e. MeanGreen / BrightGreen

As soil microbiologist Peter Salonius states flatly, “Intensive crop culture for high population[s] is unsustainable.”Read more at location 603 • Delete this highlight

It takes a thousand years for the earth to create a few inches of topsoil. Currently, topsoil is being lost at ten to twenty times the rate at which it can be replenished.Read more at location 624 • Delete this highlight

The legacy of the Romantics is especially prominent in the politics of emotion embraced by many different strands of the alternative culture. Emotions are understood as pure, unmediated by society, a society whose main offense is seen to be the suppression of these always-authentic feelings. The paramount emotional state varies—for the hippies and New Agers, it’s love; for the punks, it’s rage; and for the Goths, it’s exquisite suffering—but the ultimate goal is to achieve the selected emotion and maintainRead more at location 2290

Radical groups have their own particular pitfalls. The first is in dealing with hierarchy, both conceptually and practically. The rejection of authority is another hallmark of adolescence, and this knee-jerk reactivity filters into many political groups. All hierarchy is a tool of The Man, the patriarchy, the Nazis. This approach leads to an insistence on consensus at any cost and often a constant metadiscussion of group power dynamics. It also unleashes “critiques” of anyone who achieves public acclaim or leadership status.Read more at location 2336

These critiques are usually nothing more than jealousy camouflaged by political righteousness.Read more at location 2339

It’s often accompanied by a hyperanalysis of the victim’s language use or personal lifestyle choices.Read more at location 2341

There’s a name for this trashing. As noted, Florynce Kennedy called it “horizontal hostility.” And if it feels like junior high school by another name, that’s because it is. It can reach a feeding frenzy of ugly gossip and character assassination.Read more at location 2343

This behavior leaves friendships, activist circles, and movements in shreds. The people subject to attack are often traumatized until they permanently withdraw. The bystanders may find the culture so unpleasant and even abusive that they leave as well. And many of the worst aggressors burn out on their own adrenaline, to drop out of the movement and into mainstream lives. In military conflicts, more soldiers may be killed by “friendly fire” than the enemy, an apt parallel to how radical groups often self-destruct.Read more at location 2358

But a youth culture by definition doesn’t have that cache of experience, and it never will.Read more at location 2365

Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great struggle for human freedom is in progress. It is an added good fortune to have parents who take a personal part in the great movements of their time.… Young as I was—I could not have been older than five years—I knew perfectly well the meaning of the words “slavery” andRead more at location 2421 • Delete this highlight

‘Deeds, not Words’ was to be our permanent motto.”Read more at location 2442 • Delete this highlight

physical and sexual boundaries are seen as just one more middle-class convention that men have a right to overcome on their way to freedom. Nowhere is this more apparent—and appalling—than in the way so many on the left have embraced pornography.Read more at location 2476 • Delete this highlight

This is the moral bankruptcy of a culture built on violation and its underlying entitlement. It’s a slight variation on the Romantics, substituting sexual desire for emotion as the unmediated, natural, and privileged state.Read more at location 2539 • Delete this highlight

College students have 40 percent less empathy than they did twenty years ago.72Read more at location 2548 • Delete this highlight

“If it feels good, do it” isn’t even the province of adolescence; it’s the morality of a toddler.Read more at location 2563 • Delete this highlight

But as long as the left refuses to fight for our values as values—and to enact those values in our lives and our movements—the right will be partially correct. They will also have recruitment potential that we’re squandering: people know that civic life and basic social norms have degenerated.Read more at location 2570 • Delete this highlight

We’re getting stupider, crueler, and more depressed by the minute. Oliver James calls the values of the corporate media “Affluenza,” likening it to a virus that spreads across societies. He points out that anxiety, depression, and addiction rise in direct proportion to the inequity in a country. The values required to institutionalize inequality are values that are destructive to human happiness and human community. Injustice requires reducing people—including ourselves—to “manipulable commodities.”Read more at location 2586 • Delete this highlight

The alternative culture was based on the premise that essentially nobody had to do anything they didn’t feel like doing. A major part of their rebellion was the rejection of a work ethic, always cast as Protestant. But taken to its logical end, this is the position of a parasite. The dropouts either got money from their parents, from friends who got it from parents, or from the state.Read more at location 2652 • Delete this highlight

