Human nature, Mutual Aid, and Darwin’s blind spot

Of all of the things that the left and right fight about, perhaps the most illuminating is the great apes. The fight is simple: Human's closest living biological relatives are the two species of the pan genus, the chimpanzee and the bonobo. Of the two, the chimpanzee, pan troglodytes, is the favorite of the right. Chimpanzees live in hierarchical communities, with clear leaders and subordinates. They engage in violent warfare with other communities, and they do not share their food with strangers. They are the "might makes right" ape.

Bonobos, pan paniscus, are the favorite of the left. Bonobos are not warlike -- disputes are solved by fucking. Like, seriously, the life of a bonobo is just a long orgiastic fuckfest. They fuck to say hello, they fuck to strengthen social bonds, they fuck to end fights, and they fuck for fun. They fuck bonobos of the same sex, as well. Female bonobos unite with each other against male sexual aggression, preferring male bonobos who are respectful towards them. They are the "make love, not war," feminist, communist ape.

This is, of course, a simplification: aggression has been seen in bonobos, they do have social hierarchies, and prosocial and promiscuous sexual behavior has been seen in chimps. The fight illuminates less about bonobos and chimps, and more about what the right and left believe about human nature. The left argues that we are more like bonobos, the right argues we are more like chimps. In reality they are both cousins, equally distant from us on the evolutionary family tree. 

But in the past, the right has been more successful than the left in promoting the biological justification of their political views. It's still the version of biology that is taught to us in school: survival of the fittest. The thing that drives evolution in this interpretation is competition. The better competitors survive, while the weaker competitors die. It's brutal, but it makes for stronger, more resilient species, and as such, should be accepted as a good thing. Attempts to lift up the weak at the expense of the strong, in this version of reality, is actually weakening the species as a whole, and is morally reprehensible. Let the strong survive. Let the weak die.

This Social Darwinist way of thinking was the basis of the eugenics movement and also of Nazism. It's attempts to provide a scientific justification for racism were wildly influential in the early 20th century, and have hardly been rooted out after the defeat of fascism in the 40s. It's maybe stated a bit less explicitly, but still, at the root of right-wing thought is the idea that competition is good, and to artificially make the weak stronger is to hamper the course of nature.

Cooperation vs. Competition

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the left managed to beat back the advance of eugenics, thanks to the defeat of Nazism, the rise of the civil rights movement, and the scientific debunking of racist ideas, but it failed to adequately counter the "survival of the fittest" narrative in biological science, which effectively left the door open for the fascists, once they got their shit back together. "They can force their PC agenda on us all they want," a right-winger could argue, "it doesn't change the laws of nature."

There are a few reasons that the "survival of the fittest" narrative didn't die with the Nazis: first, a lot of the people who defeated the Nazis were capitalists, not leftists. Competition is the entire basis of capitalism, so liberals and moderate conservatives basically agree with the far right on this scientific point: the cream should rise to the top. The failure of the weak isn't an entirely bad thing. Inequality is good because it stimulates competition.

The other people who defeated the Nazis were creatures of the left, but they were usually authoritarian communists. They did not want to acknowledge that the best argument against right wing Darwinism came from another corner of the left -- came, in fact, from one of their greatest foes: the anarchists.

The specific anarchist in question was Pyotr Kropotkin. Kropotkin, in the earlier part of his life, was better known as a biologist than he was as an advocate of anarcho-communism, though his greatest contribution to both fields was likely the same book: Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.

Kropotkin's argument is widely acknowledged by biologists and anthropologists today, and that is that cooperation holds at least as much of a claim on being the core driver of evolution as competition. Animals regularly cooperate with members of their own species to survive as a group rather than as individuals: ants will lay down their lives to protect their colonies, migrating geese take turns at the head of the flying V so other geese can draft and save energy, elephant herds will protect the young and old as a unit. The individualist ideal of the "lone wolf" is in fact, quite illustrative. A lone wolf is actually a distressed creature, as wolves live in packs and are incredibly cooperative within that context -- a lone wolf's main goal would generally be to no longer be alone.

For humans, cooperation has been at least as much of a part of who we are as competition has since the beginning of time. We've always been social animals, and while we often fight with one another, the majority of our time is spent not in battle, but among our tribe, working for a common good. Every time you send someone who's having a hard day flowers or a plate of cookies, every time you lend someone your pencil or give a stranger a seat on the bus, you're sacrificing your well-being for someone else's. I would argue you probably help people more often than you destroy people, that being kind and decent is so reflexive than you do it instinctively, whereas competition and destruction requires planning, and thus, takes up more of your attention than just being decent.

Cooperation within species (called "altruism" by biologists) is extremely common, but so is mutualism, which is cooperation across species. The most obvious example of this is probably in pollination, where a pollinator like a bee or a butterfly feeds off of the nectar of a plant, and then pollinates another plant, allowing the pollinator to survive and the plant to pass on its genes. But humans do it too -- you have a mutualist relationship with your gut bacteria, which allows you to digest food and gives the bacteria a place to live. More obviously, you have a mutualist relationship with your dog, which protects and supports you in exchange for your food and love (a cat's relationship with a human might be better described as parasitic, to be honest. You know, depending on the cat).

Kropotkin didn't deny the existence of competition, which obviously played a huge role in evolution. This is why he called mutual aid a factor of evolution rather than the factor. His point was that cooperation was underemphasized, and that there was as much of a scientific basis for working together as there was for defeating the competition.

Mutual aid is widely recognized by naturalists and anthropologists as being a fact of life, but it has not been adopted as widely as a political ideal because, as we mentioned, capitalists don't like to admit that cooperation is important. The left has also been slower to glom onto the idea than it should, and this is mostly because in the 20th century, it was the Marxists, not the anarchists, who won the major battles.

Marxists generally believe in cooperation between the workers being the highest ideal, but they believe that this cooperation will be brought about through a revolution that overthrows the capitalist state. The revolution, of course, will be led by them, the Marxist vanguard, and they will guide the common people on how to reach a state of cooperative communism.

It's harder to argue for the necessity of a vanguard (or even a revolution) when cooperation is an inherent trait of being human. If cooperation is a muscle we all have, then all it needs is a little bit of flexing to get back into practice. If enough people started working together and not against each other, then you'd have a cooperative society. This is what Gandhi, who sometimes declared himself an anarchist, meant by "be the change you wish to see in the world." The revolution is not out there, it is inside you.

Grassroots Morality

Frans de Waal is a naturalist who has spent most of his life studying bonobos and chimpanzees, and in his 2013 book The Bonobo and the Atheist, he argued against the prevailing atheist thought, which was that morality, though not passed down from God or some divine being, was nonetheless something that came from the top-down. We are moral creatures, the New Atheists argue, because we can think and reason, and our reason leads us to making moral choices.

de Waal's argument was that simply looking at primate behaviors proved that this was not the case -- empathy and cooperation were reflexive traits in our closest relatives, and that behavior we would consider "moral" could be spotted throughout the animal world. What's more, when we behave in this way, it does not light up the "reasoning" part of our brain in a CAT scan. 

If you, like me, have long heard from believers that by not believing in god, there's "nothing stopping you from committing murder," you know that the top-down approach to morality is nonsense. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, to learn that higher thought is also not the reason we make moral choices. Religious people and smart people often behave like absolute dogshit.

Trying to make broad deductions about what human nature is ultimately pointless -- humans appear to have both competition and cooperation bred into their genes, and moral behavior as well as immoral behavior is present throughout the animal kingdom. If either one is an option, if either one is your birthright, then it's a choice, isn't it? 

Which one do you value more: power, strength, and competition?

Or compassion, empathy, and cooperation? 

How you choose is how you will behave, how you behave will shape your society.

Imagine a Green New Deal

If you, like me, are in your mid-thirties or younger, there is a decent chance you have worked in what anthropologist David Graeber calls a "bullshit job." In his 2013 essay, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, Graeber wrote that in the mid-twentieth century, economists believed technology would have rendered work unnecessary for most people in society. 

But, he said:

"Technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul."

In an interview with the Guardian Books podcast, Graeber added, “One of the few things that actually helped the world in terms of slowing down climate change was the financial crisis. A lot of people were out of work, and the amount of carbon emissions went down. If we all worked half as much, we’d probably do a lot for the world’s ecosystems.”

People tend to see work of all sorts as an inherent good — but in reality, some sorts of work are at best pointless, and at worst, actively harmful.

Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. [Affiliate link]

I have, as far as I can tell, worked two bullshit jobs, both writing jobs where I was sold a "vision" by canny con artists who, in reality, were just using my work to make themselves money while underpaying me. In both cases, it was a degrading and demoralizing experience, and quitting, rather than feeling bittersweet, felt like liberation.

We -- especially those of us in the Millennial generation -- spend an enormous amount of time working in unstable, underpaid, high competition, low-benefit jobs that do not feel like they are moving us in any direction of value. Even when we work in the vocation we choose, even when we have good benefits, the work is often channeled and redirected by investors, bosses, and managers towards the service of a fairly cynical bottom line, rather than in pursuit of anything loftier and useful for society as a whole.

Sure, as a writer, I could choose the more stable path of working in advertising or marketing, but what I love about writing is the opportunity to be honest with myself, to work through human problems and emotions in a public way, and hopefully, in learning, help my readers learn something themselves.

This is not what advertising does. Advertising is the act of fibbing in order to separate another struggling human from their income. It sells best to the fearful and insecure, and it sows both of these things in order to sell more.

I am 33, and my professional life so far has been a strange mix of choosing career paths that sound meaningful to me -- teacher, professor, journalist, librarian, non-profit worker -- and either being talked out of them because of bad pay and poor prospects, or being ground down by the harsh realities of holding them.

