Don't obey in advance
The fascists don’t need your help. Stop doing their work for them.
This is the fourth part in a series on Planning our Way (Strategically!) Toward Nonviolent Social Change. To read part III on Nonviolence as a Way of Life, click here.
Earlier this week, one of my almost-three-year-old twins engaged in an act of nonviolent noncooperation: Instead of leaving for school, she let us know that she would be staging a stay-at-home to enjoy her favorite show. Her demand was as ear-splitting as it was clear:
I WANNA WATCH GO DOG GO!!!
Cue waterworks. Cue flailing on the floor. Cue limp-fish tactic employed to avoid being picked up, followed by stiff-as-a-board posture to prevent herself from being placed in her car seat.
GO. DOG. GO. NOW!
I would have been in awe of how totally brilliant her performance was, had I not been so peeved at the 45 minute delay it produced. With a few days of hindsight I can admit that while she may not have gotten to watch her show, her tactics were nevertheless a textbook illustration of noncooperation in action, and a pretty damn impressive one at that.
Here’s what we can learn from my strong-willed kid about the power of nonviolent noncooperation:
Be LOUD — don’t allow consent to be assumed
It’s often said when it comes to authoritarianism that silence is compliance. This means that your consent to the status quo is assumed, unless you make it clear that you do not consent to what is happening. If my child hadn’t told me that she wanted to watch Go Dog Go, we would have gone to school with me none the wiser as to her heart’s desires.
When millions of people are enthusiastically expressing adulation for an authoritarian regime, our expression of noncooperation needs to be louder still. Otherwise, authoritarians assume everyone is with them. Their ego grows, and with it, their sense of impunity to crush those few willing to speak out (along with those they have been scapegoating all along).
Take it from my kid — volume is a great way to be clear that you do NOT consent to what is happening. It’s not easy to get a noncompliant kid in the car while she’s screaming at the top of her lungs right into your ear drum. Nor is it easy for ICE to arrest a neighbor when you’re going on at top volume about the terrible thing they’re doing (as illustrated by this story):
Screaming is, of course, not the only way to register our dissent. Around the world, folks who have opted to bang pots and pans to express their displeasure. In Hong Kong, they used thousands of umbrellas to display solidarity against the status quo en masse. Sometimes, painted cars, or banner drops, or projected symbols do the talking for us.
And sometimes, it’s the quiet yet firm voices (as I wrote about last week with Bishop Budde) that resonate most powerfully in the public conscience. While other times, voices of dissent are only heard in the annals of history — like when Gandhi’s letters to Hitler,1 never delivered, were made public — providing empowerment to a new generation, as well as cause to consider what might have been done and said differently.
Now, protest and persuasion are generally insufficient in and of themselves to actually change the course of action being taken. My child still went to school. Farah’s neighbor still got arrested.
Nevertheless, raising our voices in dissent has vital effects:
It alerts others who share our values, establishing ourselves as a site of solidarity.
This subsequently alleviates loneliness and helps stave off despair.
The resulting movement cohesion contributes to collective safety.
Be loud about what and whom you stand for, and others are likely to stand with you. Even if the fight feels futile, at least we’re in it together. And together we’ll stay human by refusing to consent to dehumanization.
To quote the poet,
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Still, being loud rarely exacts enough cost to cause the powerful party to alter their behavior. To do that, we need to:
Refuse to obey in advance
My daughter knew that it was time to go to school and that the answer to her question about watching a show would be, “Not right now, sweetie.” But did she decide to go along with the routine and head out the door against her wishes? No, no she did not. Did she decide to put up a stink and insist on having her way, making her body an obstacle to achieving parental objectives? Yes, she most certainly did.
My fierce firecracker of a kid did not obey in advance. More power to her. She reminds me to do the same.
This last week has been a textbook study of shock and awe tactics, with the administration’s flurry of executive orders meant to inspire fear and overwhelm us into silence and helplessness. Authoritarians glean significant power by simply spreading fear, which leads many people to sit down and shut up — but not before they’ve yanked on other people’s shirt sleeves, pulling them down to their level of passivity.
In the face of all that terrifies us, it can be tempting to comply with the regime’s wishes before ever being placed in a real situation where we have to make the choice to comply or engage in civil disobedience.
For example, I have heard clergy colleagues wrestling whether to engage in prophetic public witness on the one hand, or pastorally protecting targeted people on the other.
This binary thinking is exactly what authoritarians want —
they want us to do their work for them by policing ourselves.
They want to scare us into limiting ourselves to a scope of work that doesn’t threaten their power.
Please, I beg you, don’t do this.
The choice you are being presented — between compliance and survival — is a false one. Safety is not enhanced through preemptive silence and passivity. (Note: Keeping your safety plan discrete is not the same thing as keeping silence).
We keep us safe by refusing to cooperate with Christofascism.
I wrote last year about the Social View of Power, which essentially holds that the powerful have power because of the many ways we cooperate with their authority. Conversely, noncooperation can impose significant social, economic and political costs on those in power. Noncooperation can render laws inconsequential, deflate self-important people and grind the economic engine to a halt.
There are many ways to engage in noncooperation (you’ll find dozens of specific examples in Gene Sharp’s list of 198 Nonviolent Methods). They include a wide variety of boycotts and strikes, as well as tactics like slowdowns, civil disobedience of "illegitimate" laws, sit-ins, refusing to leave meetings, hiding, escape, false identities and more.
When these sorts of tactics are used strategically and at scale, they can be incredibly powerful. Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan’s research revealed that when 3.5% of a population has been engaged in tactics of noncooperation and intervention over a sustained period, that movement has never failed to succeed.
Keep calm and don’t comply
I know it’s scary out there, but I assure you, we still have way more power than we may feel like we do. Make the fascists go to a whole lot of trouble to try to shut you up. Make them work to try to get you to stop acting for justice. Make it cost them something.
Now is the time to be a huge hassle.
Don’t grease the wheels of fascism by obeying in advance.
In other words: be like the toddler who will stop at nothing to watch cartoon dogs driving cars.
I had a long text conversation with a friend about these letters today. To me, they read at once as naive, strategic, deferential and soul-preserving. An essay for another time.