It was obvious to me at age fourteen that there were two weapons I would need for the fight: a mind that could think and the heart of a warrior. Drugs would destroy the one and numb the other. I swore away from drugs and I’ve never regretted that decision.Read more at location 2669 • Delete this highlight

cultures of resistance. Such effects are broad and deep: the self-absorption, lack of motivation, and broken synapses create a population in semipermanent “couch lock.” Drugs and alcohol will not help us when we need commitment, hard work, and sacrifice, which are the foundation of all cultures of resistance. Addicts have no place on the front lines of resistance because an addict will always put their addiction first. Always.Read more at location 2672 • Delete this highlight

These were and are acts of communal self-care that were linked to survival and resistance. It was an important ethic, and it was understood and embraced. There are parallel calls for a chem-free ethic in some Native American activist groups, and for the same reason: drugs and alcohol have been damaging enough to name them genocidal. The radical left would do well to model itself on these recent examples and to consider an ethic of sobriety as both collective self-care and resistance. We need everyone’s brain. If our goal is a serious movement, then we also need focus, dependability, and commitment. On the front lines, we need to know our comrades are rock solid. In our culture, we need a set of ethics and behavioral norms that can build a functioning community. Basic awareness of addiction—its symptoms, its treatment options—is important both to help the afflicted and to keep our groups safe and strong.Read more at location 2677 • Delete this highlight

A steady diet of carbohydrates, on the other hand, will produce depressed, anxious, irritable people too exhausted to do much beyond attend to the psychodramas created by their blood sugar swings, which about sums up the emotional ambiance of my youth.Read more at location 2694 • Delete this highlight

A plant-based diet is not adequate for long-term maintenance and repair of the human brain or body, and it has been taking a heavy toll on the left for several generations.Read more at location 2713 • Delete this highlight

The appropriation of Native American religious practices has become so widespread that in 1993 elders issued a statement, “The Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality.” The Declaration was unanimously passed by 500 representatives from forty Lakota tribes and bands. The statement could not be clearer: white people helping themselves to Native American religious practices is destructive enough to be called genocide by the Lakotas. The elders have spoken loud and clear and, indeed, even reaffirmed their statement. We should have learned this in kindergarten: don’t take what’s not yours. Other people’s cultures are not a shopping mall from which the privileged get to pick and choose.Read more at location 2738 • Delete this highlight

The people who adopt the sacred symbols or religious forms of Native Americans—the pipe ceremony, inipi—do it to fulfill their own perceived needs, even over the Native Americans’ clear protests. These Euro-Americans may sometimes go a step further and try to claim their actions are somehow antiracist, a stunning reversal of reality. It doesn’t matter how much people feel drawn to their own version of Native American spirituality or how much a sweat lodge (in all probability led by a plastic shaman) means to them. No perceived need outweighs the wishes of the culture’s owners. They have said no.Read more at location 2749 • Delete this highlight

Respect starts in hearing no—in fact, it cannot exist without it. Just because something moves you deeply, or even speaks to a painful absence in your life, does not give you permission. As with the Wandervogel, the current alternative culture’s approach is never a call for solidarity and political work with Native Americans. Instead, it’s always about what white people want and feel they have a right to take. They want to have a sweat lodge “experience.” They don’t want to do the hard, often boring, work of reparation and justice. If, in doing that work, the elders invite you to participate in their religion, that’s their call.Read more at location 2754 • Delete this highlight

We were strangers. I did not ask for their vulnerability nor did I deserve it. To be told the worst griefs of their lives was a violation both of the dignity such pain deserves and of the natural bonds of human community. This was not a factual disclosure—“I lost my first child when she was an infant”—but a full monty of grief. And it was wrong.Read more at location 2821 • Delete this highlight

A true intimacy with ourselves and with others will die beneath that exposure. Intimacy requires a slow, cumulative build of safety between people who agree to a relationship, an ongoing connection of care and concern. The performance of pain is essentially a form of bonding over trauma, and people can get addicted to their endorphins. But whatever else it is, it’s not a spiritual practice. It’s not even good psychotherapy, divorced as it is from reflection and guidance. If you’re going to explore the shaping of your past and its impact on the present, that’s what friends are for, and probably what licensed professionals areRead more at location 2824 • Delete this highlight

No amount of background drumming will turn self-obsession and emotional intensity into an experience of what Rudolph Otto named “the numinous.” It will not build a functioning community. “Instant community” is a contradictory as “fast food,” and about as nourishing.Read more at location 2830 • Delete this highlight