I know I am not alone. This malaise, this feeling of being dead in the water, is pervasive among my peers. It is not, as Dr. Seuss suggested in our graduation gift, Oh! The Places You'll Go!, a mere waystation we'd be stuck in for a short time, but a perpetual state of being. It is a feature of the economy we had no choice but to enter into. We tried to avoid entering the economy, having been assured that it was only temporary: many of us who graduated during the recession to a world of bullshit jobs or just shit jobs went back into the safe bubble of academia to get another degree while we waited the storm out. But in the end, the bullshit jobs were still there when we got out, and now we had much, much more student loan debt.

Now, we tread water in this dreadful economy running through the motions: we take on the financial risks of buying houses, we get married and have kids, and are told by our elders that something will come along if we work hard enough.

Others, though, scientists, people we’ve been taught (till now) to trust, tell us that we're destroying the world and the biosphere in the service of this ocean of meaningless drudgery. They tell us that much must be done if we are to still have a planet worth living on by the end of the century. They tell us we have to start changing, fast. They tell us there's work to be done. But the work that must be done -- the equivalent of a full time job for 8 billion people -- doesn't pay, and we have bills to pay and mouths to feed. So instead, we rot in jobs we hate and watch our world slip away.

Imagine if it was different.

Imagine a Green New Deal

Imagine that there are jobs to be had, good paying jobs with benefits and healthcare. Imagine that you are no longer working for a trust-fund shithead who has power over you because his father made a fortune selling tobacco products to toddlers, and who was gifted $10 million in lieu of being raised into an actual decent human being. Imagine who you are working for is your community, your kids. Everything you do benefits them, and not just in the abstract -- you see the fruits of your efforts every day, because they are accumulating right here, right in your town.

Imagine what those jobs would be. You are no longer answering phones for a corporate attorney who makes weird comments about your body. You are out in your neighborhood every day planting trees, sprinkling milkweed seed around the fringes of your public park so you can not only bring back the pollinators and save the food supply from catastrophe, but so that in the summertime, the park briefly fills with hundreds, thousands of beautiful monarch butterflies.

Imagine you go back to college -- free this time, your old debt forgiven -- and you learn ecology and environmental science. Your classes take you on kayak trips out to the local rivers and marshlands, where you learn the name of every animal, every plant, and how each is vital to the system. You work to save the species you can, and one day, years later, you see a thriving ecosystem where once there was a toxic waste dump. Local kids swing from a rope attached to a tree and drop into the water, laughing, screaming, and you don't call out, "This water's not safe!" because you're the one who tested it, and, for the first time, found that all of the poison had been removed.

Imagine you join a rewilding program, and you set the first wolves loose in the deep woods of your state. They will control the deer population, which will allow more plants and trees, no longer grazed to death as saplings, to grow, and more carbon is sequestered. The atmosphere inches back down towards a sane level.

Imagine you take that engineering degree, and instead of building a more ergonomic Mountain Dew bottle, you apply that knowledge towards building a national high speed rail network. The trains crisscross the nation, publicly subsidized and cheap, with quiet maglev propulsion. You finish a railroad and hop on one of your trains to go visit friends 500 miles away. You're there in two hours -- your kids don't squirm in their seats, they instead play cards in the dining car and watch forests and canyons zip by from the glass-covered viewing car.

Imagine every morning you get up at 4 and get onto a boat. Fishing had to be pulled back on -- you eat it still on special occasions, really savoring the taste, since you only get to have it every few months or so -- but the fishing boats were repurposed, and you are now paid for the plastic you pull out of the ocean. You take it back to a processing plant, where the plastic is eaten by a special type of bacteria. One day, you start bringing in less and less plastic, but you start noticing shoals of fish so massive that no one in living memory can think of a precedent. You watch as dolphins and sea lions playfully dive through the swarms. You shoot video for your kids back home to get them excited for the upcoming snorkeling trip.

Imagine that teaching, a revered and well-paid profession, entails taking kids out into nature and teaching them that they are a part of this, they are neither separate from nor above it all. They camp under the night sky, which is getting clearer lately, and point up at shooting stars and satellites. Back at home, they go on foraging walks to learn the local edible plant life, and they take a gardening class where they learn how to grow plants with minimal fertilizer and no pesticides. They plant many crops at once, all complementary to each other, and they cook delicious meals with what they pick. No one has any memory of the bland, flavorless tomatoes of the 20th century.

Imagine being a milkman, a family profession until it disappeared in your grandfather's time. You know all of your neighbors by name, catch up with them while collecting the old glass bottles they used to deliver them back to a nearby farm. An older neighbor doesn't answer the door one day during a heat wave, and you, concerned, call her daughter, who brings over the key and gets her to the hospital. She lives thanks to you.

Imagine being a doctor, and realizing that your patients seem happier than they used to. You spend more time with them, you don't need to check charts, and you don't have to worry as much about malpractice suits, as no one needs to sue to cover their medical bills any more. Lung disease seems to be going down, as does obesity and depression -- a lot more people are outside these days, the air much cleaner. Because you're not feeling a pinch in your pocketbook, you don't feel pressured to push certain medicines, to churn through far more patients than you can handle. 

Imagine coming home, after a day's work, and sitting outside. A lot still needs to be done, your kid's generation isn't out of the woods, but you're working towards something, dammit. If the feedback loops that the scientists are warning about destabilize it all again, you know that you'll all work together and try your best to figure it out.

The news isn't always good, but it's hopeful: there's an international coalition of scientists and environmental workers that is constantly experimenting on the best ways to lower emissions to under 350 parts per million, there are teams of economists figuring out how to make our economies work without eternal growth while still developing the most impoverished countries, there are policymakers working on ways to keep population stable without telling people they can or can't have kids (providing education to women consistently lowers birth rates, for example), there are security professionals protecting wildlife sanctuaries from poachers, and there are spiritual leaders teaching the anxious and the fearful how to be resilient, how to be hopeful, even in times of crisis.

You snap off the news and play with your kids out in the back. There are blackberries growing on the back fence, there's a six-pack of local microbrew in the fridge, and there are a lot of crickets in the woods behind your house these days, a lot of fireflies in the night sky. Not all problems have been solved, but it's not for a lack of trying. You go to sleep fulfilled with your work, excited to get up tomorrow and do it again.

Perhaps

This, perhaps, all sounds impossibly idyllic, perhaps a little bit too utopian. We have all gotten used to being cynical about our future. But you cannot work towards a better future if you cannot imagine a better future, and there's no reason for us to bargain our imaginations down from a best case scenario. 

The arguments against such a world are almost always an act of bargaining down our imaginations. "How will we afford it?" people ask. The same way, of course, that we could afford to give tax cuts to the richest people in the world, the same way we could afford to blow trillions of dollars on wars and weapons, the same way we gave enormous sums of money to banks after they blew up our economy. We have the will, we have the resources, we have the labor. Past those three realities, all financial constraints are fictions created by "reasonable" men who just so happen to profit immensely from things never changing. If we can afford for you to spend your days sitting in a cubicle and posting funny marketing Tweets for laxative companies, we can afford for you to save our planet. End of story. It is only a matter of will. And in the words of the great Walter Sobchak, “If you will it, dude, it is no dream.”

The other option is to die not even trying. It's to leave nothing for our kids out of loyalty to jobs we hate, to an economic system which has never treated us as humans, but as cogs in an immense machine. We are not, as Charlie Chaplin put it, machine men with machine minds and machine hearts. We are humans. We can reject a world that we hate, that hates us, and build a world we love. We can save our planet and our children and feel joy in doing it.

All we have to do is to imagine it.

---

Further Reading:

• Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

• Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben

• Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot

• The Future Starts Here: Adventures in the 21st Century by John Higgs

• The Limits to Growth: 30 Year Update by the Club of Rome

• Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher

Just a note: these are all affiliate links, so I make some money if you buy from them. I haven’t been paid otherwise to promote anything specifically, I picked all these because I liked them.

Why internet flamewars haven't solved gun violence, climate change, and healthcare yet

Every time there's a mass shooting in the United States, social media goes through a very predictable cycle. After yesterday's shooting in Florida (if you are reading this on another day, just replace "Florida" with whatever state was the most recent), this meme went around the internet:

My feed, which skews progressive, tends to devolve into bilious fury pretty fast. Which I totally understand -- kids getting killed over something that was totally preventable is probably the one thing that we should be getting spluttering mad about. But a lot of the comments end up lashing out at the gun owners in their feeds. And there's a bit of a problem with that: every gun owner I've ever spoken to supports some level of gun control. The numbers hold this up: most Americans agree that some form of gun control is a very good idea. 84% of Americans believe in background checks. 89% believe there should be restrictions for buying guns if you have a mental illness. 83% believe that gun sales should be banned to people on no-fly or watch lists. 

If they, the gun owners, believe in some level of gun control, then us getting into flamewars on Facebook (about how gun control worked in Australia, about how gun deaths in the US compare with the rest of the world, about how the 2nd Amendment can be read differently and also as it's name suggests, can be amended) is a huge waste of time. We largely already agree on the facts, at least with enough consensus that, if we all voted on it, we'd approve at least some gun control measures, and some lives would be saved.

In America, consensus doesn't translate into policy change

The same is true of a lot of other supposedly divisive issues: 68% of Americans believe climate change is man-made. 61% of voters believe we should cut defense spending, not increase it. 60% of voters believe in Medicare for all. 83% support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. 80% of Americans believe that large corporations and the extremely wealthy should be taxed MORE, not less.

The question then, is this: if we all largely agree but our government isn't making policy changes based on that consensus, then who is the government serving? Who benefits from this situation and has the power to keep change from taking place?

A video came out a few years ago that explains what's going on. I know it's annoying when articles ask you to watch a video, but this one is worth taking a couple minutes on.

