Tyranny of Certainty
We need a dream and a plan. As a person alive right now, as a parent, as a sick body, I want a future that is livable. I think you want that too. We can identify problems, our work now is to build unity and chart direction.
When I help prepare people for writing letters to those incarcerated within the US prison system, I represent an abolitionist collective that works toward a future without prisons. One thing we make clear is that we don’t mandate ideological uniformity in order to participate in letter writing and relationship building. You cannot build a healthy resistance in dangerous circumstances by demanding that everyone agree with you, or else. The “or else” part begets prison and no ideology survives by tormenting its critics and dissidents.
Unifying people toward action requires a sense that we’re working toward a goal that we all want. The dream must have broad appeal, otherwise we remain fragmented. The plan needs specifics to inspire and guide action; the “why” followed by the “how.” All with respect to the Unknown.
Jacqueline Harpman’s 1995 novel, I Who Have Never Known Men, takes place in an unknown future. The setting is stark and almost all questions the characters and the reader has go unanswered. As the narrator observes, “it is impossible to predict what might happen in a world where you don’t know the rules.” So, “Rootless, I existentially write myself the stable world.”1
As we witness the accelerating distortion of this ill-conceived nation, there’s an inclination to find, fix, and follow The Rules toward stability. Most of us were raised on worship of logic and rationalism.2 We inherited the Classical European conviction that to know is to posses. Knowledge of the “right” kind became social currency and to not know is ultimate insecurity. A technical term for this is Materialism, which restricts belief to quantification, and it diminishes our dreams of what is possible. If you do not respect or acknowledge Mystery, you invariably fear what you do not know.
Jesus sometimes asked people if they wanted to be healed. It seems like a stupid thing to say to a sick person, but I think it’s akin to asking, “are you willing to accept a mystery?” Are you okay with an answer, or non-answer, that doesn’t fit the reigning paradigm? Are you prepared to be attacked, or ignored, by people who fear mystery?
Unpredictability is not a power over you, but the tearing of a veil. A gift. Trump and Co.’s playbook, though chaotic, is pretty predictable. They are lawless in an attempt to prop up a necrotic empire, an unimaginative dream. We can be lawless far better than DOGE or ICE or the IDF.
When I imagine a livable future, my dream is not to possess it. I do not want the Evangelical new world that is just this world scorched of unbelievers. I don’t want a Martian Muskite new world to claw my way to for the bargain price of my life spent mining every resource on this planet. I do not want Harris for president of a new world. I don’t dream of working, studying, or training harder toward a future as the sole survivor of a ruined planet.
Breaking Eggs to Make Cake
To know is to possess - a false premise that beget the laws that structure our society. Faith in the law so permeates the collective psyche that many seem stunned by the revelation that the law is not serving us. Thus the absolute outrage felt at Trump and his orbit of brutes bulldozing rules, but also the blindness to Biden’s genocide because of the assurance that it’s all legal. It’s scandalous to see rules treated as totally arbitrary, but rules are arbitrary.
We see people beaten, disappeared, and murdered by the State and a first reaction is, “is that even legal?!” Some people can’t get past the illegality of a felon as President. We’re so eager to punish or banish people who don’t follow the rules because we think that when we follow the rules it means our goodness and safety is predictable, but it can just as easily not. The law is not a moral standard. That means legal ≠ good, illegal ≠ bad.
I have friends and friends-of-friends who are lawyers working tirelessly to untangle people from this shifting web. I celebrate every legal victory for good, even as it amazes me that a system that imprisons people based on arbitrary rules ever responds to a rulebook appeal. The upholding of law is as arbitrary as law itself.
Many people are fighting back, but we will continue to feel isolated and helpless if we rely on the law for good change. Proper appeals to our leaders are ignored, scoffed at, and even punished. It’s okay to grieve that.
The next level of resistance scares us. We’ve witnessed the impunity with which police and courts punish and murder people who threaten their control. Enforcers of unjust laws are not your friend, they are not protecting you.
It is good to break bad rules. We deny usurpers control when we refuse to acknowledge their power, and we know this is effective because we immediately face resistance. Don’t grant Trump & Co. imaginary power by clinging to a code that they tauntingly disregard. As our leaders are magicians of their own authority, so are we.
