolutionary.

The only book they allowed him was the Bible (and they even took this away and replaced it with a smaller-print version for no other reason but to inflict another petty torment in the dim light of his cell). In the course of reading and reflecting on what he read — particularly the Sermon on the Mount — he decided that the revolution could be fought and won even where he stood.

To change the world by bullets or ballots was a useless procedure. …the only revolution worthwhile was the one-man revolution within the heart. Each one could make this by himself and not need to wait on a majority.

(A few days back I saw a bumper sticker that read “Jesus was a community organizer.” But if you read the Sermon on the Mount, you won’t see any organizing going on there at all — Jesus is urging people individually to get their lives in order so that their deeds will be like a light shining before others to inspire them. Do you see any “we must,” “we ought to,” “we should work together to,” or “once there are enough of us” in that sermon? Jesus isn’t addressing an organization but an assembly.)

You can start now, with full integrity

Lloyd Danzeisen expressed one of the advantages of the one-man revolution in a letter to Hennacy: “You are lucky and of course very wise to be a ‘one man revolution,’ for you do not have to discuss your action over and over again (with committees) but can swing into action.”

The advantage of organizing and working together is superior numbers, and, in theory anyway, greater force. But there are many disadvantages. It takes a lot of time and negotiation to get a bunch of people to take action together, and usually this also involves finding some lowest common denominator of principle or risk that they can all agree on — which can mean watering down the core of what you’re fighting for until it seems less like a principle than a petty grievance.

What such a movement gains in quantity it may lose in quality, and the force it gains from numbers it may lose from the diffuse, blunted, half-hearted effort of the individuals that make it up, or from the fact that much of their energy is expended in the organizing itself rather than the ostensible goals of the organization.

The advantage of drawing a large crowd of half-hearted followers is rarely worth the effort. It is not too hard to sway a crowd of wishy-washy people by appealing to the half-truths they already believe and being careful not to attack any of the nonsense they adhere to. But what does this get you? A crowd of wishy-washy people who are just as vulnerable to falling for the next demagogue who comes along with patronizing speeches. Instead, Hennacy recommends, we should “appeal to those about ready to make the next step and… know that these are very few indeed.… We can live and die and never change political trends but if we take a notion, we can change our own lives in many basic respects and thus do that much to change society.”

Thoreau wrote of how when he was invited to speak he refused to water down his message to make it most palatable to his listeners. He wasn’t aiming for the sympathy of the crowd, but hoped to reach that one or two who were ready to be challenged: “I see the craven priest looking for a hole to escape at — alarmed because it was he that invited me thither — & an awful silence pervades the audience. They think they will never get me there again. But the seed has not all fallen in stony & shallow ground.”

Thoreau noted with approval that the abolitionist revolutionary John Brown had not gathered around him a large party of well-wishers and collaborators, but instead had been very selective about whom he let in on his plans:

I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority? Would you have had him wait till that time came? — till you and I came over to him?

The very fact that [Brown] had no rabble or troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes. His company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to pass muster. He would have no rowdy or swaggerer, no profane swearer, for, as he said, he always found these men to fail at last. He would have only men of principle, & they are few.

He quotes Brown as saying:

I would rather have the small-pox, yellow-fever, and cholera, all together in my camp, than a man without principle.… Give me men of good principles, — God-fearing men, — men who respect themselves, and with a dozen of them I will oppose any hundred such men as these Buford ruffians.

A one-man revolutionary is more effective and harder to defeat

A one-man revolutionary — a “man of good principles” — is individually more effective and harder to defeat than that same person would be as part of 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.”

This is for two related reasons:

First, because as a one-man revolutionary you are self-motivated, you do not 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, because this makes it difficult for your opponents to get a foothold in trying to persuade you with threats or with bribes to give up the fight.

For example, Hennacy tells of one of his captors trying 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.

The detective assumed that Hennacy valued his belonging more than his integrity, and so made a completely ineffective attack. Thoreau similarly noted that his captors had failed to understand his motives, assuming 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 when used by governments against opposition movements. The lesson proved by this is not that unless we stay united we are weak, but that to the extent that our strength depends mainly on our unity we are vulnerable.