The TL;DR, if you can't take the time to watch it, is what you expect: basically, broad, countrywide consensus on issues does not translate into policy changes. But if the rich (whether it's rich people or rich corporations) want something in America, they are likely to get it, regardless of what the rest of America thinks. If they don't want something to happen, it is not very likely to happen.

Which is why we aren't getting gun control -- because gun manufacturers don't want it, and have effectively organized against it. If Americans are like, "Hey, children shouldn't be murdered in their classrooms, let's maybe do something about all of these guns," the gun manufacturers, through lobbying groups they fund like the NRA or through funding given to think tanks, can insert narratives into the media about how the real solution is more guns, a gun in every classroom, and about how "guns don't kill people, people kill people."

Available at Welcome to Night Vale!

Here's the bad news: Facts aren't going to save us.

It should be clear to us, by this point, that we aren't going to win by proving anyone wrong, whether it's in an internet flamewar or on some sort of daydream national stage where we publicly embarrass the President of the NRA so brutally that he breaks down crying, admitting he's wrong, and says they'll give up their violent ideology and work to make amends with the families of all of the people that died because of the policies they've pushed for years. We are (literally, in the latter example) dreaming if we think that's going to be the case.

Facts don't have power in this situation, because facts are not, at the moment, the main currency in our political economy. If they were, then we'd be doing a lot more to fight climate change. We'd stop fighting the War on Drugs. We'd drastically change the War on Terror. We wouldn't use the death penalty. And we wouldn't have Donald Trump as our President.

This is depressing, but the sooner you get over it, the sooner you'll be able to actually start taking steps to change things.

What matters to the powerful is not truth, but power itself.

Activists like to talk about "speaking truth to power," but as Noam Chomsky once said, "You don’t have to speak truth to power, because they know [the truth] already." Rather than speaking the truth to a power that doesn't care about what the truth is, we should instead try to take their power away from them.

In the US, money is power. Power is money. People who are extremely rich are extremely powerful. They are the ones influencing policy. And if we don't like the way they're doing it, we need to ask ourselves -- how can we take their money away from them? 

This is a big question that I'm going to write more on in the coming months, but I do have a few ways we can get started right now:

First: Get off your high horse. The people you are friends with on Facebook are not the people who put this system in place. They might be helping to support it, but if you talk with them, they will probably agree with you on the broad points, and probably would change things if they were in control. Also, if you are a working adult, you have likely, at some point, had to "sell out." You have made a decision which, if money were not a factor, you would not have made. You took a job you found to be a little skeezy. You have continued working for a person you did not respect because you wanted the paycheck. You didn't speak up over something wrong that was happening because you were worried you might lose your job. Most of us are not pure. Most of us have made compromises because of money. And we've rationalized what we did after the fact.

Now, imagine that it wasn't a job you would lose if you did the right thing, but a massive corporate empire. Imagine what sort of rhetorical pretzels you'd be able to bend yourself into in order to justify not making changes. It's important to understand this: Trying to convince a person of the truth when accepting that truth would mean fundamentally changing everything about who they are and have been for their entire lives is not an easy (or even really a worthwhile) task. 

What is more effective is to work to take away their power. Slowly erode it over time. Elect officials (locally, if you can't elect them on the state or federal level) who aren't friendly towards them. Stop buying their products. If you have investments, make sure they aren't in companies that are undermining our democracy. Don't give money to oil companies, or gun manufacturers, or private prisons, or big banks. Put your savings into local credit unions instead. If you have the stomach for it, get involved in acts of civil disobedience and protest. Get involved in your community. Start changing things in small ways. The big changes always follow from the small ones.

Most importantly for now is this: We can get creative about how we take away their power, but we're not doing ourselves any favors by getting into heated internet blow-ups with the people who aren't responsible for these problems in the first place. There is a way out of the situation we're in. It's just not in the direction we've been heading.

Donald Trump doesn't deserve your rage (and it's probably helping him anyway)

It's been an enraging few weeks to live in the land of Trump. First, the President told the people of Puerto Rico, whose home had just been crippled by a massive hurricane, that should feel lucky that they hadn't suffered a "real catastrophe" like Katrina. Then he picked a fight with the mayor of San Juan, who had simply been begging for more assistance, while explaining that it was impossible to effectively help them because Puerto Rico is “an island surrounded by water. Big water. Ocean water.” Then he tried to do a Puerto Rican accent. Then he tossed paper towels out to survivors like they were t-shirts at a Minor League Baseball game, and later bizarrely bragged about how soft those paper towels were, and how much the crowd of disaster survivors loved him.

Embed from Getty Images

And that's just Puerto Rico: he also picked a fight with athletes who have been protesting the murder of innocent people at the hands of the police, saying that they should be fired for exercising their right to free speech. His administration went so far as to stage a ludicrously expensive counter-protest featuring his empty shell of a Vice President, and he later tried to use the death of former NFL player and veteran Pat Tillman (who was known for his liberal politics, corresponded with Noam Chomsky, and supported war resisters) as a reason why players shouldn't be allowed to kneel during the anthem.

He repealed the Obama-era clean power plan, which could potentially do enormous harm to future generations through added carbon emissions. He pushed a tax plan that would give him, personally, a billion dollar tax cut, while trying to cut healthcare for the poor and decrease women's access to birth control. Then he pushed an immigration agenda which is just naked white supremacy.

Oh, and he's single-handedly taken us to the brink of nuclear war with North Korea, who literally no one thinks we should go to war with.

It's been an enraging few weeks.

Fffffuuuuuuuuu---

Take a second. Take a deep breath. In. Out. Okay. Let's move on.

If you've got a conscience, have been paying attention, and have been living in America for... Jesus Christ, it's been nearly 10 months of this shit, you are likely very tired and very angry. It is understandable. It is the natural response. But I'm going to need you to let go of that rage for the rest of the article. Here. Here's a dog who loves his stuffed animal.

Dawww. What were we talking about, again?

Better, right?

Right. The thing about all this rage is that it may actually serve Donald Trump more than it harms him. There are undoubtedly positive side effects to all of this anger -- the newly mobilized left that has arisen post-election seems to be moving the Democrats leftward, and organized democratic movements like Indivisible may have played a large role in the fact that the GOP, despite having both Houses of Congress and the White House, have not been able to pass repeal and replace.

But we're still angry, and we're still working primarily in response to Donald Trump. There is an excellent quote from Ursula K. LeGuin's brilliant book, The Left Hand of Darkness:

To oppose something is to maintain it.

They say here “all roads lead to Mishnory.” To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

In his epic masterpiece, Dune, Frank Herbert puts it differently:

What do you despise? By this you are truly known.

This idea -- that the things we hate are simply the other side of our coin -- is a centerpiece of Daoism. If we did not know light, darkness would have no meaning. If we did not know sound, we would not be able to fathom silence. Good could not make sense without evil. You are, to some extent, defined by the things you choose to be against. So you must choose carefully.

Donald Trump, the Internet, and the Attention Economy

Let me put it in a less mystical way.

I've worked in the internet writing business for almost half a decade, and I know most of the tricks for how to get something to go "viral." A piece about sex is just naturally going to get more clicks than a piece about something drab like books. More people will click if you appeal to emotion than if you appeal to reason. Short, catchy posts with lists and multimedia are more appealing than long blocks of text. Distraction, emotion, simplification, and humor are valuable; context, nuance, reason, and balance are not.

The key is to get people emotionally engaged enough to click, and then to keep them on your webpage -- by whatever means necessary! -- for as long as possible. The turning point in any internet writer's life comes when they realize that people hating their piece is just as valuable as people loving their piece.

Anger, rage, hate, righteous indignation -- these are all just as big emotional click-drivers as happiness, humor, and love. You know what gets people to click on a garbage headline? Indignation. You know what keeps them on the page? Long, angry comments. If it is your attention that I want, I will be much more likely to get it if I can teach myself not to care whether it's positive or negative attention.

Let me tell you why I hate you.

Donald Trump is the undisputed master of the attention economy. This isn't to say he's a genius: most of the tricks I've mentioned can be figured out by any intuitive 5-year-old. The only real brake on someone using these tricks to the fullest extent is integrity and a basic moral code. And if you have neither of these, if the only thing of value is attention -- well, then it's very easy to get.

Donald Trump's attention machine is almost beautiful in its simplicity. When he Tweets something outrageous, liberals attack him (fie! shame! disgusting!) and his supporters attack the liberals (hypocrisy! political correctness! frog memes!). It's a nightmare firestorm, but Donald Trump loves the fire, as long as it's swirling around him.

Meanwhile, the island of Puerto Rico languishes, but our attention is on the tossing of paper towels.

How do you fight someone and ignore him at the same time?

If those of us on the left do not want to be defined by Donald Trump, we will have to stop playing his game. We will have to stop giving him the attention he wants. And this will be hard to do, as he is the President of the United States of America, and, unfortunately, plays a pretty central role in our news cycle.

But there's a simple question you can ask yourself every time you read the news:

Who deserves my attention?

Is it the Puerto Ricans who are trying to rebuild their homes and lives? Is it the women who won't be able to afford birth control, the people who will lose coverage under repeal and replace? Is it the children whose lives will be demonstrably worse as we continue to turn our planet into a slow-cooker? Is it the tens of millions of people who would die in a nuclear exchange, including the innocent North Koreans who have been oppressed by their government for decades? 

Or is it Donald Trump?

Undoubtedly, there are times that he will attack people and we will need to defend them, but instead of making the story about his inadequacy as a human, you can make it about the humanity of the victims of the things he does.

There is someone who's doing it right

I mentioned Trump's "feud" with athletes earlier in the article: Trump has tried to make this issue about himself, but he's largely failed. This conversation was started by a single soft-spoken person.