Organized disregard of chaotic-evil has no sting if we build it on the oppressor’s terms. We cannot wield resistance using rules that no longer apply, nor can we unify by appealing to hollow dreams of material excess, political power, or social influence. There will be no slow motion or still lifes of Roy Wilkins / Strolling through Watts in a red, black, and green liberation jumpsuit / That he has been saving for just the proper occasion.3
I Dream of Goodness
It’s one thing to agree on what we’re against, it’s another to trust one another to act right without rules. Our grief at the farce of law and our fear of the consequences of defiance are too often focused on the real or imagined deficit of our neighbor’s political knowledge (if they knew better, or were better, surely they’d vote better!). But if we agree that sustaining an evil system is not our dream, it’s of no concern whether we agree on the policies of empire.
The thing you’re feeling underneath indignation at the brokenness, enforcement, and abuse of the law is moral clarity. You know, without being taught, that what you’re seeing and experiencing is wrong. Owning land is not a natural possibility, as if the ground agrees with us. Yet when we witness land stolen, we sense the moral violation. If we recognize moral clarity but our faith is in the construct of law-as-justice, we leech the legitimacy from our own senses.
Morality is a tricky word because it has even less public consensus than laws and it can’t be taught as law without resulting in diabolical marriages of Church and State. I’m talking about morality as a spiritual knowing. Spiritual knowing is mysterious, it’s not the currency-of-knowledge of Materialism. Spiritual knowing that is neither binary nor punitive may not be teachable, but it can be awakened. You can begin to nurture your own intuition, and we can encourage it in one another.
It’s wrong to bomb civilians. It’s wrong to manufacture, sell, or give weapons of mass destruction. It is wrong to destroy the earth. It’s wrong to tax people and use the money to murder and pillage. It’s wrong to lie to your constituents about how you will represent their concerns. It’s wrong to call massacre self defense. It’s wrong to beat people for protesting genocide. It’s wrong to extort people who need medical care. It’s wrong to kidnap people.
I’m not a researcher or reporter or priest. I don’t need any title or authority to say that these things are wrong or to resist the mental gymnastics of any politician or Facebook bot that says these things are ambiguous or complicated. I don’t need to prove it with a legal code or Bible verse. Neither do you.
Moral clarity can be frightening. It demands more change than we are ready for. Do we want to be healed? Do we hate injustice more than we hate instability? We think that to know what is right means that everything should be right, so the fact that everything is not right must mean that everyone else is asleep, or dead inside. Naturally, feeling that you’re alone is isolating.
Many are still asleep. Hanif Abdurraqib refers often to “our societal sickness.” The sense that many people lack moral clarity is real, and I believe it’s a symptom of deeply imbedded moralizing control. Moralizing mandates how to act “right,” defined by authority as a tool of control. I was taught that obedience is morality, and the consequence of disobedience was punishment. I learned this from religion, family, the legal system, doctors, school, the military, governments, and workplaces.
We’re taught to respect authority, whose basis is People Who Know More (knowledge as possession), not to honor intuition. Manipulative control and punishment are normalized as consequences of actions that authority figures don’t want. We’re told that when we experience harm, it is our fault in one way or another, so we learn to stay quiet.
Experiencing manipulation as normal can lead people to perpetuate punitive control, believing that it’s right. In fact, if you act right by the ruling code, you may be rewarded with authority over others. I’ve been offered this authority when a teacher or boss asks me to report the behavior of my peers: behavior that isn’t wrong, but may be against a rule. It’s tempting to deaden your sense of morality in exchange for control (or a raise), and just as temping to silence your intuition to preserve your job or your safety.
When we start naming what is wrong (burning Palestinians alive) instead of quieting our moral intuition (“that’s just the world we live in!”), suddenly the scale of how much is wrong is crushing. It can come with the recognition that people we know by name are sometimes really bad to us, and they may not even know it. That realization hurts.
Moralizing control is abusive. You’re not a bad person for internalizing manipulation as normal, but it does infect you with societal illness. Many people are unable to resist because they are bewitched by a lie that gaining crumbs of control over others is some kind of personal freedom or power. It’s difficult to trust each other to invite internal upheaval in hopes that we can share moral clarity as a unifying bond of organized resistance. So, dreaming of goodness is our work!