True community requires time, respect, and participation; it means, most simply, caring for the people to whom we are committed. A performative ethic is ultimately about self-narration and narcissism, which are the opposite of a communal ethic, and its scripted intensity is an emotional sugar rush.Read more at location 2834 • Delete this highlight

My attempts to name cultural appropriation in the alternative culture have been largely met with hostility.Read more at location 2849 • Delete this highlight

Some white people say they want to “reindigenize,” that they want a spiritual connection to the land where they live. That requires building a relationship to that place. That place is actually millions of creatures, the vast majority too small for us to see, all working together to create more life. Some of them create oxygen; many more create soil; some create habitat, like beavers making wetlands. To indigenize means offering friendship to all of them.Read more at location 2858 • Delete this highlight

That means getting to know them, their histories, their needs, their joys and sorrows. It means respecting their boundaries and committing to their care. It means learning to listen, which requires turning off the chatter and static of the self. Maybe then they will speak to you or even offer you help. All of them are under assault right now: every biome, each living community is being pulled to pieces, 200 species at a time. It’s a thirty-year mystery to me how the neopagans can claim to worship the earth and, with few exceptions, be indifferent to fighting for it.Read more at location 2861 • Delete this highlight

That is one of the functions of religion, to frame the moral code of a given society inside a mythos that stretches from the individual to the cosmos.Read more at location 2873 • Delete this highlight

As Andrea Dworkin said, “Feminism requires precisely what misogyny destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power.”91Read more at location 2896 • Delete this highlight

The first priority of their movement was loyalty, both to their cause and to those who were leading. Therein lies one of the major problems with modern radical groups. We tend to destroy our leaders with criticism, often personal and vicious. The antihierarchical stance of radicals leads to an adolescent reaction against anyone who rises to a public position. Writer after writer gets accused of “selling out,” although not a single one can even make a living—let alone a killing—as a writer.Read more at location 2968 • Delete this highlight

This charge is also leveled at dedicated people who run small presses, bookstores, and, indeed, anyone with the temerity to actually get something done.Read more at location 2972 • Delete this highlight

It’s a combination of petty jealousy and “rooster battling.”Read more at location 2973 • Delete this highlight

We must call it what it is when we see it happening. If the offenders refuse to stop, they should be shunned until their behavior improves. Attacking our leaders is painful and destructive to both individuals and movements. The younger members can’t be expected to be able to identify and take a stand against this behavior; they don’t have the life experience, and they’re naturally inclined to be “combatants” at that stage of life. It is up to the middle-aged and older members to set the tone and behavioral expectations, to guide the community norms. People decades too old for this particular behavior publicly engage in it with glee. It’s frustrating and heartbreaking, because no individual except the most resilient can survive those kinds of sustained personal attacks. And no one can hurt you like your own.Read more at location 2974 • Delete this highlight

We can reject the concept of leadership all we want, but that will not eradicate its necessity.Read more at location 3038 • Delete this highlight

But a wholesale rejection of leadership means a movement will be stuck at a level of ineffective small groups. It may feel radical but it will change nothing.Read more at location 3048 • Delete this highlight

Every movement is faced with the task of nurturing the will to fight in the people at large and in potential recruits especially. People need a mythic matrix that includes a narrative of courage in the face of power, loyalty to comrades and cause, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. They need the emotional support of a functioning community that believes in resistance. And they need an intellectual atmosphere that encourages analysis, discussion, and the development of political consciousness.Read more at location 3116 • Delete this highlight

Right now, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has disabled 30 percent of the oil industry’s production in Nigeria, and the industry is considering pulling out altogether. If we had one hundredth of their courage and commitment to their land and community, we could do the same thing here. We have vastly more resources at our disposal, and the best we can come up with is, what, compost piles? The world is being killed and environmentalists think that riding bikes is some sort of answer?Read more at location 3225 • Delete this highlight

Andrea Dworkin once said, “I found that it is always better to fight than not to fight, always no matter what.”110 This is the last moment to feel that passion, to defend whatever you love as a form of grace. Far too many people on the left claim that resistance never works. Some combination of cynicism, despair, ignorance, and cowardice has taken hold and even taken root. Some of the claimants have a solid radical analysis of capitalism, racism, patriarchy, civilization. They understand that the planet is being killed, that all we hold dear is under assault.Read more at location 3250 • Delete this highlight