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Last year, the only NFL player to take a knee was Colin Kaepernick. When they asked him why, he said, "I'm going to continue to stand with the people that are being oppressed. To me, this is something that has to change. When there's significant change and I feel that flag represents what it's supposed to represent, and this country is representing people the way that it's supposed to, I'll stand."

It did not go well for him. He was ridiculed, he was booed, and it may have contributed to him losing his job. But a year later, after Trump threw his little tantrum about Kaepernick, he forced people to choose: are you with me, or with Kaepernick?

The two have very different records over the past year: Trump has spent months attacking the most vulnerable people in our society and serving the mega-rich (a kind of anti-Robin Hood), while Kaepernick has spent the past year giving money to oppressed communities. He's given to the Coalition for the Homeless and United We DREAM, an organization that helps undocumented immigrants. He's given nearly $1 million, all told, to charities over the past year, in spite of losing his job. He's also held "Know Your Rights" camps for kids. And he's tried, for the most part, to stay out of the press. The two could not be more different.

The NFL picked its side. Huge swaths of the league knelt during the anthem. The tide on the issue may well have turned, and all because a single man quietly took a knee in honor of the many people who have needlessly, unjustly been killed by the law enforcement that is supposed to be serving us.

A Guardian headline on September 24th read: "Colin Kaepernick has won. He wanted a conversation and Trump started it."

Quiet dignity defeats rage.

Fighting the right fight

We get to choose the our enemies, and we get to choose our allies. There are 7 billion people on this struggling little planet, and there are so many people and so many things more deserving of our attention than a sad little manchild sending out early morning Tweets on his toilet. We could be fighting against poverty, climate change, racism, sexism, loneliness, ignorance, and war. We could be fighting for justice, dignity, freedom, equality, and humanity.

If it's what we despise that defines us, then it's time for us to find worthier things to despise.

How to deal with Trump whiplash

If you're like a lot of Americans, you woke up to the news this morning that last night President Donald Trump delivered his first address to a joint session of congress and managed to sound like someone who was not an enraged, unhinged real-life-version-of-if-Jake-Gyllenhaal's-character-from-Nightcrawler-was-a-successful-landlord. For many news organizations, and indeed, for many every day Americans, Trump tends to be graded on curve. When your ordinary classroom behavior is to tip over all the desks and try to stab the teacher with scissors, managing to simply sit quietly and do some light vandalism to your desk with a pocket knife is a massive improvement, after all. So it is with Trump, who delivered a speech last night, that while very light on substance, was by all accounts more subdued, lighter in tone, and less free associating and off-script jabbing than any speech he's made in the past.

Politics are a fickle thing because people can be fickle, and I have no doubt that there are quite a few party line Republicans out there who have just been begging for this guy to give them a reason to not feel embarrassed to support him. For those people, last night was the confirmation they needed that the ship was on the right course, and I have no doubt we'll see Trump's approval rating climb back up to the mid-to-high 40's soon. That said, if you've been fervently anti-Trump, you've been riding a very powerful wave of support for your resistance from more or less all corners except Trump's most die-hard base up until now. Seeing the tide stem a bit as a few mainstream Republicans get off the worry train and slide back into line with their fellow conservatives could be jarring, so we at Enough 2 Be Dangerous thought it might be useful to remind you that lipstick on a pig, despite being a beautiful shade of patriotic red, is still just lipstick on a pig. Here are a few of the best takes out there this morning:

• Writing for The Atlantic, David Frum points out that Trump's speech failed in 3 large ways: failing to lay out a coherent agenda, failing to give any real details about how his goals would be accomplished, and failing to respond to any of the mounting scandals and criticisms that have plagued his presidency thus far.

• Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) echoed these sentiments, basically saying that while Trump delivered some nice words, his actual actions are yet to live up to anything he promised and anything the American people want.

• ABC News' Rick Klien reports that while Trump did do a better job with both tone and rhetoric, he has changed nothing about the unpopular and controversial policies he supports.

• In 2 separate stories, Vox reported that 1.) Trump did not provide any leadership settling the growing rift in the party on how to repeal and replace Obamacare (if at all) and 2.) Despite some conciliatory tone, there has been no indication that the administration has any intention of changing its immigration stance.

• I don't personally fault him for this, because I feel like any politician would have done the same thing, but I suppose that doesn't make it right, and at least the folks at Slate felt Trump's outreach to the mother of slain Navy SEAL Ryan Owens was "crassly manipulative".

So, while there's no denying that last night's speech was a massive improvement from a rhetorical standpoint, from the standpoint of content, policy leadership, and actual substantive change, this is still the same ol' Trump who reportedly echoed David Duke in saying that the recent wave of anti-Semitic attacks including the desecration of Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia, may have just been "false flag" operations of Jews terrorizing themselves for sympathy. Wow. A cure for Trump whiplash is always a tweet away.

Featured photo by Matt A.J.

Nope: Protesting someone doesn’t make you anti-free speech or a politically correct snowflake.

There’s an interesting debate going on right now about Milo Yiannopoulis, the far right skeez-ball troll whose speaking engagement was recently canceled at UC-Berkeley after violent riots broke out. There were some reports that he’d planned,to publicly name undocumented students on campus, which he denied (he’d previously outed trans students in the past, so it’s conceivable he would’ve been that much of a douche).

Naturally, people are claiming that his free speech rights were violated. People like the President of the United States, who threatened to pull federal funding from UC Berkeley. And this raises an interesting debate — is protesting repellent speakers inconsistent with a belief in free speech?

The short, easy answer is “no.” I’ll let xkcd’s Randall Munro explain.

The longer answer is just a more extended “no,” but I think I can give a bit more context. Basically, though, you can be done with reading this article, because comics are a much better medium of communication than blogging, and I clearly picked the wrong profession.

Free speech doesn’t mean “everyone gets a megaphone.”

In 2007, my junior year at Penn State, Ann Coulter came to give a speech. I was President of the school’s chapter of Amnesty International at the time, and we, along with a number of other progressive groups, decided to protest her speech.

The speech was heavily attended — both by the college’s many conservatives, and by a lot of locals living in the surrounding rural area. And as they walked into the speech, they saw us. And they were annoyed.

“What a bunch of whiners,” they said. “This is America! Take your PC bullshit to China!”

I am not particularly aware of a political correctness movement in China, but the rebuke to our protest was broadly the same from everyone who engaged with us: “FREEDOM OF SPEECH!”

It was a strange argument to make against us, as it was precisely the reason we were protesting — and it also totally missed the point of the protest.

The reason we were protesting Ann Coulter was not because we thought she did not have a right to speak at Penn State. It was because the school was paying her a lot of money to speak, and the money they were using came from a fund that was partially filled by the student’s tuition. I forget what the exact number was, but I believe it was around $10,000.

Our argument was that, if the school wanted to pay political commentators, then they should. But Ann Coulter is not the type of conservative who has very much of value to say. She’s a demagogue and a bigot and a troll. Penn State’s not exactly a small-time school, and there was no reason to think that, if they’d wanted to, they could’ve gotten a slightly more thoughtful conservative commentator. There’s no shortage of right-wingers who aren’t dumbasses.

Had Ann Coulter wanted to exercise her right to free speech, no one would’ve stopped her — the school had designated “free speech zones,” one of which happened to be the patch of pavement in front of the HUB, which is where she was speaking, and thus was the place we chose for her protest.

She could’ve gone to one of those spots — for free! — and said whatever she wanted. We would’ve argued with her, but we wouldn’t have questioned her right to talk.

But no one sat long enough for us to explain this — in their eyes, we were crybabies who hated freedom of speech.

Tools to shut down a conversation

Phrases like “Free speech” and “Political Correctness” are really good at shutting down what might have otherwise been productive conversations. They’re both misleading. Freedom of speech, as Munro points out, is not freedom from criticism or backlash — it is merely freedom from the government interfering with your right to say what you want.

People with platforms — news outlets, universities, churches, etc. — all have to play a role as the gatekeeper to their platform. With some exceptions (the equal time rule, for example, which only applies to political candidates during elections), they are allowed to give time to whomever they choose. Universities position themselves as a place where ideas can be exchanged, but the universities get to choose which ideas are worth exchanging.

Geologists, for example, would not invite a flat-earther to lecture their students in most cases. Acting programs wouldn’t be questioned for inviting Daniel Day-Lewis to speak instead of Pauly Shore. One of these people is clearly better at what they do than the other, with more to say.

There’s nothing wrong with setting rules of engagement.

Likewise, the matter of “political correctness” often glosses over a major point: every arena of debate has its own rules of engagement, and what is often dismissed as “political correctness” is more often an attempt to better define those rules of debate. Let me provide an example.

When I have disagreements with my wife, we have an understanding that we’re not going to say or do certain things. I used to roll my eyes when I was frustrated — she called it out as arrogant and condescending, and I don’t do it anymore. She would occasionally tease me about certain things that hit a really soft spot — I asked her not to, and now she doesn’t.

We still haven’t totally worked out the exact rules of engagement, nearly five years into our relationship, but we have the understanding that it’s a work in progress, and we know that it’s important that we a) communicate and b) do so respectfully. Otherwise, we’ll spend our time attacking each other rather than working together to get the things we both want.

This is basically what’s happening with what many people are calling “political correctness.” Certain groups of people are saying, “Hey, we’d like you to maybe speak to us in this way — it feels kinda disrespectful, otherwise.” You might feel defensive or embarrassed when they say this: I was mortified when my wife pointed out the eye-rolling thing, so naturally I got angry at her because that was easier than admitting I was being an asshole. But you have to understand that they’re totally allowed to ask for certain things in order to feel respected.

