Love this. I taught revolutions/movements and hope my kids saw the micro and macro elements. France is in its 5th Republic so things took awhile. Sometimes it seems they don’t but there’s the “solidarity” on the ground and then Lech Walesa speaks out. Gandhi built huge grassroots movements for years that mattered more to the British than the revolutionary Tilak who kinda flamed out. Lasting change does seem to be woven into the community building DNA. Minneapolis’ rapid response was aided by technology. Kinda like Arab Spring. Time will tell. I’m just glad to see this stack and discussion. Thx.
I think it would be wise to redefine community as the community of all living on the planet earth and not just human communities... and I means all species, animal, vegetal, mineral...
Definitely. It's a core belief in MAGA, peddled by grifters. But I see it a lot everywhere. Someone else is doing well, so it means they took something from you. It fuels a lot of nasty interactions on here as well. I have to check myself on this front at times.
My revolution is on the public road. I drive donkeys in public to demonstrate that it is possible. I consider it to be a revolutionary act. People look at me and say, "You have the right idea."
My other revolutionary act is that I *always* drive below the speed limit.
I'm living by my beliefs. Not entirely, because the necessary infrastructure has been destroyed and eliminated, covered with concrete and nearly infinite tons of metal and plastic going a mile every minute.
But as you say, what I believe would work, nearly nobody else does. If we had a shooting revolution I'm pretty sure I'd wind up at the guillotine.
Excellent, excellent, superb essay, once again as so often. Thank you.
Thanks! We're on the same page. I also believe I'd wind up at the guillotine. Over the last several years, I've seen many would-be revolutionaries shed much of their humanity and intelligence. Just because someone's trying to form a revolution doesn't mean I feel safe around them. Often it's the opposite. Daily actions like yours matter. Like others have said, the climate clock might end civilization, however you define it, but I think people are going to be around for a while yet. Industrial civilization or none, these ideas apply. People need to get used to seeing donkeys on the road again.
Thank you for this interesting post. I wonder if that's why Canadians are different from Americans: our natural environment (specifically the winter weather) demands that we take care of each other. Never drive past someone in the ditch, check on people when the power goes out, watch for each others' kids playing hockey on the road... These all add up.
I appreciate your perspective and discussion of this. I appreciated the back and forth you had with Andra Watkins around why Americans aren’t rising up. I appreciate the perspectives of those who leave their comments.
The truth is, what is the “BEST” or “CORRECT” course of action to take….this is what I wrestle with every day. What to spend my time on? Where can I make a difference and how big of a difference does it have to be to justify it?
There’s pressure from so many to do this or do that, call these people, protest here, boycott this, donate to this cause, rise up…
I could stand on the street corner day after day holding my sign and the likelihood of that garnering enough momentum to change anything is so small, but spending the same time in my garden, growing food that I hope to eat AND donate to the food bank…that makes a boots on the ground difference, too. Still small, but significant to my family and someone else’s. Does it count?
the Dalai Lama said: if you think you are too small to make a difference, try to spend the night with a mosquito...
Being unapologetically you is a contribution we can all make...
I don't think there is a Best or Correct course of action that applies to all across the board. we all have to find our own within the larger intelligence that organize it all...
I think one reason we aren't seeing the levels of protest one would expect is that a lot of resistance is more practical than a street march. When ICE showed up in Chicago and Minneapolis, for example, locals mobilized. They distributed whistles, they taught people how to evade stormtroopers. The resistance is also using an army of lawyers. Every time the goons in power try something, a lawsuit is filed.
Even climate change is being looked upon as a practical challenge. One look at your many posts here on Substack — for example, how to collect and store rainfall (just one of many such posts) — provides a good reflection on this. You're cutting edge there, but I can see that building. And it's not all BS. It's real. It's crafted out of experience and genuine, gritty reality.
I wrote a short fiction piece about "So you want a revolution?" A different approach, but one in full agreement with your thoughts here, I'd say:
You'd think with my pen name I'd be all over the "Jacobin" thing, but mostly I just think "Jacobin" is an interesting magazine that contributes alternatives to these dark times.
One of my favorite and unattributed sayings is that not to design something is to suffer design by default. Time for me in my own way, and in my community, to design a plan of how I can resist and help.
I think our devices have increasingly alienated us from each other. We're focused on them instead of outside ourselves. I've seen this as smart phones have evolved over the 30 years I've been riding the bus to work. This screen focus takes us away from others, our environment. It breaks down our bonds... in whatever form. Society breaks down. Community breaks down or never gets formed.