Successful movements follow broad patterns, and one strong element in their success is the surrounding culture of resistance.Read more at location 3263 • Delete this highlight

The DGR strategy is not one of militant action to magically usher in generalized social chaos and revolt, nor is it a call to action because it feels better, nor is it militance to shore up masculinity. The DGR strategy is instead a recognition of the scope of what is at stake (the planet); an honest assessment of the potential for a mass movement (none); and the recognition that industrial civilization has an infrastructure that is, in fact, quite vulnerable. If you want to take issue with any of those three premises, well and good. But at least give us the respect of differentiation from other movements whose strategic goals we have clearly rejected.Read more at location 3286 • Delete this highlight

In From Slogans to Mantras, Stephen A. Kent traces how ’60s radicals adopted both. He writes, “The revolution would still come, but its arrival would be heralded by a personal transformation of purified individuals, and its appearance would (have to) be a divinely orchestrated event (since bitter experience had taught them that it could not be a socially orchestrated occurrence).”Read more at location 3293 • Delete this highlight

Humans are storytelling animals; we build narratives and then live inside them. It is no accident that the Irish independence struggle arose from the Gaelic Revival or that the civil rights movement followed the Harlem Renaissance. People need stories; people who resist need stories of resistance.Read more at location 3302 • Delete this highlight

The tasks of a culture of resistance include holding and enforcing community norms of justice, equity, commitment, and solidarity; encouraging vibrant political discussion and debate; producing cultural products—poems, songs, art—that create a mythic matrix organized around the theme of resistance; and building individual character based on courage, resilience, and loyalty.Read more at location 3310 • Delete this highlight

to the creation of institutions capable of running civic society as the old system collapses. Along the way, from personal relationships to small groups to our larger institutions, a culture of resistance has got to embody justice and firmly reject domination. This means that white people have to own up to white privilege, ally with people of color, and commit to dismantling racism. It means that people from settler cultures have to acknowledge that the Americas are stolen land in an ongoing genocide, a genocide we must stop. It means men have got to cease in their sexual atrocities against women and girls, atrocities as quotidian on the left as on the right, and it means women have to stand in solidarity with each other. It means that men must ally themselves with women and against those who would abuse them. We’re up against a system that is not only unjust, but insane.Read more at location 3314 • Delete this highlight

A culture of resistance must collectively face the layers of horror embedded in history; the daily acts of sexual sadism that comprise slavery, conquest, and rape; the knowledge that these acts are not the mistakes of confused, tragic children. Forgive them or not: they know what they do.Read more at location 3320 • Delete this highlight

All activities that destroy living communities must cease, forever. This includes clear-cutting forests, plowing up prairies, overgrazing grasslands, draining wetlands, damming rivers, vacuuming the oceans, and mining. It includes agriculture and it includes life in cities. All of those activities reside in one word: civilization.Read more at location 3367 • Delete this highlight

And the powerful are pleased that no one is threatening their conversion of the last of the living biomes into their own private wealth. Hope—real hope—is for the brave, because hope’s only true action is to be that threat.Read more at location 3382 • Delete this highlight

the specific economies organized for the accumulation of private wealth. It may surprise readers to learn that this idea is quite new in the history of human affairs. As Ted Trainer points out, In almost all previous societies economic activity was determined mostly, and usually entirely, by social rules and procedures, not by the market. What a person produced, what he or she was paid, the price of the object, hours of work and who the work was done for, were all decided mainly by custom and tradition.…Read more at location 3404 • Delete this highlight

Before the seventeenth century money lending for interest was immoral, it was expected that prices would be “just,” personal gain and hoarding were discouraged, work was for the “well-being of the soul” and to produce things for direct local use was not to make profit.Read more at location 3423 • Delete this highlight

A sustainable and just society cannot be a consumer society, it cannot be driven by market forces, it must have relatively little international trade and no economic growth at all, it must be made up mostly of small local economies, and its driving values cannot be competition and acquisitiveness. Whether or not we’re likely to achieve such a transition is not crucial here … The point is that when our “limits to growth” situation is understood, a sustainable and just society cannot be conceived in any other terms. Discussion of these themes is of the utmost importance, but few if any green agencies ever even mention them.Read more at location 3452 • Delete this highlight