That’s what respect is — it’s treating someone with the dignity that they ask for. And if you’ve ever asked someone not to call you a certain name — a racist, an idiot, a butthead, a moron, a bigot, a douchebag, a fuckstick, a wankstain, a jerkyjerkjerkface, etc. — then you’ve engaged in this exact same behavior.

A new America

The reason we’re having these fiery conversations about what we can and can’t say is because more people are taking part in the conversations now. The academic and political conversation in the US was created by rich, white males, and has been dominated by them for a long time. They wrote the constitution, they created the government, and they populated academia. So they set the rules of engagement. It was understood that threats against their personal safety were not conducive to civil discussion, so threats were taken off the table.

Today, we (fortunately) have more voices in the conversation. This is good — democracy is about getting different people with different interests working together. But now that there are women, LGBT people, and people of color in the conversation, and they’re saying, “Hey, can we go back and discuss these rules of engagement so they take my unique experience into consideration?”

Most people who believe in democracy believe that its lifeblood is civil conversation. If you can talk about an issue civilly, without resorting to ad hominemattacks and cheap rhetorical tricks, then you’re likely to come to some form of agreement or compromise. But for a democracy to work, all parties have to have input on the rules of that conversation. There will never be a perfect agreement, and sometimes people’s feelings will get hurt. But that doesn’t mean that the rules of engagement aren’t worth discussing.

Featured photo by mpancha

5 things you didn't know about nonviolence

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Mark Kurlansky's book, Nonviolence: the History of a Dangerous Idea, and discussed the biggest argument typically used against nonviolence as an ideology: that it never would have worked against Hitler. (Hint: It actually probably could have!)

Over the Martin Luther King weekend, our bloviating piss-receptacle of a President-elect attacked the man who is probably our greatest living practitioner of nonviolent resistance, John Lewis. Lewis was the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which did the grassroots organizing work that eventually led to the dismantling of Jim Crow in the South.

In his attack, Trump said Lewis was "All talk, talk, talk, no action or results. Sad!" This is a common attack on nonviolent activists -- the idea is that, because they're not beating or killing a problem into submission, they're somehow ineffectual. So it's maybe worth it for us to take a moment to briefly review our world's legacy of nonviolent activism.

1. Early Christianity was one of the very first nonviolent movements.

The Roman Empire was pretty tolerant of religions, as far as repressive empires go. Their basic attitude was that hey, believe what you want, so long as you don't fuck with us. Any Christian will know, though, that the Romans hated the Christians. Crucified them all the time. The reason behind this is simple: Early Christians were political AF.

One of Jesus's primary teachings was nonviolence. He once famously said, "whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." One long-term, more pacifist interpretation of this has been, "Accept the blows life rains down on you." There's another, infinitely more badass explanation, though. Biblical scholar Walter Wink explains:

"You are probably imagining a blow with the right fist. But such a blow would fall on the left cheek. To hit the right cheek with a fist would require the left hand. But the left hand could be used only for unclean tasks; at Qumran, a Jewish religious community of Jesus' day, to gesture with the left hand meant exclusion from the meeting and penance for ten days. To grasp this you must physically try it: how would you hit the other's right cheek with your right hand? If you have tried it, you will know: the only feasible blow is a backhand.

The backhand was not a blow to injure, but to insult, humiliate, degrade. It was not administered to an equal, but to an inferior. Masters backhanded slaves; husbands, wives; parents, children; Romans, Jews. The whole point of the blow was to force someone who was out of line back into place. Notice Jesus' audience: "If anyone strikes you." These are people used to being thus degraded. He is saying to them, "Re-fuse to accept this kind of treatment anymore. If they backhand you, turn the other cheek." (Now you really need to physically enact this to see the problem.) By turning the cheek, the servant makes it impossible for the master to use the backhand again: his nose is in the way. And anyway, it's like telling a joke twice; if it didn't work the first time, it simply won't work. The left cheek now offers a perfect target for a blow with the right fist; but only equals fought with fists, as we know from Jewish sources, and the last thing the master wishes to do is to establish this underling's equality.

This act of defiance renders the master incapable of asserting his dominance in this relationship. He can have the slave beaten, but he can no longer cow him. By turning the cheek, then, the "inferior" is saying: "I'm a human being, just like you. I refuse to be humiliated any longer. I am your equal. I am a child of God. I won't take it anymore.""

Early Christians, then, were forbidden from violence, but not from resistance. And one of the things they did to resist was to convert. And among those they converted were the Roman legions. Roman legions who were now Christians were also forbidden from violence, and could not fight. So the Roman Empire (correctly) saw Christianity as a direct threat to its ability to subdue the masses. Christians weren't put to death for their religion -- they were put to death for their politics.

The Romans only eventually brought the Christians to heel by becoming Christian themselves. Once the Christians were in power, well -- then they decided violence wasn't so bad after all. Power tends to do that.

2. Gandhi preferred violence to pacifism.

Gandhi was intensely political -- he believed that nonviolence (what he called satyagraha) was the best way to fight the British Empire. But he also supported the British in WWI, believing they would be more likely to listen to the Indians if they were seen as Allies. He also believed that if you had to choose between being passive to injustice, or acting out in violence against it, that violence was preferable. Kurlansky writes:

Gandhi was first and foremost a political activist, and he had utter contempt for nonactive pacifism... he regarded such a passive stance as cowardly, calling inaction "rank cowardice and unmanly," and said he would rather see someone incapable of nonviolence resist violently than not resist at all. "Violence is any day preferable to impotence," he wrote. "There is hope for a violent man to become nonviolent. There is no such hope for the impotent."

(If you think it's weird that Gandhi is comparing activism to having a penis, then you should maybe research some of his bizarre attitudes on women and sex. Holy shit, the man was a Freudian nightmare.)

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Similarly, MLK, Jr. initially thought violence was more likely to result in change than nonviolent resistance. He didn’t change his mind until he became close with nonviolent labor union and civil rights activist A.J. Muste.

3. Martin Luther King, Jr. was considered a radical in his time.

Today, Martin Luther King is about as close as you get to an American Saint. But in his day, he was viewed much in the same way that Black Lives Matter activists and protestors like Colin Kaepernick are now — he was seen as “un-American,” and as a rabble-rouser. Indeed, he expressed his frustration with “white moderates” in his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”

Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

This radical depiction of him runs counter to the modern tendency to neuter him or paint him as conservative. Towards the end of his life, King believed that defeating racism and poverty wasn’t possible with changing the capitalist system. It’s popular today to try and chastise activists with the specter of a saintly Martin Luther King, who wouldn’t have caused waves. Hell, even this weekend, prominent moron Rob Schneider tweeted the following:

Rep. Lewis. You are a great person. But Dr. King didn't give in to his anger or his hurt. That is how he accomplished & won Civil Rights.

— Rob Schneider (@RobSchneider) January 16, 2017

(Just to compare their records: In 1965, John Lewis marched with King at Selma. In 1992, Rob Schneider chased a 10-year-old out of the Trump-owned Plaza Hotel, leaving him to fend for himself while being stalked by criminals and street-people.)

This is common, though — by making a saint out of otherwise radical figures, you’re able to strip them of some of their political edge and assimilate them into the mainstream. The same has been done for Jesus, Gandhi, and Mandela. Remember — your heroes were political, and usually were pretty radical. Don’t believe any Deuce Bigalow who says otherwise.

4. The Cold War was ended by nonviolent activism — not by Ronald Reagan.

We in the US like to say that Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War by taking a hard line against the Soviet Union. He didn’t. Americans had been taking a hard line against the Soviets for decades, and Ronald Reagan shouting at a wall changed very little.

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What really ended the USSR was a decades-long nonviolent resistance movement in the Soviet Bloc countries like the Czech Republic and Poland. These dissidents would hold protests or demonstrations, the Soviets would respond violently, and then they’d lose more and more public support. The names of these activists are well-known: Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and literally thousands more.

It’s important to remember this: Nuclear catastrophe between the world’s two superpowers has ALREADY been prevented by a scrappy band of artists, activists, writers, and labor unionists. When the USSR fell, Reagan took the credit. He doesn’t deserve much of it. The collapse of the Soviet Union had a little to do with pressures coming from the outside, but had much more to do with the pressures from within.

5. Apartheid was brought down through nonviolence.

When the fight against apartheid stalled in the late 50s, Nelson Mandela, the leader of the African National Congress, created an ANC military wing, saying, “As violence in this country was inevitable, it would be unrealistic and wrong for African leaders to continue preaching peace and nonviolence at a time when the Government met our peaceful demands with force.”

Mandela famously ended up in prison in 1964, and the crackdown on anti-apartheid activists got even more brutal. It was in the 1970’s that nonviolence got a second wind, in part through the personality of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Tutu preached nonviolent resistance, but was also a staunch supporter of economic and cultural boycotts.