No longer accepting the things we can’t change, as Angela Davis said, is only step one, but it’s crucial. Naming that bombing is wrong doesn’t prevent them from dropping, but it does build bravery in me. I no longer believe that if only I was more obedient, if only I understand the games my health insurance play (manipulation-as-normalcy), then I’d be treated well. I still feel embarrassed to make a scene, but it’s even more embarrassing to never develop the ability to risk being disliked for confronting abuse. The more I confront manipulators in their schemes, the less power their authority holds.
Bureaucratic cogs hate to see me coming, even if what I feel as moral clarity is just a pain in the ass to them. If you choose a vocation that requires your obedience to a killing machine, whether that’s behind a desk or on a squad, fear or annoyance of people with moral clarity might be your intuition rolling over deep inside you. Industry4 that stomps on people is not worthy of your respect or obedience, even if they beat you for defiance.
You want me to maintain my innocence within a violently corrupted state? The thing that got Jesus killed?
Moral clarity helps us dream of goodness, it’s not some blueprint for a holy war. Listening to your intuition will accelerate change, first in yourself, and subsequently in your relationships and surroundings. People who act out of moral clarity (not moralizing control) are formidable. We reject manipulation, we do not fear death, we have invincible spirits. We embrace mystery and are healed.
Having moral clarity doesn’t make me the arbiter of morality, but it helps me trust myself. Rather than thinking I can convince others, I’m aware that people who want to be healed will come to trust themselves. We don’t need rules to define goodness, goodness is already within us.
Embodied morality awakens the conviction that defying anti-love is a good dream and a worthy standard. This helps guide decision making in times of uncertainty. Spiritual knowing is a unifier that the law can never be, and an advantage that our enemies lack. I’m not eager to die by the sword, but neither will I argue with a liar on his own terms. Deepening spiritual knowing is like a portal to a new world. Not an escape, but an expansion. Through it we grow our access to goodness, a knowing that present suffering is not all there is.
In This World, I Need Water
In early COVID days, uncertainty was a remarkable equalizer. Before there was any information to decipher, many, many people did an excellent job of providing one another with basic care. Our internet provider at the time gave every customer several months of free service. The restaurant I worked at shut down and distributed its perishable inventory among the employees. We took care of strangers, and they took care of us. We were and are capable of unity!
Then I became obsessed with information because I wanted to have the most informed plan at all times. But information is not knowledge. I respect most scientific research, and still COVID has attributes that scientists, let alone me, don’t understand. Observation of patterns can and should help inform our plans, but “it is impossible to predict what might happen in a world where you don’t know the rules.”
I Who Have Never Known Men is striking for its lack of catastrophe. Every day is the end of the world as we know it, it’s just kind of a slog. Rather than one horrible event that puts everything into focus (though surely we can name some of those, too), it’s the endless unraveling of Events into the rest of life, permeating everything, that claims my attention toward sifting and deciphering endless, endless information. Here I am, so well informed, and all I have to show for it is being more right than every president, ever.
I know what’s wrong. I need a plan.
I’m a decade into community organizing, both information gathering and experience. Before anything, I know I can’t form a plan alone. We’ve all arrived at the vague conclusion that “we need community.” I’m the first to insist that gatherings involve shared food and that equitable food access is foundational in community care. But eating with your friends is called a dinner party, not a resistance tactic.
Community is choosing to trust people different than you, relinquishing control. It’s necessary to tune out excessive information for the sake of focusing on your own skills and knowledge-building. If you do that, and I do that, together we have a collection of tactics toward our shared goal.
A word I like for myself is “simplicity”: I shed clutter5 in my routines and through a meditation practice so that I can access a sense of personal calm and the mental space to work out problems. When I’m prepared, there is nothing in the way of acting on clarity when it strikes.
In community, I am neither self sufficient nor unaffected. I find many reasons to avoid action if I feel alone, but when one light turns on, it’s as if that small glow helps others nearby see their own work more clearly, and slowly the web is getting brighter. Nurturing clarity is personal work, acting on it is communal work.
Community is also unpredictable. Sometimes people let you down. We are waking and grieving and ready to act at different rates. A dream of goodness is something that everyone is invited into, whereas our enemies are united by exclusion, a dream that demands cruelty and exploitation upon entry. In community, we’ll never all be on the same page at the same time, but instead of that being a reason to disengage, it means we always find new recruits among sleepers and enemy defectors.