Without the one-man revolution, no other revolution is worth the trouble

The problem with the mass, popular, peasants-with-pitchforks sort of revolution is that it’s so unreliable. You put everything on the line, shed buckets of blood, endure betrayals and unfriendly alliances and hard compromises, and finally (if you’re lucky) cut off the king’s head and take charge… and then what? As often as not, you end up with something as bad as before.

Political revolutions, says Hennacy, “only changed masters.” — “We made a revolution against England and are not free yet. The Russians made a revolution against the Czar and now have an even stronger dictatorship. It is not too late to make a revolution that will mean something — one that will stick: your own one-man revolution.”

Tyranny is not something that only infests the top of the org chart. The tyrant doesn’t cause tyranny, but is its most obvious symptom. Tyranny lives as tenaciously in the tyrannized as in the tyrant. This is why Thoreau was careful to say (emphasis mine):

“That government is best which governs not at all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

Not, “when the workers seize power” or “when we get money out of politics” or anything of that sort, but “when men are prepared for it.” We must prepare ourselves, one one-man revolution at a time, and when we have, we will get the government we deserve (self-government, if Thoreau is right and if we ever do deserve such a thing).

The revolution is not accomplished when the last faction still standing wipes the blood from its hands and sits down behind the presidential desk to issue its first decree, but “when the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office” — that is, when tyranny is purged from the bottom of the org chart.

Define success and failure carefully

Be careful how you define “success.” You can do everything you set out to do, but if you haven’t set out to do anything worth doing, you still fail. Even in mundane things, you’d be wise to keep your eye on a bigger picture. Thoreau mused in his journal:

If a man has spent all his days about some business by which he has merely got rich, as it is called, i.e., has got much money, many houses & barns & woodlots, then his life has been a failure, I think. But if he has been trying to better his condition in a higher sense than this — has been trying to be somebody, to invent something — i.e., to invent and get a patent for himself — so that all may see his originality, though he should never get above board — & all great inventors, you know, commonly die poor — I shall think him comparatively successful.

Success and failure have superficial and deep components that may contradict each other. John Brown set out to launch a rebellion that would end American slavery; the government stood its ground and defended slavery against the rebellion and had Brown hanged. Who was successful? Who won? A victory for evil is just a triumphant form of failure.

And a year and a half after Brown’s execution when Union troops set off to crush the confederacy of slavers, they were singing “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave — his soul is marching on!”

At the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, Brown was called insane by the pulpit, popular opinion, and the press (even — especially — the liberal, abolitionist press). Some gave as evidence for his insanity the most extraordinarily sane thing about him:

It is mentioned against him & as an evidence of his insanity, that he was “a conscientious man, very modest in his demeanor, apparently inoffensive until the subject of slavery was introduced, when he would exhibit a feeling of indignation unparalleled.”

You’d think with the example of Jesus hovering over Western Civilization, people would be skeptical of traditional notions of success: being captured and tortured to death by your enemies and having your followers scorned and scattered throughout a hostile empire doesn’t seem much like a victory. But Thoreau thought the response to John Brown proved that even after centuries of Christianity, “[i]f Christ should appear on earth he would on all hands be denounced as a mistaken, misguided man, insane & crazed.”

You don’t have to believe that history will eventually smile on you and turn your seeming defeats and setbacks into obvious victories. You don’t have to believe the nice-sounding but unlikely sentiment that Hennacy attributed to Tolstoy: “no sincere effort made in the behalf of Truth is ever lost.” You just need to remember that the seemingly small victories in an uncompromising one-man revolution can be more worthwhile (when seen from the perspective of what is worthwhile, not just what is expedient) than huge triumphs rotting within from compromise and half-truths.

Slavery in particular was such an unambiguous evil that it was one of “those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply,” Thoreau said. He made this comparison: if the only way you can save yourself from drowning is to unjustly wrest a plank away from another drowning man, you must instead do what is just even if it kills you. If you are “victorious” in wresting away the plank, and thereby save your own life at the cost of another, you lose.^✴

But even in cases not as extreme as slavery, he says, compromise and expediency are overrated: “there is no such thing as ac­com­plish­ing a right­eous re­form by the use of ‘ex­pe­di­ency.’ There is no such thing as slid­ing up hill. In morals the only sliders are back­sliders.”