This, I think, is the way our rulers want it. A lot of work to do....
I agree with a lot of this but we do also need an imminent revolution to stand a chance of avoiding rapid collapse. "Climate revolution or we'll lose everything" as some climate scientists once wrote on a banner at COP26 in Glasgow. And as losing everything looms, revolution becomes likely or even inevitable.
But yes, revolutions are scary and don't come with guarantees.
@jessica did it again, honestly dear, you’ve become one of my favorite read here.
The comment section is rich too.
Being french I am well aware of the fact revolutions do not bring the change we expect, they bring another group in power.
Reading about the civil right movement, something became obvious, the slow growing construction that work is also the tool that has been used to take the US where it is now, all the way from the Powell memo and with the support of the rich and powerful who infiltrated the institutions and hollowed them. So whatever movement could be started now is going to face deep structural resistance.
Now I am not even talking about climate change that defines the timeline in way that gives us very little runway.
Of course none of this sounds hopeful but I don’t deal hopium here.
For decades I have tried to get a birds eye view, to figure out what is possible. I studied political science and international development, I worked internationally for 3 decades and honestly I still have not found nor seen any template that works.
Specially if it is disconnected from a deep spiritual framework.
A something that help us, humans, understand who we are ( know thyself). And from that understanding start moving ( taking actions) that are not driven by fear, including the fear of our own demise ( personal) or extermination ( collective).
I also do not believe that anything centralized will provide any solution.
I always use the forest as a metaphor for creating harmony. No centralized system, no one tells anyone what to do. Every species and entity within a species doing what their inner directive ( consciousness? DNA?) is telling them to do.
The bird is being a bird. The tree is being a tree. Etc
Harmony is created by surrendering and trust in the larger intelligence ( call it life or anything that works for you) to orchestrate the whole, and understanding the inner directive being the reflection of that larger intelligence that orchestrate the whole.
In this model Jessica is creating harmony by being Jessica and writing awesome posts. Jeff is creating harmony being Jeff by riding donkeys under speed limits. Etc
It often goes wrong when the Jessica’s and Jeff’s want others to do what they do with the beliefs they have the solutions for everyone else.
Was there another road humans could have taken, a road that would not have created the current situation? I don’t know. The question is moot. Can we create something better? Potentially yes, but I doubt we will. I see the pattern too clearly.
So maybe, just maybe, our best chance is to trust that this larger intelligence is at work right now. Even if we don’t understand it, for after all, sometime even the forest fire is part of the harmony.
And our best effort is to align with this intelligence by knowing who we are and acting in alignment with the deeper directives that drives us.
For after all, we all like to recall Gandhi and MLK (or john Lennon), yet Hitler, Mao, Staline and DT are also expression of the larger intelligence at play…
Community organizing to educate people about socialism we've been lied to about and how it works in Europe. This is also a setting for finding other like minded people. We need more progressives running against the Dem establishment. They come from the community.
Your article deeply resonates with what I am trying to build through Project Anodos.
You show that lasting transformation does not begin with revolution itself, but with the human connections that make it possible: caring for others, building communities, making every person feel seen, and accumulating small actions over many years.
This is precisely the intuition behind Anodos: using Conscious Reallocation and community-based gamification to connect everyday economic choices to the common good. A person chooses a local initiative, generates a small ImpAct, progresses through a collective journey, and discovers that their individual action is part of something greater.
Gamification is not meant to replace human relationships. It should serve as a gateway: making participation visible, creating a sense of belonging, and transforming countless small actions into a shared story.
You write that change is slow—until suddenly it is not. This is also the logic of Anodos: tiny flows, repeated by many people, can gradually build genuine community power.
Perhaps we are not ready for a revolution because we have not yet built the human infrastructure that must come before it. Anodos is a modest attempt to help create such an infrastructure: peaceful, local, gradual, and accessible to everyone. It remains a hypothesis to be tested, but I believe Conscious Reallocation could help awaken the world by first reconnecting people.
Thank you for the humanity of your article and for this essential reminder: caring for others is already a way of changing the world.
Beautifully said, and all of it is true. I’m just skeptical that violence can be avoided altogether. I don’t want to believe this, but people in power are very piggish and intransigent (and criminal), especially when they own and control the lion’s share of the available force. And my read of history is that, in revolutions that succeed, whether instantly or over time, nonviolence and all of the slow, person-to-person prerequisite accretions you note are as likely as not to go hand in hand with violence.