The “tech-fix optimists,” who are to be found in plague proportions in the renewable energy field, are open to the same criticism.… Despite the indisputably desirable technologies all these people are developing, they are working for the devil. If it is the case that a sustainable and just world cannot be achieved without transition from a consumer society to a Simpler Way of some kind, then this transition is being thwarted by those who reinforce the faith that technical advances will eliminate any need to even think about such a transition.6Read more at location 3458 • Delete this highlight

Again, there is that basic ignorance of how life actually works, knowledge that is endemic to agricultural societies. Soil is alive, profoundly so. It is not an inert material for humans to use or manipulate, and treating it as such has brought us to the end of the world. Because soil is alive, it needs to eat. Continuously removing the plant material means the soil starves. With starved soil, the plants in turn will have nothing to eat.Read more at location 3585 • Delete this highlight

Reducing physical reality to a narrative is, of course, one of the core components of liberalism. To suggest switching narratives as a political plan is a dead end of insane proportions. The murder of my planet is not a bad movie I can turn off. It’s not a book I can take back to the library. It’s not a story.Read more at location 3747 • Delete this highlight

Or maybe we could just abandon the narrative that the world is made of narratives. It’s not. It’s made of living creatures entwined in a vast complexity of giving and taking, a consanguinity of sunlight and carbon, a Great Communion. There is a prayer of participation in every animal breath, in every fragile, reaching radicle, every dividing cell. But our thanksgiving is collapsing to a plainsong, 200 species at a time. So if we need a narrative, it’s a simple one: resistance is possible. If you want to add some suspense, try: and we’re out of time. Beyond that, can we stop telling stories and get to work?Read more at location 3758 • Delete this highlight

Contrast these words with the courage of Henning von Tresckow, who said that even though the Nazi state was doomed, the efforts to bring down this evil regime must continue because it was daily murdering more innocent victims. The current victimization of both human and nonhuman creatures is an order of magnitude larger, which should imply that our moral responsibility is that much greater.Read more at location 3789 • Delete this highlight

We need the permaculture wing to be Sinn Fein. We need an aboveground group that will vociferously defend direct action and militance, plan for it, support it, work beside it. We need massive pressure aboveground to dismantle corporate personhood, capitalism, civilization, and patriarchy. This includes building alternative institutions to take their place and to structure our cultures on justice and sustainability.Read more at location 3859 • Delete this highlight

It’s repugnant that anyone could put their emotional needs for an energy descent with a happy ending above the unassailable facts of human suffering.Read more at location 3922 • Delete this highlight

“When faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money. Access to actual physical resources and assets, as well as intangibles such as connections and relationships, quickly becomes much more valuable than mere cash.”Read more at location 3950 • Delete this highlight

Except in one instance: Chernobyl. Ninety thousand square miles were contaminated with radiation; 350,000 people were displaced; and there is a permanent “exclusionary zone” encompassing a nineteen-mile radius and the ghosts of seventy-six towns. But other ghosts have come back from the dead. Because despite the cesium-137 that’s deadly for 600 years and the strontium-90 that mammal bones mistake for calcium, Chernobyl has become a miracle of megafauna: the European bison have returned, as well as, somehow, the Przewalski’s horse. There are packs—that’s plural—of wolves. There are beavers coaxing back the lost wetlands. There are wild boar. There are European lynx. There are endangered birds like the black stork and the white-tailed eagle, glorious in their eight-foot wingspans. All this even though ten years after the accident, geneticists found small rodents with “an extraordinary amount of genetic damage.” They had a mutation rate “probably thousands of times greater than normal.”71 Yet twenty years after the accident, and with multiple excursions into the contaminated area, the same researcher, Dr. Robert Baker, said flat-out, “The benefit of excluding humans from this highly contaminated ecosystem appears to outweigh significantly any negative cost associated with Chernobyl radiation.”72 Witnessing the return of bison and wolves, who could say otherwise? Even a nuclear disaster is better for living creatures than civilization.Read more at location 3980 • Delete this highlight

We don’t need to wring our hands in helpless horror, stuck in a wrenching ethical dilemma between human rights and ecological drawdown. In fact, the most efficacious way to address the twin problems of population and resource depletion is by supporting human rights.Read more at location 3994 • Delete this highlight