The one-man revolution is more about doing the right thing daily than achieving the right result eventually, so even if it seems that everything is going against you, you can be confident you’re on the right track. “[B]e as unconcerned for victory as careless of defeat,” Thoreau advises, “not seeking to lengthen our term of service, nor to cut it short by a reprieve, but earnestly applying ourselves to the campaign before us.”

“Hennacy, do you think you can change the world?” said Bert Fireman, a columnist on the Phoenix Gazette.

“No, but I am damn sure it can’t change me” was my reply.

If you want to change things you have to get 51% of the ballots or the bullets. If I want to change things I just have to keep on doing what I am doing — that is: every day the government says “pay taxes for war”; every day I do not pay taxes for war. So I win and they lose. The One Man Revolution — you can’t beat it.

Do not let your opponent set the norm. Generally a minority is jeered at because they are so small. It is quality and not quantity that is the measure. “One on the side of God is a majority” is the perfect answer which I have given dozens of times with success.

(In this last quote, Hennacy is paraphrasing Thoreau, who wrote that “those who call them­selves ab­o­li­tion­ists should at once ef­fec­tu­ally with­draw their sup­port, both in per­son and prop­erty, from the gov­ern­ment of Mas­sa­chu­setts, and not wait till they con­sti­tute a ma­jor­ity of one, be­fore they suf­fer the right to pre­vail through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, with­out wait­ing for that other one. More­over, any man more right than his neigh­bors con­sti­tutes a ma­jor­ity of one al­ready.”)

One-in-a-million can move the world

Sometimes, a single one-man revolutionary really does change the world. Maybe the world was already ripe for changing, but it still needed a one-man revolutionary to break from the pack and make the change happen.

Hennacy says the self-transforming doers like Christ, the Buddha, Gandhi, or Joan of Arc, were far more radical than theorizers like Marx or Bakunin. Thoreau would agree (though his list — “Minerva — Ceres — Neptune — Prometheus — Socrates — Christ — Luther — Columbus — Arkwright” — was a little more ethereal):

I know of few radicals as yet who are radical enough, and have not got this name rather by meddling with the exposed roots of innocent institutions than with their own.

We don’t progress by passively absorbing the inevitable bounty of history grinding away unconsciously on the masses, as the Hegelians might put it. Rather, says Thoreau, “The great benefactors of their race have been single and singular and not masses of men. Whether in poetry or history it is the same.” We should not be content to admire these heroes, or to await their arrival, but should be inspired by their examples to be heroic ourselves.

The gods have given man no constant gift, but the power and liberty to act greatly. How many wait for health and warm weather to be heroic and noble! We are apt to think there is a kind of virtue which need not be heroic and brave — but in fact virtue is the deed of the bravest; and only the hardy souls venture upon it, for it deals in what we have no experience, and alone does the rude pioneer work of the world.

Ac­tion from prin­ci­ple, — the per­cep­tion and the per­for­mance of right, — changes things and re­la­tions; it is es­sen­tially rev­o­lu­tion­ary, and does not con­sist wholly with any thing which was. It not only di­vides states and churches, it di­vides fam­i­lies; aye, it di­vides the in­di­vid­ual, sep­a­rat­ing the di­a­bol­i­cal in him from the di­vine.

There is something proudly thrilling in the thought that this obedience to conscience and trust in God, which is so solemnly preached in extremities and arduous circumstances, is only to retreat to one’s self, and rely on our own strength. In trivial circumstances I find myself sufficient to myself, and in the most momentous I have no ally but myself, and must silently put by their harm by my own strength, as I did the former. As my own hand bent aside the willow in my path, so must my single arm put to flight the devil and his angels. God is not our ally when we shrink, and neuter when we are bold. If by trusting in God you lose any particle of your vigor, trust in Him no longer. … I cannot afford to relax discipline because God is on my side, for He is on the side of discipline.