In your account of the precursors of civil rights movement, for example, you didn’t mention John Brown, any number of slave rebellions, e.g. Nat Turner, or the U.S. Civil War. The generally nonviolent abolitionist movement that preceded them was necessary, but their violence (of Brown et al.) was also a progenitor of the movement’s success, and not a negligible one. One cannot discount the occasions where the use or threat of force worked, and was arguably necessary, if not also sufficient, for the revolutionary ends in view to be achieved.
There are other cases. The British would never have left India nonviolently had World War II not lent its devastating assistance. Orwell noted that the British had found Gandhi useful for a while because “in every crisis, he would exert himself to prevent violence - which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever.” It was only contemporaneously with the Blitzkrieg that Gandhi’s long-standing method of noncooperation became decisive.
The overthrow of Stalinism was also not nonviolent, as is sometimes claimed. The violence that contributed to it just took place by proxy in the countries comprising what used to be called the Third World, through countless violent interventions in those countries by the two Cold War “Great Powers” - although more by the U.S. - which added to the exhaustion that caused the U.S.S.R. to collapse.
Again, I do not want this to be true, and I would welcome any attempt to refute this argument, but I think it’s a reality that any democratic political movement needs to reckon with, if only because the ruling powers and their thugs and goons will invariably bring coercion and violence to bear on any and every revolutionary prospect while it is still inchoate, long before game day. How this fact is dealt with morally and practically is a hard problem for traditional democratic or left-wing movements, which typically proceed from one relationship or another to ordinary morality, religious or not, and relatively inferior competence in the use of force, not to mention the willingness to use it when necessary (offensively or defensively).
“but we need something more than our phones and our snark” — brilliant
Gold.
This aging hippie peacenik remembers a related song from that time: "Won't Get Fooled Again," by the Who. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."🎶
That's what I hope we avoid when new Democrats are elected to lead.
Love this. I taught revolutions/movements and hope my kids saw the micro and macro elements. France is in its 5th Republic so things took awhile. Sometimes it seems they don’t but there’s the “solidarity” on the ground and then Lech Walesa speaks out. Gandhi built huge grassroots movements for years that mattered more to the British than the revolutionary Tilak who kinda flamed out. Lasting change does seem to be woven into the community building DNA. Minneapolis’ rapid response was aided by technology. Kinda like Arab Spring. Time will tell. I’m just glad to see this stack and discussion. Thx.
I think it would be wise to redefine community as the community of all living on the planet earth and not just human communities... and I means all species, animal, vegetal, mineral...
I agree. Thank you for the comments.
I also agree and would add air, soil, and water to our definition of community.
BTW, one of the more fruitful thoughts I’ve seen lately is the embedded idea that everything is a zero sum game - that simply isn’t true.
Definitely. It's a core belief in MAGA, peddled by grifters. But I see it a lot everywhere. Someone else is doing well, so it means they took something from you. It fuels a lot of nasty interactions on here as well. I have to check myself on this front at times.
My revolution is on the public road. I drive donkeys in public to demonstrate that it is possible. I consider it to be a revolutionary act. People look at me and say, "You have the right idea."
My other revolutionary act is that I *always* drive below the speed limit.
I'm living by my beliefs. Not entirely, because the necessary infrastructure has been destroyed and eliminated, covered with concrete and nearly infinite tons of metal and plastic going a mile every minute.
But as you say, what I believe would work, nearly nobody else does. If we had a shooting revolution I'm pretty sure I'd wind up at the guillotine.
Excellent, excellent, superb essay, once again as so often. Thank you.
Thanks! We're on the same page. I also believe I'd wind up at the guillotine. Over the last several years, I've seen many would-be revolutionaries shed much of their humanity and intelligence. Just because someone's trying to form a revolution doesn't mean I feel safe around them. Often it's the opposite. Daily actions like yours matter. Like others have said, the climate clock might end civilization, however you define it, but I think people are going to be around for a while yet. Industrial civilization or none, these ideas apply. People need to get used to seeing donkeys on the road again.
Thank you for this interesting post. I wonder if that's why Canadians are different from Americans: our natural environment (specifically the winter weather) demands that we take care of each other. Never drive past someone in the ditch, check on people when the power goes out, watch for each others' kids playing hockey on the road... These all add up.
I appreciate your perspective and discussion of this. I appreciated the back and forth you had with Andra Watkins around why Americans aren’t rising up. I appreciate the perspectives of those who leave their comments.