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Now, the ANC mostly recognizes that it was the nonviolent tactics — specifically the sanctions and boycotts — that made the difference, and not the violence. When Mandela was released, he (along with Tutu, the last apartheid leader de Klerk, and the ANC) kept the transition from apartheid from becoming a bloodbath by emphasizing peace, truth, and reconciliation.

~~~

Nonviolence is a creative force. Violence is dumb and brutal — it is at best a blunt weapon that creates a lot of collateral damage. But nonviolence is creative and ever-changing, and draws less on the meaner side of our nature, and more on our ability to outthink our opponents. In the Trump era, our best defense is our creativity and our intelligence. Lord knows he doesn’t have much of either.

Take heart — life in Soviet Russia, Apartheid South Africa, the Roman Empire, and the 1960’s South was far worse than what we’re facing. There’s already peaceful roadmap to winning these struggles, and we can pull out of this.

Featured photo by CyberMagik.

Is there anything you can do about Syria?

Jesse Steele: I have to be honest with you: as I write this, I have no idea where I’m going with this Syria thing. I know you’ve seen the pictures and heard the reports coming out of Syria lately and going all the way back to 2011, and it’s a crisis. Their leader, Assad, is a soft-spoken psychopathic ophthalmologist who inherited his daddy’s iron throne and legacy of an iron fist, so when the “Arab Spring” reaches Syria and protests break out, he attacks, bombs, and gasses peaceful protesters. Rather than crush the rebellion though, he just lights a spark he cannot put out, which flares up into “civil war” that quickly escalates into complete chaos.

Now Russia is involved somehow in propping this dude up, the US and other allies considered getting involved for a time but ultimately decided it was too risky to do much more than arm a few groups they trusted. Meanwhile, rebel sides range from moderate pro-democracy fighters to ISIS and continue to fracture and trade territory with the government. Civilians are caught in the middle,  and now we’re left with nothing short of a daily horror show.

On top of all of this, it’s not like Syria is even in the only massive global crisis right now. Setting aside terrorist attacks (like in Germany and Turkey) because that’s more than I can handle right now, just off the top of my head we’ve got: violent political conflict in South Sudan, a comic-if-it-weren’t-tragic, actual-self-confessed multiple murderer Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines actively killing and advocating for the killing of anyone who has ever heard of drugs, and a refugee crisis continuing in Europe.

It leaves a person feeling pretty small, helpless, and confused about the state of the world. I will readily admit I have no idea what to do here. It feels like foreign policy is made by far away people in dark, smokey rooms and I don’t know how a person like me can even begin to think about this, let alone do something. You have a degree in human rights. Fix this for us, Matt. Give me like, 2-3 steps to just clean this whole mess right up. We need to sing songs in a circle or something, right? That’s gotta be one of the steps…

Step 1: Go back in time.

Matt Hershberger: Okay, here’s my four step plan:

1. Go back in time, murder baby Hitler.

2. Go back in time, murder colonialism and, if possible, the entire concept of hierarchical power.

3. ?????

4. World peace.

Not helpful? Okay, let me answer your question as if you asked something totally different. Remember the Haiti earthquake back in 2010? It killed around 160,000 people. What you may not remember is that a month and a half after the Haiti earthquake, there was an earthquake in Chile. This earthquake only killed 525 people. Which is still a lot, but not when you take into account the fact that the Chilean earthquake was the 5th largest ever recorded, way bigger than the Haitian earthquake.

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Why the difference?

The answer is, largely, that Chile is a developed Pacific Rim country that experiences earthquakes on the reg. Haiti is an extremely poor country where earthquake-resistant architecture is not really a thing, and which hasn’t been able to develop a disaster-proof infrastructure as a nation thanks to a string of kleptocratic or incompetent leaders, and also thanks to over two centuries of unfavorable trade policies and violent foreign intervention dating back to the successful Haitian slave uprising of the late 1700’s.

The lesson of Haiti and Chile is that disasters, whether natural or man-made, have a historical context that either limits or exacerbates the amount of damage they do. As a result, the best time to prevent disasters is before they happen. Once the disaster has started, all we can do is damage control. But if we do the less sexy, less obvious work ahead of time, we can either prevent the disaster altogether, or limit the scale of the destruction when it comes.

The truth is, we could’ve seen Syria — or something like Syria coming. And we actually contributed to it, with our constant destabilizing interference within the region. But we’ve allowed ourselves to be blinded to the larger issues in the region — poverty, neocolonialism, totalitarianism, sectarianism — by focusing on terrorism, which is less a cause of these problems, and more a symptom of them.

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Part of the reason we spend too much time on the symptom and not enough time on the disease is because of our daily news cycle, which focuses on anecdotes instead of trends. It makes us more responsive than proactive, and it hobbles us from doing the long-term work that we need to do to keep Haitis and Syrias from happening. We can look to the impoverished places, the places more quietly troubled, and start doing the real disaster prevention work now.

What if I don’t have the time?

Jesse: Almost like how an apple a day, when strategically coupled with a national commitment to affordable preventative health care, keeps the emergency room doctor away, right? Are we doing Obamacare jokes here? Is there going to be an Obamacare blog? What avenues can you create for more Obamacare-based humor?

Ok, so I get it: international crises are really tough to do anything about once they really get going, and so if we want to prevent these atrocities from happening, we have to act sooner. Without getting too political here, I think maybe you’re suggesting that a general indifference to massive poverty and inequality are not recipes for a world full of happy healthy societies? Are you further suggesting that a little bit of awareness of world events might help us recognize a bad situation before its a catastrophic situation? And finally, are you suggesting that other people, despite being not in this room with me right now, have their well-being intertwined with mine in this giant interconnected world? I’m dubious, but for the sake of argument, I’ll take these radical suggestions at face value.

Three questions emerge out of this for me, but because you continue to refuse to explain what love is to me, I’ll just ask two:

1. What does that preventative work look like? I’m busy enough as it is, do I have to be doing homework on the whole world all the time?

2. Obviously, there’s some big news happening at home which seems to demand most of my time. Like everyone else, I work, I look at cool memes on the internet, I vision board, I eat, pray, and love, etc… to be blunt, like everyone, I only have so many fucks to give. Can you give me any kind of useful way to think about how I can balance paying attention to problems at home with crises and tragedy abroad?

Matt: I’ll accept Obamacare jokes for like, one more week. After that, you’ll have to repeal them and replace them with a more expensive joke that does irreversible harm to poor people.

To answer your questions (the latter two, as I’ve told you a hundred times, you’ll know what love is when you buy your first fleshlight):

First: the world is, as you say, indeed an interconnected place. And while that immense complexity makes it impossible to fully comprehend, it also means that small acts of your own can have huge ripples. So while you, one person, can’t do everything, it’s important to recognize that you can do something, and you can choose what you want to do specifically. My suggestion is to look at the current conflict, and identify what we in the US could’ve done to prevent it:

1. If we hadn’t invaded Iraq in 2003, that wouldn’t have destabilized the region, and that would’ve helped.

2. If we had done a better job historically of supporting democracy and human rights in the region for all people instead of undermining any leader or country whose economic interests clashed with our own, we would have a) probably a more stable situation in the Middle East right now, and b) more moral clout when it came to working against violence.

3. Considering climate change has been a factor in both the Syrian and Sudaneseconflicts, it’s safe to say that swifter action on correcting our carbon emissions may have helped lower the possibility of full-on civil war.

Those are by no means all of the factors that contributed to the Syrian civil war, but it gives you three causes right there to support in the future:

1. Work for peace and oppose war.

2. Work for democracy and human rights.

3. Fight climate change.

There are already hundreds of institutions that work for these causes. Take your pick and start donating or volunteering.

To answer your second question, the flip side of interconnectedness is that you are always complicit in injustice. An interconnected world leaves no one pure. So whenever you get the chance to stand up against an injustice, you should. And yes, a part of this is educating yourself. This doesn’t have to be boring, but I get that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

The thing is, citizenship of any kind carries duties as well as perks. And understanding the world you live in so that you can be an optimal citizen is one of those duties. Your time is limited, but you could always listen to news podcasts during your commute, or start your day by reading a newspaper. You don’t need to know everything, but you do have a basic human responsibility to try and learn about the world around you, and to act to make it a better place.

In short: you cannot do everything. But you must do something.

Going beyond “awareness raising”

Jesse: Reminds me very much of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” a story of how we all bear responsibility for the part of our world we choose not to see. Also of this wonderful article from Vox, which stresses how important it is to just “bear witness” to what’s happening.

Embed from Getty Images

It’s not really the same thing, but I work in a domestic violence organization, and one of the things we fight against all the time is what we call the “culture of silence” around domestic violence. We learn from a young age when we see signs of a bad or scary relationship, we tend to look away, excuse, whisper a quick word of concern, and then move on. This is how domestic violence is allowed to grow: this culture of silence gets normalized, and very soon we can be surrounded by violence (1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men will experience physical, sexual, or emotional abuse from an intimate partner in their lifetimes) but not even realize it. So it seems to be with humanitarian crisis.

As someone who is generally impatient, and who is writing on a blog about how people can take action, I don’t usually hold with “awareness raising”, but it seems to me from what you’re saying that one of the more important things we can do is force ourselves to look: force ourselves to pay attention, even if the images are disturbing and make us feel helpless. It sounds like you’re arguing that at the least, we owe these victims of horrible global tragedy our attention. Maybe if we do that, in some way we acknowledge our share of their pain and our share of their attackers’ culpability. We have to see it, and speak about what we’ve seen, because our global culture of silence cannot continue if we’re going to be proactive in preventing these human rights crises.

Of course, that’s all well and good, but we can only raise so much awareness — there has to be a step where there’s some practical action to be taken, right? What are the practical steps people can take beyond flogging themselves with news reports, Hotel Rwanda, and Holocaust movies?