We can’t all be Christ, Buddha, Gandhi, or Joan of Arc. (Steve Allen said that Ammon Hennacy fulfilled more of the role of a Lenny Bruce; Hennacy’s wife suggested Don Quixote.) It is only one-in-a-million who moves the world. But despite the odds we all should aspire to be this one in a million.

Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. Therefore one who has love, courage, and wisdom is one in a million who moves the world, as with Jesus, Buddha, and Gandhi.

Even if we fall short of this goal ourselves, by choosing this goal we not only choose the only goal worth choosing, but we adjust our standards so that if we are ever lucky enough to meet this one in a million, we will be more likely to recognize her or him. Most people are incapable of recognizing or comprehending the hero in real life — they lionize the dead martyred heroes of past generations, while joining the lynch mobs to martyr the heroes of their own.

It only takes a little leavening to leaven the loaf

By aiming at this standard, you also raise the standards of those around you, and so even if you cannot detect a direct influence, you improve society. The way Thoreau put it — “It is not so im­por­tant that many should be as good as you, as that there be some ab­so­lute good­ness some­where; for that will leaven the whole lump.”^†

By being virtuous in an out-of-the-ordinary way you encourage people to call ordinary vices into question and you force the devil’s advocates to show themselves by coming to the devil’s defense. Thoreau was convinced that one person was enough to leaven the loaf:

[I]f one thou­sand, if one hun­dred, if ten men whom I could name, — if ten hon­est men only, — aye, if one hon­est man, in this State of Mas­sa­chu­setts, ceas­ing to hold slaves, were ac­tu­ally to with­draw from this co­part­ner­ship, and be locked up in the county jail there­for, it would be the ab­o­li­tion of slav­ery in Amer­ica.

Hennacy said that his “work was not that of an organizer but of a Sower to sow the seeds.”

We really can’t change the world. We really can’t change other people! The best we can do is to start a few thinking here and there. The way to do this, if we are sincere, is to change ourselves!

When they are ready for it [my emphasis again — ♇], the rich, the bourgeois intellectual, the bum, and even the politician and the clergy may have an awakening of conscience because of the uncompromising seeds of Christian Anarchism which we are sowing.

You have a plan to reform the world? As the saying goes: “show me, don’t tell me.” Thoreau:

The Reformer who comes recommending any institution or system to the adoption of men, must not rely solely on logic and argument, or on eloquence and oratory for his success, but see that he represents one pretty perfect institution in himself…

I ask of all Reformers, of all who are recommending Temperance, Justice, Charity, Peace, the Family, Community or Associative life, not to give us their theory and wisdom only, for these are no proof, but to carry around with them each a small specimen of his own manufactures, and to despair of ever recommending anything of which a small sample at least cannot be exhibited: — that the Temperance man let me know the savor of Temperance, if it be good, the Just man permit to enjoy the blessings of liberty while with him, the Community man allow me to taste the sweets of the Community life in his society.

Too many reformers think they can reform the rottenness of the system the people are sustaining without changing the rottenness of the people who sustain the system. “The disease and disorder in society are wont to be referred to the false relations in which men live one to another, but strictly speaking there can be no such thing as a false relation if the condition of the things related is true. False relations grow out of false conditions. … It is not the worst reason why the reform should be a private and individual enterprise, that perchance the evil may be private also.”

So often we hear of a Big Plan that, were it enacted as designed, would solve the Big Problems. But the problem with the big plans is that they never seem to get enacted, or if they do, they never seem to work as designed, as the same problems show up in new guises. Meanwhile the planners waste their time and energy and don’t change what is changeable. Tolstoy put it this way:

If a man drinks, and I tell him that he can himself stop drinking and must do so, there is some hope that he will pay attention to me; but if I tell him that his drunkenness forms a complex and difficult problem, which we, the learned, will try to solve in our meetings, all the probabilities are that he, waiting for the solution of the problem, will continue to drink. The same is true of the false and intricate scientific, external means for the cessation of war, like the international tribunals, the court of arbitration, and other similar foolish things, when we with them keep in abeyance the simplest and most essential means for the cessation of war, which is only too obvious to anybody. For people who do not need war not to fight we need no international tribunals, no solution of questions, but only that the people who are subject to deception should awaken and free themselves from that spell under which they are. This means for the abolition of war consists in this, that the men who do not need war, who consider a participation in war to be a sin, should stop fighting.