The truth is, what is the “BEST” or “CORRECT” course of action to take….this is what I wrestle with every day. What to spend my time on? Where can I make a difference and how big of a difference does it have to be to justify it?
There’s pressure from so many to do this or do that, call these people, protest here, boycott this, donate to this cause, rise up…
I could stand on the street corner day after day holding my sign and the likelihood of that garnering enough momentum to change anything is so small, but spending the same time in my garden, growing food that I hope to eat AND donate to the food bank…that makes a boots on the ground difference, too. Still small, but significant to my family and someone else’s. Does it count?
the Dalai Lama said: if you think you are too small to make a difference, try to spend the night with a mosquito...
Being unapologetically you is a contribution we can all make...
I don't think there is a Best or Correct course of action that applies to all across the board. we all have to find our own within the larger intelligence that organize it all...
Love
Sounds very wise to me
I think one reason we aren't seeing the levels of protest one would expect is that a lot of resistance is more practical than a street march. When ICE showed up in Chicago and Minneapolis, for example, locals mobilized. They distributed whistles, they taught people how to evade stormtroopers. The resistance is also using an army of lawyers. Every time the goons in power try something, a lawsuit is filed.
Even climate change is being looked upon as a practical challenge. One look at your many posts here on Substack — for example, how to collect and store rainfall (just one of many such posts) — provides a good reflection on this. You're cutting edge there, but I can see that building. And it's not all BS. It's real. It's crafted out of experience and genuine, gritty reality.
I wrote a short fiction piece about "So you want a revolution?" A different approach, but one in full agreement with your thoughts here, I'd say:
https://www.ruminato.com/p/conversations-on-a-bank-floor
You'd think with my pen name I'd be all over the "Jacobin" thing, but mostly I just think "Jacobin" is an interesting magazine that contributes alternatives to these dark times.
One of my favorite and unattributed sayings is that not to design something is to suffer design by default. Time for me in my own way, and in my community, to design a plan of how I can resist and help.
Just riffing on your first paragraph, Charles:
I think our devices have increasingly alienated us from each other. We're focused on them instead of outside ourselves. I've seen this as smart phones have evolved over the 30 years I've been riding the bus to work. This screen focus takes us away from others, our environment. It breaks down our bonds... in whatever form. Society breaks down. Community breaks down or never gets formed.
This, I think, is the way our rulers want it. A lot of work to do....
P.S. Typos fixed. Apparently, my spellchecker extension wasn't on.
I agree with a lot of this but we do also need an imminent revolution to stand a chance of avoiding rapid collapse. "Climate revolution or we'll lose everything" as some climate scientists once wrote on a banner at COP26 in Glasgow. And as losing everything looms, revolution becomes likely or even inevitable.
But yes, revolutions are scary and don't come with guarantees.
@jessica did it again, honestly dear, you’ve become one of my favorite read here.
The comment section is rich too.
Being french I am well aware of the fact revolutions do not bring the change we expect, they bring another group in power.
Reading about the civil right movement, something became obvious, the slow growing construction that work is also the tool that has been used to take the US where it is now, all the way from the Powell memo and with the support of the rich and powerful who infiltrated the institutions and hollowed them. So whatever movement could be started now is going to face deep structural resistance.
Now I am not even talking about climate change that defines the timeline in way that gives us very little runway.
Of course none of this sounds hopeful but I don’t deal hopium here.
For decades I have tried to get a birds eye view, to figure out what is possible. I studied political science and international development, I worked internationally for 3 decades and honestly I still have not found nor seen any template that works.
Specially if it is disconnected from a deep spiritual framework.
A something that help us, humans, understand who we are ( know thyself). And from that understanding start moving ( taking actions) that are not driven by fear, including the fear of our own demise ( personal) or extermination ( collective).
I also do not believe that anything centralized will provide any solution.
I always use the forest as a metaphor for creating harmony. No centralized system, no one tells anyone what to do. Every species and entity within a species doing what their inner directive ( consciousness? DNA?) is telling them to do.
The bird is being a bird. The tree is being a tree. Etc
Harmony is created by surrendering and trust in the larger intelligence ( call it life or anything that works for you) to orchestrate the whole, and understanding the inner directive being the reflection of that larger intelligence that orchestrate the whole.