The biggest social initiative was to raise the status of women. Female literacy went from 25 percent in 1970 to over 70 percent in 2000. Ninety percent of girls now attend school.Read more at location 4014 • Delete this highlight

In seven years, Iran’s birthrate was sliced in half from seven children per woman to under three. So it can be done, and quickly, by doing the things we should be doing anyway. As Richard Stearns writes, “The single most significant thing that can be done to cure extreme poverty is this: protect, educate, and nurture girls and women and provide them with equal rights and opportunities—educationally, economically, and socially.… This one thing can do more to address extreme poverty than food, shelter, health care, economic development, or increased foreign assistance.”Read more at location 4016 • Delete this highlight

Two things work to stop overpopulation: ending poverty and ending patriarchy. People are poor because the rich are stealing from them. And most women have no control over how men use our bodies. If the major institutions around the globe would put their efforts behind initiatives like Iran’s, there is still every hope that the world could turn toward both justice and sustainability.Read more at location 4022 • Delete this highlight

The US is too big, ruled by corporations, and bent on global domination through imperialist wars, while peak oil looms and the planet strains under the demands of a growth economy. Frank Bryan calls the time of the industrial revolution “the two most vicious centuries the world has ever known, ending with the hierarchical, totalitarian industrial horrors of Hitler and Stalin.”92Read more at location 4135 • Delete this highlight

They have their own currency, a silver token stamped with the face of Scott Nearing, he of the Good Life. They have a foreign minister, already establishing relationships abroad. They have a solid statement of principles, ranging from Human Scale to Entrusting the Commons to Food Sovereignty.Read more at location 4143 • Delete this highlight

This political form has its origins in the Puritan movement. The Puritans practiced a system of church governance in which each congregation was sovereign and hence governed itself.Read more at location 4149 • Delete this highlight

Town meetings are what Frank Bryant and John McClaughry call human-scale democracy. Past a certain number of participants, the process breaks down. Kirkpatrick Sale, the original defender of the human scale, and a stalwart critic of technology, posits that somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 works as a district size for direct democratic voting. Larger than that, the political process must revert to representative democracy.Read more at location 4155 • Delete this highlight

90 percent of Swiss municipalities are run by town meetings. Switzerland is serving as a model for the Second Vermont Republic, and it’s a model the aboveground wing of DGR—the Transitioners and the permaculturists—could also emulate.Read more at location 4163 • Delete this highlight

It also stands as a challenge to the permaculture wing and the Transitioners who want to do something to save the world, but have yet to understand the nature of power. Don’t just swap seeds: swap the US Constitution for local direct democracies confederated across your bioregion. Swap capitalism and its sociopathic corporate personhood for local economies based on human needs and human morality. Swap the rapacious drawdown of civilization for a culture nestled inside a repaired community of forests and grasses, filling once more with species with whom we must share this home.Read more at location 4206 • Delete this highlight

This planet does not simply need more great gardens: it needs resistance against the forces that have been plundering our collective garden for 10,000 years.Read more at location 4212 • Delete this highlight

We got further smashing windows than we ever got letting them smash our heads. —Christabel Pankhurst, suffragistRead more at location 4224 • Delete this highlight

If you love this planet, it’s time to put away the distractions that have no potential to stop this destruction: lifestyle adjustments, consumer choices, moral purity. And it’s time to put away the diversion of hope, the last, useless weapon of theRead more at location 4233 • Delete this highlight

desperate.Read more at location 4234 • Delete this highlight

As Derrick succinctly wrote in Endgame, “Bringing down civilization means depriving the rich of their ability to steal from the poor, andRead more at location 4239 • Delete this highlight

means depriving the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet.” It means thoroughly destroying the political, social, physical, and technological infrastructure that not only permits the rich to steal and the powerful to destroy, but rewards them for doing so.Read more at location 4240 • Delete this highlight

We must fight back because if we don’t we will die. This is certainly true in the physical sense, but it is also true on another level. Once you really know the self-sacrifice and tirelessness and bravery that our kin have shown in the darkest times, you must either act or die as a person. We must fight back not only to win, but to show that we are both alive and worthy of that life.Read more at location 4296 • Delete this highlight

And persuasion can only work on people, whereas we are dealing with massive social machines like corporations, which are functionally sociopathic.Read more at location 4447 • Delete this highlight