An alcoholic who spoke with Hennacy had much the same sentiment: “the AA fixed me up. You are right in not wanting to change the world by violence; the change has to come with each person first.”

The present American peace movement, stubbornly paying for the imperial armies it says it opposes, reminds me of drunks meeting in a tavern at happy hour to organize a prohibition movement that will solve their alcohol problem.

Your one-man revolution isn’t as lonely as it may seem

Hennacy and Thoreau also had faith that if you begin the one-man revolution, this will attract like-minded souls to you and you to them, and that you will find yourself working in concert with comrades you never knew you had:

Thoreau: “Men talk much of cooperation nowadays, of working together to some worthy end; but what little cooperation there is, is as if it were not, being a simple result of which the means are hidden, a harmony inaudible to men. If a man has faith, he will cooperate with equal faith everywhere. If he has not faith he will continue to live like the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to.”

Hennacy: “In reading Tolstoy I had gained the idea that if a person had the One Man Revolution in his heart and lived it, he would be led by God toward those others who felt likewise.… This was to be proven in a most dramatic way, and was to usher me into the second great influence of my life: that of the Catholic Worker movement.”

The One-Man Revolution

So what do you have to do to be the exemplar and sow the seeds?

1. Accept responsibility, and act responsibly.
2. Build yourself a glass house and start throwing stones.

Accept responsibility, and act responsibly

Most political action amounts to “who can we find to take responsibility for this problem” — the One Man Revolutionary asks “what can I do to take responsibility for this problem?”

Not that everything is your responsibility, or that the world is looking to you personally to solve all of its problems. But you should at the very least examine your life to see what problems or solutions you are contributing to with it. Can one person make a difference? You are already making a difference — what kind of difference are you making?

It is not a man’s duty, as a mat­ter of course, to de­vote him­self to the erad­i­cat­ion of any, even the most enor­mous wrong; he may still prop­erly have other con­cerns to en­gage him, but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it prac­ti­cally his sup­port. If I de­vote my­self to other pur­suits and con­tem­plat­ions, I must first see, at least, that I do not pur­sue them sit­ting upon an­other man’s shoul­ders. I must get off him first, that he may pur­sue his con­tem­plat­ions too.

A man has not ev­ery thing to do, but some­thing; and be­cause he can­not do ev­ery thing, it is not nec­es­sary that he should do some­thing wrong.

In Thoreau’s time, the evils of slavery and of wars of conquest were sustained by the active allegiance and support of the ordinary people around him, many of whom nonetheless congratulated themselves for their anti-war, anti-slavery opinions.

I quar­rel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-op­er­ate with, and do the bid­ding of those far away, and with­out whom the lat­ter would be harm­less.

I have heard some of my towns­men say, “I should like to have them or­der me out to help put down an in­sur­rec­tion of the slaves, or to march to Mex­ico, — see if I would go;” and yet these very men have each, di­rectly by their al­le­giance, and so in­di­rectly, at least, by their money, fur­nished a sub­sti­tute. The sol­dier is ap­plauded who re­fuses to serve in an un­just war by those who do not re­fuse to sus­tain the un­just gov­ern­ment which makes the war…

Those who, while they dis­ap­prove of the char­ac­ter and meas­ures of a gov­ern­ment, yield to it their al­le­giance and sup­port, are un­doubt­edly its most con­sci­en­tious sup­port­ers, and so fre­quently the most se­ri­ous ob­sta­cles to re­form. Some are pe­ti­tion­ing the State to dis­solve the Union, to dis­re­gard the req­ui­si­tions of the Pres­i­dent. Why do they not dis­solve it them­selves, — the union be­tween them­selves and the State, — and re­fuse to pay their quota into its trea­sury?

If a thou­sand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a vi­o­lent and bloody meas­ure, as it would be to pay them, and en­able the State to com­mit vi­o­lence and shed in­no­cent blood. This is, in fact, the def­i­ni­tion of a peace­able rev­o­lu­tion, if any such is pos­si­ble.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that because the one-man revolution is in your heart that it can just stay there, locked up inside, without leaking out into the world around you.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course. Do not let your right hand know what your left hand does in that line of business. I have no doubt it will prove a failure.