In this model Jessica is creating harmony by being Jessica and writing awesome posts. Jeff is creating harmony being Jeff by riding donkeys under speed limits. Etc
It often goes wrong when the Jessica’s and Jeff’s want others to do what they do with the beliefs they have the solutions for everyone else.
Was there another road humans could have taken, a road that would not have created the current situation? I don’t know. The question is moot. Can we create something better? Potentially yes, but I doubt we will. I see the pattern too clearly.
So maybe, just maybe, our best chance is to trust that this larger intelligence is at work right now. Even if we don’t understand it, for after all, sometime even the forest fire is part of the harmony.
And our best effort is to align with this intelligence by knowing who we are and acting in alignment with the deeper directives that drives us.
For after all, we all like to recall Gandhi and MLK (or john Lennon), yet Hitler, Mao, Staline and DT are also expression of the larger intelligence at play…
Community organizing to educate people about socialism we've been lied to about and how it works in Europe. This is also a setting for finding other like minded people. We need more progressives running against the Dem establishment. They come from the community.
Also - the Beatles did it well, but it might be that the Who did it even better. "...and the morals that we worshipped will be gone." https://youtu.be/UDfAdHBtK_Q?is=iP2cEf3OTJ66U3dY
I think in fact we get fooled over and over... 😂 😂 😂
Great performance! Thanks for the link.
Your article deeply resonates with what I am trying to build through Project Anodos.
You show that lasting transformation does not begin with revolution itself, but with the human connections that make it possible: caring for others, building communities, making every person feel seen, and accumulating small actions over many years.
This is precisely the intuition behind Anodos: using Conscious Reallocation and community-based gamification to connect everyday economic choices to the common good. A person chooses a local initiative, generates a small ImpAct, progresses through a collective journey, and discovers that their individual action is part of something greater.
Gamification is not meant to replace human relationships. It should serve as a gateway: making participation visible, creating a sense of belonging, and transforming countless small actions into a shared story.
You write that change is slow—until suddenly it is not. This is also the logic of Anodos: tiny flows, repeated by many people, can gradually build genuine community power.
Perhaps we are not ready for a revolution because we have not yet built the human infrastructure that must come before it. Anodos is a modest attempt to help create such an infrastructure: peaceful, local, gradual, and accessible to everyone. It remains a hypothesis to be tested, but I believe Conscious Reallocation could help awaken the world by first reconnecting people.
Thank you for the humanity of your article and for this essential reminder: caring for others is already a way of changing the world.
Love it. Trenchant and true. Gives the start of answers to my questions of occasional hopelessness.
Beautifully said, and all of it is true. I’m just skeptical that violence can be avoided altogether. I don’t want to believe this, but people in power are very piggish and intransigent (and criminal), especially when they own and control the lion’s share of the available force. And my read of history is that, in revolutions that succeed, whether instantly or over time, nonviolence and all of the slow, person-to-person prerequisite accretions you note are as likely as not to go hand in hand with violence.
In your account of the precursors of civil rights movement, for example, you didn’t mention John Brown, any number of slave rebellions, e.g. Nat Turner, or the U.S. Civil War. The generally nonviolent abolitionist movement that preceded them was necessary, but their violence (of Brown et al.) was also a progenitor of the movement’s success, and not a negligible one. One cannot discount the occasions where the use or threat of force worked, and was arguably necessary, if not also sufficient, for the revolutionary ends in view to be achieved.
There are other cases. The British would never have left India nonviolently had World War II not lent its devastating assistance. Orwell noted that the British had found Gandhi useful for a while because “in every crisis, he would exert himself to prevent violence - which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever.” It was only contemporaneously with the Blitzkrieg that Gandhi’s long-standing method of noncooperation became decisive.
The overthrow of Stalinism was also not nonviolent, as is sometimes claimed. The violence that contributed to it just took place by proxy in the countries comprising what used to be called the Third World, through countless violent interventions in those countries by the two Cold War “Great Powers” - although more by the U.S. - which added to the exhaustion that caused the U.S.S.R. to collapse.
Again, I do not want this to be true, and I would welcome any attempt to refute this argument, but I think it’s a reality that any democratic political movement needs to reckon with, if only because the ruling powers and their thugs and goons will invariably bring coercion and violence to bear on any and every revolutionary prospect while it is still inchoate, long before game day. How this fact is dealt with morally and practically is a hard problem for traditional democratic or left-wing movements, which typically proceed from one relationship or another to ordinary morality, religious or not, and relatively inferior competence in the use of force, not to mention the willingness to use it when necessary (offensively or defensively).