#collective-action

#collective-action

Real change rarely happens through debate or persuasion. Instead, transformation grows out of relationships, shared struggle, cognitive dissonance, and practice. Together, Kelly and Lewis explore what organizers can learn from the science of neuroplasticity, the role of rupture and confrontation, and why movements need to focus less on 'changing minds' and more on creating conditions where people can unlearn harmful beliefs and step into collective action.

One political conversation with a gay friend that I'll never forget occurred the night before Election Day in 2016, where my friend told me that he hoped Donald Trump would win so that "The Revolution" would finally happen. The idea, I suppose, was that Trump would make things so bad that it would finally wake up the proletariat of the world, and it would unite in the ultimate class war to overthrow the messed-up liberal world order,

that incentivizes stories designed to polarize rather than illuminate. This flattening doesn't just distort our work; it enables erasure and makes authoritarianism's job easier. Authoritarianism thrives on main-character energy. It needs a hero story - a single person to valorize, platform, co-opt, discredit, or remove. Journalism has leaned hard into these toxic individualistic tropes, perpetuating a form of narrative kingmaking that creates a momentum of inevitability that feels impossible to escape.

But there is hope, too, as the authors point to effective changes and policies that are contributing to slower warming of the planet: "The future is still being written. Through choices in policy, investment, education, and care for one another and the Earth, we can still create a turning point. It begins by embracing our shared humanity and recognizing the profound interconnectedness of all life on the planet."

Of the original nine colleges and universities, so far none has signed, and seven- Brown University, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Universities of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Southern California and Virginia -have loudly and forcefully rejected it, citing "our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone" (MIT) and "the government's lack of authority to dictate our curriculum or the content of academic speech" (Brown).

In Hans Christian Andersen's folktale, The Emperor's New Clothes, when a child cries out that the emperor is naked, he isn't revealing a secret. Everyone already knows it. What changes in that instant is that everyone now knows that everyone else knows. That shift-from mutual knowledge to common knowledge, from private recognition to public awareness-topples the illusion. It's also the central insight of cognitive scientist Steven Pinker's new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy, and Outrage.

And so rather than talk about who those actors are that hold them at risk or talk about coalitions of one form or another that might take on coalitions of malign actors, let's talk about the needs of our citizens and that everyone wants to live in a crime-free world. That might sound like a bit of a panacea, but there's no one that would argue against that.

It's not just me, of course. Other people are exhausted by different things in different ways, and many people are exhausted (or worse) by more material changes in their lives.