Matt: Yeah, and don’t get me wrong — awareness raising is a good thing. But it’s predicated on the idea that if you see something terrible happening, you’ll do something about it. The fallacy behind raising awareness is that we assume humans are naturally good, active creatures, and thus will work to stop an injustice if we’re confronted with it. But, as we’ve learned from every Holocaust bystander down to every woke person who has ever let his racist uncle rail against blacks and gays at the Thanksgiving dinner table, humans can be insanely conflict avoidant.

A photo posted by Intern Audrey (she/her) (@a_friendly_desert_community) on Jan 8, 2017 at 9:35am PST

So what I’m saying, that there’s not a ton you can do, isn’t to say you’re excused from doing something. If you follow the Night Vale maxim, “If you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget,” you’re complicit, to some extent, in what’s going on.

Now, what can you actually do?

• Find out if there are refugees in your area. Find out who is hosting them, and find out how you can help. How do you do this? Simple!

  • The White House has a ZIP code locator tool to help you find refugee-supporting organizations in your area. It unfortunately needs to be said that this tool may not be available for much longer.

  • You can also volunteer at a local resettlement office with the International Rescue Committee. They are also a good group to donate to.

  • Donate your time or money to the International Refugee Assistance Project — they provide legal help to refugees in need.

  • Offer to share your home with refugees.

• Donate your time or money to an organization helping Syrians on the ground in Syria.

  • The International Red Cross helps people in need pretty much everywhere in the world, including Syria.

  • Doctor’s Without Borders is pretty much always helping out in an emergency, and has been on the ground in Aleppo.

  • The White Helmets are on the ground in Syria helping out people in need. They are literally in harm’s way saving people.

  • Mercy Corps offers direct assistant to refugees.

  • Shelterbox offers supplies and disaster relief wherever they’re needed.

  • UNICEF helps children everywhere, including Syria. And make no mistake — there are a lot of kids being harmed in this fight.

  • Oxfam is another dependably excellent charity that serves people and Syria and elsewhere. Oxfam is doubly excellent because they’re also advocates for anti-poverty global policy.

• Get political.

  • One concrete way to show support is to call your Senator and ask them to support the Caesar bill, which would allow the US to institute no-fly zones in Syria and sanction the Assad regime.

  • Call your representative and ask them to support the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the US.

• Also, pray, I guess, but only after you’ve done literally everything else on this list.

This list is obviously incomplete, and we’d welcome any additional suggestions (or quibbles) both in the comments of this page, and in the comments on Facebook. We’ll try to add stuff as we go.

There’s a final point worth making: a lot of the destabilization in Europe and the United States, as well as the rise of right-wing nationalists all over the world, has been fueled by Islamophobia, fear of refugees, fear of terrorism, and the perception (both by western conservatives and Islamic extremists) that we’re undergoing some sort of ridiculous, crusade-like “clash of civilizations.” So it’s not too huge of a stretch to say that Syria’s nightmare has also very much become our nightmare. If you’re the type of person who needs a self-interested reason to do something charitable, then there it is — mass violence in one part of a globalized world means destabilization and upheaval in other parts.

This also means there’s no such thing as an apolitical solution — you can’t divorce charity from the politics that have led to a situation where charity is required. So instead of wringing your hands in despair, just do something.

Featured photo by David Holt — picture shows the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria

Can you truly be nonviolent in the face of someone like Hitler?

This is the first in a series on the ideas behind nonviolence. It’s also our first semi-book review. We’re going to do this from time to time, just to give you a bit of an inspirational reading list. We’re not paid to review these things, but if you buy the book (or whatever we recommend) through the link we provide on the page, we get a small kickback from Amazon. Every little bit helps!

WE, AS AMERICANS, KNOW that there were only two things that could have defeated the Nazis:

1. The ghosts inside the Ark of the Covenant.

2. Good ol’ fashioned American military might.

A possible third option, nonviolent resistance, is discarded out of hand. How on earth could a hypermilitarized, megaviolent nationalist movement ever have been stopped by kum-bi-yahs? In fact, World War II is used as our ultimate justification for the existence of what we call a “just war.” What was more just than this?

“Just war” is a concept that dates back millennia, and it’s been used to justify pretty much every war ever — the idea is, “We are right, they are wrong, and we are justified in fixing their wrongness by force.” This rationale is not concerned with ideology — it was used by the Allies and the Axis Powers in World War II, it was used by the Soviets in Afghanistan, by the Americans in Vietnam, and by everyone ever telling themselves they have a right to hurt someone.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that sometimes, violence is necessary. But in his 2006 book, “Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea,” Mark Kurlansky argues that this simply isn’t the case, and that nonviolence is pretty much always the better route to justice. He backs it up with thousands of years of history.

Nonviolent resistance is going to be an important tool in your utility belt during the Age of Trump (also, if you don’t have an activist utility belt yet, you’re doing it wrong). But a lot of people don’t really understandnonviolence. They usually confuse it with pacifism, and these two things are not one and the same. Nonviolence is not passive — it’s aggressive. But it’s an aggressive tactic used by a weaker force.

Say you’re a 10 year old on a playground, and a big kid is trying to get you to fight him. He’s goading you into taking a swing, which will give him the justification for punching the shit out of your scrawny ass. You know that you’ll get whupped if you fight him, so instead, you choose to make fun of him. Friends and classmates laugh, and now, if he takes a swing out of anger, he’ll just look like an asshole. You’ve won, and you’ve won by being creative. Nonviolence is a creative and and aggressive force.

But when you’re faced against something like the immense violence of Nazi Germany, you’re faced with a problem: how do you fight against it without using everything you’ve got? There’s an old cliche that any time you bring Hitler into an argument, you end it. But seeing as Hitler and the Nazis are the go-to argument against nonviolence, we need to address it.

Did we have to violence the bejesus out of Europe?

So the question is: Did we have to Inglourious Basterds our way out of World War II? Kurlansky thinks that in the case of World War II, violence is misrepresented as being just, and appeasement is incorrectly equated with pacifism. Here’s why:

Why we fought

First off, when people today talk about our involvement in WWII, they focus on the evils of the Nazis and fascism, and how we had to fight it. But at the time, our reason for fighting the Nazis had relatively little to do with fighting fascism, as many Americans viewed fascism as preferable to communism. It also had little to do with protecting the European Jews, as the United States was pretty antisemitic — when Roosevelt accepted 300,000 Jewish refugees in 1936, he was accused of being “too close to the Jews.” (If this sounds familiar to today’s outcry around Syrian refugees, then, well, duh.)

Instead, America’s involvement was a geopolitical one that was primarily directed at the Japanese Empire, and you couldn’t really fight Japan without fighting Germany. Roosevelt decided to put more force in the fight against Germany first, but this wasn’t because of antifascism or the Holocaust. It was because Germany already controlled most of Europe, by extension, the Atlantic. This made Germany a more immediate threat than Japan, which still did not have total control of the Pacific. He also was more nervous about the Germans because their weapons program was extremely advanced, and he wanted to fight them before they developed worse weapons (which turned out to be the right choice — they managed to develop the V-2 by the end of the war, but not the atomic bomb). There was also the matter of loyalty to the British, who were our number one allies.

So it’s important to recognize that we didn’t enter WWII for humanitarian reasons — meaning it’s a little dishonest to defend our involvement after the fact with them.

What about appeasement?

Ever since WWII, we’ve been using the word “appeasement” as justification for going to war. And while Chamberlain’s appeasement was indeed appalling, and let him get away with more than he should have, this argument misses one big thing:

Appeasement isn’t the only alternative to war.

At the time of Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement with Hitler, nonviolent activists were furious. They recognized that the pro-war hawks in Parliament (led by Churchill) would use the appeasement deal as an excuse to go to war, when other, more hardline diplomatic and economic tactics could’ve been used against Hitler.

In the US, this could’ve taken the form of economic sanctions, and by not allowing any of our companies to operate there. In the 30’s, Germany was home to factories of a number of US companies, including Ford, GM, Coca Cola, and ITT. The fact is, we were supporting and appeasing fascism and those that profited from it for a decade before the Munich Agreements were ever signed. It never had to get that far, and the evils of Hitler’s Germany were apparent long before 1938, when the agreement was signed. It’s silly to look back at that moment, when things had already progressed so far, and say, “that was the moment the war could’ve been prevented.”

The best time to oppose a dictatorship or a corrupt regime is at the very beginning, before it has a chance to get entrenched. But let’s assume, for the moment, that the moment a real, concerted nonviolent opposition would’ve started in Europe would’ve been post 1938, as the Nazis started annexing more and more of Europe. What’s the next argument?

Nonviolence never would’ve worked in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Except it happened, and it did work. The most shining example, which Kurlansky points out in his book, was the Danish. The Danish knew they couldn’t fight the Nazis, so rather than allow their soldiers to die, they surrendered. Their neutrality, however, did not become Swiss-style collaboration: as a nation, they actively undermined the Nazi war effort, by striking, sabotaging trains and infrastructure, and working as slowly as possible.

When the Nazis insisted that they deport Denmark’s Jews, the country resisted by hiding nearly all of the Jews (including some refugees from other countries) and smuggling them away to neutral Sweden (you’ll remember this if you read Number the Stars in grade school). Of the 6,500 Jews in Denmark, only 400 were ever deported, and Danish officials insisted on constantly visiting these 400 to make sure they weren’t mistreated. 51 Danish Jews died in the Holocaust. This is still tragic, but it compares to 300,000 in France and millions in Poland.

The “Final Solution” may have actually been caused by the war.

One of the more brutal ironies of the war is that we excuse it using the Holocaust, when the war itself may have made the Holocaust infinitely worse. Kurlansky points out that Allies knew about the gas chambers at Auschwitz but refused to bomb them, and that no real action was made to target the concentration camps (in part because Roosevelt knew that, even now, making the war about saving the Jews would be unpopular in America), which, again, makes the use of the Holocaust as an excuse for things like the firebombing of Dresden a bit dishonest after-the-fact.

But he also mentions that the Nazi plans for the dissidents and the Jews were not set in stone early on. One possible plan was to have them deported to Madagascar, which would have required bargaining with the British and the French. This possibility would have come off the table as the war started. The “Final Solution” itself wasn’t planned until January 1942, in the middle of the war. Kurlansky suggests that it was the brutality of war that escalated the brutality of the Holocaust*.