“If this monstrosity is not stopped, the carefully tended permaculture gardens and groves of lifeboat ecovillages will be nothing more than after-dinner snacks for civilization.”Read more at location 4611 • Delete this highlight

In addition, even the most carefully designed ecovillage will not be sustainable if neighboring communities are not sustainable. As neighbors deplete their landbases, they have to look further afield for more resources, and a nearby ecovillage will surely be at the top of their list of targets for expansion. An ecovillage either has to ensure that its neighbors are sustainable or be able to repel their future efforts at expansion.Read more at location 4613 • Delete this highlight

Kuhn quotes Nobel laureate Max Planck, who said that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”53Read more at location 4865 • Delete this highlight

When the whole planet is being destroyed, your inaction will not save you. We must choose the larger life. We must choose to do what is right to protect the planet. It is our only home.Read more at location 4915 • Delete this highlight

I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?Read more at location 4921 • Delete this highlight

How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go. But what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?Read more at location 4923 • Delete this highlight

The results of the experiment were completely the opposite of what Asch had expected. In more than half of the trials the subjects went along with the consensus, even though the correct answer was obvious.Read more at location 4937 • Delete this highlight

people, they observed, tended to have high levels of anxiety, low status, a high need for approval, and authoritarian personalities. That last part is particularly interesting—the people who are likely to boss others around are themselves psychologically pliable.Read more at location 4945 • Delete this highlight

Prior to the experiment, Milgram polled his students and colleagues, all of whom believed that only a tiny percentage of subjects would administer the maximum 450-volt shock. Of course, when the experiment took place, 65 percent of people administered successive shocks all the way up to the maximum voltage.3 Of those subjects who refused to administer the maximum shock, no one demanded that the experiment itself should be stopped; no one questioned its existence.Read more at location 4953 • Delete this highlight

news is that when two confederates were introduced into the mix to defy the authority, almost all of the subjects refused to continue the experiment.Read more at location 4962 • Delete this highlight

Learned helplessness offers another insight into the psychology of resistance and nonresistance.Read more at location 4969 • Delete this highlight

Those in power encourage us to believe that the status quo is natural, inevitable, even the best possible society. If someone is dissatisfied with the way society works, they say, then it is that individual’s personal emotional problem.Read more at location 4985 • Delete this highlight

The response time of the participants also increased significantly as the number of participants grew.8 In other words, the more people present, the more their sense of responsibility became diffused.Read more at location 5008 • Delete this highlight

to some degree the mere existence of those in power and their asserted expertise—help to keep people passive.Read more at location 5036 • Delete this highlight

“The expectation that superior authorities will do something to ward off the threat, and the often combined belief that the individual himself can do nothing, are apt to be associated with absence of worry.”14Read more at location 5043 • Delete this highlight

“one could only be a resister if one was maladjusted.”Read more at location 5052 • Delete this highlight

they were people with strong moral convictions who may have been from traditional backgrounds or occupations. Jackson writes: “These were not maladjusted mavericks although clearly they were individuals of exceptional strong-mindedness, ready to break with family and friends.”Read more at location 5054 • Delete this highlight

The effective resister has some important personality characteristics, with bravery, intelligence, and persistence among the most important. Intelligence alone is never enough. Though an intelligent person may be better able to see through propaganda and to understand the problem at hand, real courage is a requirement for action in the face of danger. The brilliant coward simply has a more sophisticated rationalization for inaction. And persistence is required to continue in the face of unfavorable odds against a powerful enemy in a struggle that is bound to be rife with setbacks and mistakes.Read more at location 5095 • Delete this highlight

But what it really comes down to is if you effectively oppose the will of those in power, they will try to kill you. We need to make that explicit so we can face the situation that we’re in. And the situation we’re in is that those in power are killing the planet and they are exploiting the poor, they are murdering the poor, and we are not stopping them because we are afraid.Read more at location 5118 • Delete this highlight

The fact that those in power will use their power against resisters is not a reason to give up the fight before we even begin. It is a reason to be really, really smart.Read more at location 5127 • Delete this highlight

Given the same amount of intelligence, timidity will do a thousand times more damage than audacity.Read more at location 5401 • Delete this highlight

current neuroscience research shows that we often make decisions on an unconscious level long before coming up with a conscious rationale for those decisions.Read more at location 5566 • Delete this highlight