Community is where a collection of personal knowledges becomes a plan. The beauty in non-hierarchal collectives is that I don’t have to know everything. My friends have more knowledge of the law, more experience with tech security (anti-surveillance), skills like carpentry or mechanics, vegetable gardens, and different knowledge of self defense. What I offer is resourceful cooking and the impetus to facilitate organizing groups of people.
Gather and take stock of your group, both literally and conceptually. Answer as specifically as possible: what are our concerns, needs, resources, and skills?6 These answers will shape your goal and plans. Every time a new tactic is floated, first questions are 1) does this fit with our goal, and 2) do we have the resources (usually in unpaid, volunteer time) to do it? If yes to both, a volunteer(s) takes the lead and we check in periodically on progress and capacity, adjusting the goal and the resources as needed. It’s not glamorous, but it is sustainable, and that’s good for plans.
Endless information, a major currency of post-internet globalization, steals time that is needed to build skills. I’m not anti-technology or anti-AI, but consumption of the digital is not a practical skill. Knowledge of the digital is valuable, reliance on it is not. Every standard of value that is not life-essence is arbitrary, and flimsy things collapse first: law, “the economy”, the stock market, even things like the gold standard or “more secure countries.”
Amidst COVID shipping delays, boycotts, defundings, tariffs, and bird flu, I’ve discovered that my needs are few. I still need water, food, shelter, friends, and medicine. I have other likes and wants, but the spell of having more stuff, faster, and cheaper, is broken. I’m not into suffering and self-imposed denial and I don’t advocate for any form of isolationism, I just don’t want the emaciated dream of “riches” or prestige anymore. I’ll fight for life, not for stuff.
I expect that things I like or even rely on are not permanent. I utilize what is available to me while it lasts instead of stockpiling for unknowable Extreme Events. We know that there are enough resources to sustain every living being on this planet, but the distribution is diabolically manipulated. Jobs, services, and laws that my community needs are dismantled daily. Tactics are to provide care and creative alternatives at a community level, but also to dismantle inequity. I can’t do either alone.
Your skill set is different than mine, which I’m relying on! I define a practical, meaningful, valuable, skill or pastime as something that requires little or no money and that a human can do better than a computer. Here are examples that interest me or that I cultivate:
Learn family history (cultures, practices, stories).
Cook from scratch, preserve recipes.
Read for pleasure.
Teach my skills for free.
Learn about local environment; the names and uses of native plants.
Craft; write, draw, embroider, sculpt things that not only keep technique and traditions alive, but leave a record.
Meditation as training to function and regulate without distraction.
Give time to existing groups who serve for free (food, medical care, childcare, transportation), without controlling.
Workshops are a great way to roleplay new skills. They provide an atmosphere where I can see strangers taking unpredictability seriously (I see that I am not alone!), and they’re low-stakes opportunities to invite friends who think “prepping” is cringe. Demonstrate that making some preparations isn’t the same thing as living in fear.
A dream and a plan are no guarantee against loss, pain, or every kind of extortion and manipulation. Neither is hand-wringing. Let the threat of wasteland sharpen your focus. We are impermanent, but goodness is not.
This second line is from the author of the introduction, Sophie Mackintosh.
MAGA or “not seeing the problem” of racism, class divide, homophobia, the genocide in Palestine etc. is in no small part a product of several philosophical movements in Europe that the good ol’ Founding Fathers venerated, and many Classical Education curriculums, which boomed beginning in the 1980s, focus on reviving. “Discovering” the New World and then claiming it and subjugating Indigenous peoples was believed (or at least said) to be Manifest Destiny, and this philosophy persists: that knowledge (discovery) is akin to ownership.
Every reference in The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
Policing, prison, the courts, and the military profit from punishment. That’s evil.
I wrote about how to use social media this way.
This conversation between Margaret Killjoy and Dean Spade covers both philosophical and practical prepping. If learning to hunt squirrels isn’t likely for you (Spade), make some space for non-perishable food storage (Killjoy). Learn to handle weapons, and/or how to apply a tourniquet. Strategic planning utilizes existing interests (diversity within a group) to focus on skill building in areas that are underprepared.