This is, of course, tricky — it’s hard to see how historical events would have played out if things had gone differently. But it’s reasonable to think that if no war had happened, if the international community had made a serious effort (like Denmark did), that more Jews and dissidents could have been smuggled out of Europe to safety.

Nonviolence against Hitler

The big problem with violence is that it takes other methods off the table. You can’t tease the bully while he’s punching you. I mean, you can, but it’s not remotely as effective. Denmark showed that resistance was possible in WWII, (mostly) without getting violent. And when you’re one of the people who will be in harms way when the violence starts — i.e. the civilian, the low-level infantryman, the political dissident — it almost always pays to try and keep violence from ever starting.

Hitler probably could’ve been stopped, and not by going back in time and killing him as a baby. He could’ve been stopped by a local and global effort that didn’t equate conflict avoidance with peace. He could have been stopped — or at least slowed to a less destructive speed — with constant nonviolent pressure from within and without Germany.

Peace is not the state of being like, totally chill and not arguing or whatever. It’s a proactive attempt at managing conflict so it doesn’t degenerate into violence. It’s a constant act of subduing those who may be subject to violence, and getting those who may be victims out of harm’s way. Peace is nuanced, tricky, creative, and kinda badass.

Featured photo (and the video embedded in the piece) are from the Chaplin movie The Great Dictator, which is awesome, and which you should watch.

* To be clear, the suggestion is not that a lot of people still wouldn’t have died — nonviolent resistance never guarantees that violence will not be used against the resistors, or even innocents — it’s that war may have enabled an escalated level of brutality.

The future belongs to the best organized

A LOT OF PEOPLE haven’t heard of Saul Alinsky, and many of the people who have heard of him seem to have the wrong idea. Alinksy died in 1972, and while he was influential, he was never famous enough to be a household name. He never wrote a blog. People on the political right who have heard of him know him from his vague association with Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and something about communism and dangerous lefty ideas, while people on the political left who have heard of him tend to see him as another face on the Mt. Rushmore of liberal thinkers, alongside Dr. King, Eugene Debs, and Noam Chomsky.

The truth is, however, Alinsky wasn’t really “political” in any kind of right-left sense as it is typically framed today. Alinksy was an operator, an organizer, a do-er — he was a guy who believed that all people should have a voice, and a guy who understood that in a pluralist democracy like ours (a democracy in which there are many groups, but no single group constitutes a majority), the most organized voices always win. So that’s what he did — he helped organize people.

Organizing from a political standpoint is really just about finding the people who care about an issue, getting them together in one group, and helping that group take collective action rather than as individuals, and Alinksy literally wrote the book on modern organizing (Rules for Radicals,1972). Primarily, Alinsky helped organize black neighborhoods in Chicago in the 1930’s, but he worked with a number of groups in places like Michigan, New York, and his native California.

I mention all of this about Alinsky because he famously eschewed political parties and all of those complicated “-ism’s” that seem to define mainstream politics. He had his ideas, like all people have their ideas, but Alinsky’s true allegiance was to democracy, and he felt that democracy only worked when all people had a voice and knew how to use it effectively to try to make change. If people he helped organize had an idea he didn’t like, it didn’t bother him because it wasn’t his business. What was important to Alinksy was that people worked together to find their voices and to make a demand of government and society.

I have only dabbled in organizing in my career (it’s hard work and it DEFINITELY doesn’t pay much, if at all), but I’ve come to admire and share Alinsky’s outlook. Yes, I have political views, and yes, if you assigned an “-ism” to them, it would be one of the “-ism’s” on the far left (I think ‘anarcho-democratic socialism’ fits best, but again, who cares?), but I believe very strongly that all those terms like capitalism, conservatism, liberalism, socialism, etc., have come to represent identities and dictate actions like they’re some sort of blueprint.

But these are just vague ideas. They are just the best-fitting descriptions of a set of ideas that a lot of people happen to share, more or less. Like the “identity politics” we hear so much about today, it’s just a way of saying that when you look at the group of people who share a certain set of beliefs, those people tend to share a common characteristic like ideology, skin color, or economic class. At best, these shared characteristics provide a way to broadly identify people uniting around common interest, but at worst, and more and more frequently, they’re a way of stereotyping, dismissing, dehumanizing, and co-opting the voices of others without their consent.

Like Alinksy, I believe that my personal politics are less important than the ability of all people to get together and talk about what’s going on in the world, how they see it, how it affects them, what they think about it, and what they should all do about it. Do I happen to believe that in an ideal world, these people would get together and agree that the system I happen to think is best is the best one? Of course I do. Everyone does. But the reason I do the work I do (I have spent my career in the nonprofit sector), the reason I pursued my course of study (I studied public policy and urban planning in school) and the reason I wanted to work with Matt to write this blog is because too many people do not understand the power and capacity for change they possess.

Call it empowerment, call it education, or call it dumb internet “hot takes,” but I believe we’re all the same stupid jumped-up primates with the same inherent dignity (or lack thereof) and are worthy of the same respect (or lack thereof), and so to me, Enough to be Dangerous presents an opportunity to help people find their own voices, their own power, and their own ideas.

This blog will provide some info Matt and I have gleaned from school or research or some random podcast we both listened to, but the point is not that we will steer you to the right idea. The point of this is exactly what it says in the URL — to give you the tools and the knowledge to express your own ideas in your own community, and maybe make that felt in the world as well.

We could never claim to touch Alinksy’s brilliance or experience, but because I think this blog shares some of his intellectual DNA, maybe it’s best to close with a quote of his from Rules for Radicals: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

Featured photo by Pat “Cletch” Williams

The future belongs to the people who show up

ON THE NIGHT OF the 2016 Presidential Election, I was in a New Orleans Airbnb with my wife and cousins. We planned on waiting until 10 — when the election would be called for Hillary, of course — and then going downstairs to get a cocktail on Bourbon Street. Instead, at 10, I found myself urging friends not to panic, to wait for Wisconsin, wait for Michigan, wait for Pennsylvania… and whoops, nope! The world’s on fire!

My wife, Steph, works in New Jersey politics, and that means you’re imagining her as some sort of Tony Soprano gumar with big hair and too much make-up. She’s more like Leslie Knope from Parks and Rec. A sweet, gregarious Italian girl from the Jersey Shore who thinks she can help people who need help. I’ve never seen her more upset than she was on election night — Donald Trump was so clearly a liar, so clearly a kleptocrat, and so casual about tossing grenades into the lives of the marginalized people of the world that she simply couldn’t conceive that so many of our loved ones would support him.

What was so galling was that he was what everyone was saying was wrong with politics. I’ve seen Steph get into it with strangers at bars — She tells them what she does for a living, and they say, “Sorry sweetheart, you’re all corrupt,” and she tears them a new asshole, because they have no fucking idea what they’re talking about. I’ve lived in DC, I’ve worked two blocks from the White House, and I’ve married a public servant, and it even took me a few years to reject the common narrative that American politics are hopelessly broken.

I reject it now because I go out for drinks with the poorly-paid peons that keep America afloat. I’m friends with Congressional staffers, non-profit workers, union employees, even dreaded lobbyists, and in them, I don’t see conniving puppet-masters like Frank and Claire Underwood from House of Cards. What I see — when they’re at their best — is Sam Seaborn and C.J. Cregg from The West Wing. At their worst, they’re like the petty buffoons of Veep, but they’re never evil.

But after the election, it was hard to argue with the House of Cardsinterpretation of American politics. “They can’t make that stuff up!” one family member said of House of Cards. Sure, they can make up an intergalactic robo-war in Battlestar Galactica, or a time-traveling alien who lives in a police box in Doctor Who, but they can’t make up a Senator pushing a girl in front of a train.

As I talked to more and more of my non-political friends and family members, I realized how far we as a country have become divorced from the reality of our democracy. A staggering amount of people believe 9/11 was an inside job — that George W. Bush was competent enough to conduct the greatest cover-up in history, but couldn’t manage to find false-flag terrorists that were from the country he wanted to invade or plant a few WMDs. Even more of us think that it’s impossible to be an elected official without being patently corrupt, which is demonstrably wrong. And nearly everyone votes based on personality, not on policy.

After the election, I spent most of my time on Facebook, trying to help organize and console friends who had just seen a brighter future melt away before their eyes. I am not part of the “everything’s okay” crowd, because it’s not, but I do think there’s more reason for hope than we maybe imagine.

Probably the most vocal voice on my Facebook feed was Jesse Steele. I’ve known Jesse since the first day of second grade, and we lived together a few years after college, back when we were broke and drunk most of the time. The two of us eventually went off to grad school — he studied public administration, I studied human rights — and he now works as a manager of a non-profit. I’m a writer and occasionally a journalist.

After the election, we decided that our Facebook posts could only get out to so many people, so we decided to start a website. We’re calling it Enough to be Dangerous (with a stylized 2, for reasons that have nothing to do what was available on GoDaddy), and we’re focusing on how we, the mothafucking people, can be effective in our democracy.

Because, look: things seem bad. But we still have a nominally democratic system. It’s a system that favors the people who show up. And for years, the main people showing up have been businesses. This isn’t because they’re evil, it’s because they have very clear bottom lines, and because they can see — in terms of dollars and cents — how different policies are affecting their bottom lines.

It’s a lot harder to quantify our conception of “the good life” than it is to look at numbers on a balance sheet. So we convinced ourselves that what was good for business is good for us. And it sometimes is. But it often isn’t.

So the future will start bending back in our direction if we start paying more attention to how we’re planning for it. That’s it — that’s all. There’s no reason that Donald Trump needs to mean the end of America or the end of the world.

What we’re going to try and do with this blog is to explain how we can be good, involved, effective global citizens. As the stoic slave philosopher Epictetus said 1900 years ago, “Only the educated are free.” As Jesse said to me on Gchat a half an hour ago, “In a pluralist democracy, whoever is the most organized wins.”

Let’s get educated and organized. We can still win this. This blog will hopefully teach you just enough to be dangerous.

Featured photo by Paul Sableman