Of course, there are also people who are very bad at these things, who constantly criticize new members for doing things differently, who engage in self-righteous cliquishness, and who generally make people miserable by being poster children for horizontal hostility.Read more at location 5593 • Delete this highlight

a culture of resistance include the following: Antioppression analysis and training Group facilitation, decision making, conflict resolution, crisis intervention Basic history of resistance Basic grounding in resistance organizational styles and strategies Basic off-the-grid and survival skills First aid Reinforcement of culture of resistance norms and attributes Physical training and self-defense Communications, including secure communications Some of these skills are technical, and so can be readily learned from many sources. Others are deeply political in nature, and need to be taught by people with a commitment to aboveground organizing—probably the people we’d call cadres.Read more at location 5703 • Delete this highlight

So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery.Read more at location 5976 • Delete this highlight

One major reason that resistance strategy is underdeveloped is because thinkers and planners who do articulate strategies are often attacked for doing so. People can always find something to disagree with. That’s especially true when any one strategy is expected to solve all problems or address all causes claimed by progressives.Read more at location 5989 • Delete this highlight

It’s easier to attack resistance strategists in a burst of horizontal hostility than it is to get things together and attack those in power.Read more at location 5993 • Delete this highlight

A movement that wanted to win would be smarter and more strategic than that. It would abandon the strategy of moral attrition. It would identify the most vulnerable targets those in power possess. It would strike directly and decisively at their infrastructure—physical, economic, political—and do it while there is still a planet left.Read more at location 6140 • Delete this highlight

Effective nonviolent organizing is not a pacifist attempt to convince the state of the error of its ways, but a vigorous, aggressive application of force that uses a subset of tactics different from those of military engagements.Read more at location 6183 • Delete this highlight

People who are privileged and entitled take a long time to change, if they change at all. More likely they will side with someone who makes big but ultimately empty promises.Read more at location 6291 • Delete this highlight

But they never specified how turmoil would lead to radical change, how they would actually seize power, or how they would reorganize politics, culture, and the economy after a revolution.Read more at location 6412 • Delete this highlight

they translated their belief that revolution was politically and morally necessary into the mistaken sense that revolution was therefore likely or even inevitable.”Read more at location 6414 • Delete this highlight

To some degree, this sort of anchorless optimism is a coping mechanism.Read more at location 6418 • Delete this highlight

Resistance groups are up against powerful foes, and believing that your desired victory is somehow inevitable can help morale. It can also be wrong.Read more at location 6419 • Delete this highlight

“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”Read more at location 6420 • Delete this highlight

the bubble or silo effect. People tend to self-sort into groups of people they have something in common with. This can lead to activists being surrounded by people with similar beliefs, and even becoming socially isolated from those who don’t share their ideas. Eventually, groupthink occurs, and people start to believe that far more people share their perspective than actually do. It’s only a short step to feeling that vast change is imminent.Read more at location 6423 • Delete this highlight

They believed, as liberals usually do, that the oppressive horrors perpetrated by those in power were mostly a misunderstanding (rather than an interlocking system of power that rewarded the oppressors for evil).Read more at location 6527 • Delete this highlight

Indeed, this basic trajectory is so common that it is nearly archetypal. Again and again, whenever privileged people have tried to ally themselves with oppressed people, we have seen this phenomenon at work. Seemingly ignorant of the daily violence perpetrated by the dominant culture, many people of privilege have wandered off into a strategic and tactical Neverland, which is based on their own personal wishes about how resistance ought to be, rather than a hard strategy that is designed to be effective and that draws on the experience of oppressed peoples and their long history of resistance.Read more at location 6551 • Delete this highlight

“I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?”Read more at location 6649 • Delete this highlight

When a destructive system is deeply entrenched, and when average people are isolated from the costs of that system, real change doesn’t come just from speeches. Real change happens—and only can happen—when that system is broken down by force. Then the oppressed gain the breathing room needed to fight back, and the apathetic can get their first look at that system’s real face.Read more at location 6704 • Delete this highlight

is important to identify the reasons why some people refuse to give in to conformity, obedience, learned helplessness, and inaction. But understanding those reasons still doesn’t allow us to convert a majority of people into active resisters. These psychological phenomenon (and others) are so interlocking, so complex, so constantly reinforced, and so deeply entrenched, that most people will never shake them off.Read more at location 9666 • Delete this highlight