The one-man revolution doesn’t necessarily require living in opposition to society and the status quo, but it does require holding fast to justice and virtue. When society and the status quo are opposed to justice and virtue, as they so often are, this puts them in opposition to you as well.

Build yourself a glass house and start throwing stones

Your friends and even your enemies will come to your aid when you try to hold yourself to a high standard. All you have to do is to make yourself vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. People love to point out hypocritical moralists, in part because some hypocritical moralists are hilarious, but also in part because it helps people excuse their own failures to hold themselves to high standards. If you build yourself a glass house and throw stones from it, everyone will volunteer to keep you on the straight-and-narrow.

Hennacy:

I have… put myself in a glass house. If so I must needs take whatever stones come my way. I have the right by my life of integrity to criticize, but I must also take whatever criticism comes my way in all good humor.

[A] spoiled and arrogant priest wanted to know if I was “holier than thou.” I told him I hoped by Christ I was, for if I wasn’t I would be in a hell of a fix. I used this blunt method to deflate his spurious piety.

At times those who do not want to have their inconsistencies pointed out say in a super-sweet voice to me “judge not, lest ye be judged.” I reply, “O.K., judge me, then.”

When your standards for yourself rise, so do your standards for other people (otherwise you really are being arrogant). Thoreau, criticized for demanding too much from people, said he could not “con­vince my­self that I have any right to be sat­is­fied with men as they are, and to treat them ac­cord­ingly, and not ac­cord­ing, in some re­spects, to my req­ui­si­tions and ex­pec­ta­tions of what they and I ought to be.”

While both Thoreau and Hennacy strike me as stern with others, and maybe not always fun to be around (as Hennacy would say: “I love my enemies but am hell on my friends”), they were anything but joyless. Thoreau’s vigorous, enthusiastic love of life and the world are legendary, and Hennacy’s character too was eager, life-affirming, and generous (even in its criticisms).

Utah Phillips came home from the Korean war a drunken brawler, checked in to Hennacy’s Catholic Worker hospitality house in Salt Lake City, and eight years later checked out again, sober, a pacifist, and an anarchist. He remembered Hennacy this way:

He was tough without being hard — tough without that brittle hardness that some tough men have that would shatter if you struck it too hard. “Love in Action,” Dorothy Day called him — Dostoyevsky’s words: “Love in action is harsh and dreadful compared to love in dreams.”^‡

Neither Thoreau nor Hennacy had any tolerance for bliss-bunnyishness, but both were cheerful; both knew how to be dutiful without being dour. Thoreau:

To march sturdily through life, patiently and resolutely looking grim defiance at one’s foes, that is one way; but we cannot help being more attracted by that kind of heroism which relaxes its brows in the presence of danger, and does not need to maintain itself strictly, but, by a kind of sympathy with the universe, generously adorns the scene and the occasion, and loves valor so well that itself would be the defeated party only to behold it; which is as serene and as well pleased with the issue as the heavens which look down upon the field of battle. It is but a lower height of heroism when the hero wears a sour face.

A great cheerfulness indeed have all great wits and heroes possessed, almost a profane levity to such as understood them not, but their religion had the broader basis of health and permanence. For the hero, too, has his religion, though it is the very opposite to that of the ascetic. It demands not a narrower cell but a wider world.

In conclusion

I’ve tried here to put forward the strongest affirmative case for the practical effectiveness of the one-man revolution, at least as it can be found in Hennacy’s and Thoreau’s writings.

They make a strong and persuasive argument, I think, but not an airtight one. I wish more evidence was preserved of them in dialog with incisive critics of the one-man revolution, to hear how they would respond to the best arguments against it.

But what keeps the argument for a one-man revolution from persuading people is not, I think, the strength of the counter-arguments, but just the fact that to accept the argument is not enough — it demands much more than a “Like,” and much more than most people think they have to give. To be persuaded is to be overwhelmed, to take the first step off the path and into uncharted territory, and only a few of us have the courage to take that step.