Better Strangers

“If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

We live in an age of collapse. Most of what’s collapsing is physically, tangibly real: the collapse of global ecosystems and the climate, the slow and steady erosion of democratic norms, the collapse of original storytelling in Hollywood in favor of remakes, reboots, sequels, and prequels of established franchises, etc. But perhaps the most frightening collapse is the slow, wholesale destruction of our old philosophical worldviews by our changing understanding of reality.

Our entire lives are built around our beliefs. The things we spend our waking (and often, sleeping) minutes on are the things we believe are valuable and worthy of our time and attention. These beliefs are heavily influenced by our overarching worldview — it is the engine that keeps our lives moving.

But western civilization’s guiding philosophies for the past several hundred years are no longer particularly good at helping us deal with modern reality. Eternal-growth capitalism may have been an easy thing for a white, affluent male to believe in back in the postwar-economic boom of the 1950s, but now, as the planet buckles under the weight of 200 years of that economic system, it is a much harder philosophy for a reasonable person to subscribe to. The same goes for Christianity, which a mere 170 years ago didn’t need to incorporate the discoveries of people like Darwin, Einstein, Niels Bohr, or Edward Lorenz into their conception of truth.

Some people are simply too invested in these worldviews to let them fall apart, so instead, they address the holes in their beliefs either by ignoring them, rejecting truth as a whole and retreating into fundamentalism, or by inventing complicated conspiracies. Climate change, these people argue, is a communist hoax. The decline in Christianity in the US is the result of an insidious campaign conducted by a Satanic, pedophilic, liberal cabal. Multiculturalism, if you’re a reader of the Daily Stormer (or the CEO of Twitter) is actually part of a global plot to commit white genocide.

Others — either because they are privileged enough to do so or critical enough in their thinking to be forced to — instead deconstruct their old worldviews until there is nothing left there to believe in. And when this happens, they are forced to confront a harsh truth: human beings don’t function well without systems of meaning.

It’s easy, in these moments, to slip into existential nihilism. This is the belief that there is no fundamental purpose or meaning in life, that it is all pointless and absurd and possibly not even worth living. And down that road there be monsters.

It is possible to rebuild meaning and purpose after going through periods of nihilism, meaninglessness, and despair, and if you succeed, your life will almost certainly be better for the effort. While there is no one route out of nihilism, I can give some tips.

Note: Working through nihilism can force you to confront some of the bleakest thoughts a human can have, so it’s understandable if you’ve gotten to a really dark place. If you have: Lifeline provides 24-hour, confidential support to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress. Call or text 988 to connect with a trained crisis counselor. Call 911 if you or someone you know is in immediate danger or go to the nearest emergency room.

1. Figure out which came first: the depression or the despair.

I hit the most depressed, nihilistic point of my life shortly after I moved from downtown Washington, DC to a suburb on the Jersey Shore. I was suddenly without my large network of friends, without access to a car, and working from home, so I interacted with virtually no one except my fiancee. I drank too much and exercised too little. I spent a lot of time on the internet.

It is, in retrospect, a little embarrassing that I didn’t connect the drastic shift of my worldview from what was essentially Vonnegut-style humanism to stare-into-the-void nihilism with my change in circumstances. But at the time, I didn’t fully appreciate the connection between our mind’s health and our body’s health (more on that revelation in the article linked below).

So if you’re feeling incredibly bleak about the world, the first thing I’d do is check out the conditions of your existence. Remember that all of the following things can contribute to depression and anxiety:

* Lack of exercise

* Lack of sunlight

* Lack of sleep

* Lack of social connection

* Loneliness

* Physical traumas (including childbirth)

* Emotional traumas (breakups, deaths of someone close, major life changes)

* Unprocessed childhood traumas

* Toxic relationships

* Lack of hydration

* Poor diet

* Alcohol use

* Drug use

* Excessive time online/social media (a.k.a. “doomscrolling”)

* Just existing in a late capitalist hellscape

Some of these conditions may be impossible to fix, but others might just require minor lifestyle tweaks. You don’t have to go to a gym to get more exercise and fresh air — just go for a walk, there is tons of research showing that merely being around trees can help your mental health.

This does not mean the stuff you are struggling with isn’t real. But our thoughts follow our moods, and there are simple physiological ways we can boost mood. If you’re thinking stuff like, “life is a meaningless meatgrinder” it can sound true if you’re living in misery and squalor. It does not sound true if there’s stuff you actually enjoy in your life. So give your mood a boost by drinking more water, meditating, or doing some light yoga. And hey: if you can afford it, get into therapy.

2. Find meaning.

You aren’t going to function without some form of meaning in your life, so it’s important that you find something to live for. Fortunately, that can be literally anything.

The most famous essay on the topic of fighting for meaning is Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. In this, he uses the character of Sisyphus from the Greek myth to try and picture the most meaningless life possible. In the original story, Sisyphus offended the gods and was condemned to push a rock up a hill for all eternity, only to have it roll back down to the bottom right before he made it to the top. The full essay (linked above) is essential reading to one struggling with the absurdity of a meaningless existence, but the trick, in short, is that Camus finds meaning within meaninglessness. By accepting that life is meaningless and choosing to fight on anyway, he is sticking a finger in the eye of a universe which wishes to tear him down.

Camus doesn’t do it for everyone, of course — not all of us have his dashing French Resistance fighter temperament to rage against the dying of the light — but his overall point is a vital one: meaning does not need to come from a god, or the universe as a whole. It can come from within, by accepting our reality and choosing to fight for something better anyway.

During my struggle with nihilism, I found a therapist who focused on Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy methods. Frankl was a Jewish Austrian psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, and during his time there, became interested in what helped people to survive the horrors of the Holocaust. He survived himself, and developed logotherapy, a form of existential psychological analysis that helps people find meaning in life. His book, Man’s Search for Meaning, became influential in postwar psychology, and is still worth a read today.

In a material sense, finding what matters to you is relatively simple: who and what do you love? What topics and work do you find interesting? Invest time and energy into those. For me, what got me through the darker parts were my family, friends, good music, and good books. Once I focused more of my energy on those things, other meaningful things began to crop up naturally on their own, and I was able to start cobbling something new together.

3. Find philosophical alternatives.

The best news I can give you is this: while western civilization’s philosophies are breaking under the weight of the reality they created, other worldviews are doing just fine. Since the 1950s, eastern religion and philosophy has made serious inroads in the west, and while there are plenty of New Age pseudoscientific backroads you can find yourself going down in your exploration of these worldviews, there’s also a lot of good.

The lowest hanging fruit for you here is Buddhism. As a religion, Buddhism was founded by a man going through an existential crisis. Siddhartha Gautama was a privileged prince who renounced his belongings upon first coming into contact with the world’s suffering. After a time of intense meditation, he became “enlightened” (the title “Buddha” means “enlightened one”) and created the philosophy that would form the basis for Buddhism. And unlike Christianity, much of the core tenets of Buddhism has aged spectacularly well: neuroscientists keep finding that many of the Buddha’s core insights are true.

For my money, the best writer to introduce westerners to eastern religions is the late Alan Watts. His book on the core beliefs of Vedanta, a school of Hinduism, titled simply The Book, is a trippy wonder that will have you asking yourself totally different questions about existence and its meaning at the end of it. For those who aren’t inclined to read, Watts’ talks are all over the place online and on YouTube — he was an exciting and lucid speaker — but I would most recommend that you download the video game Everything. It is a game in which you can play literally everything in the Universe — from an atom to a dust mite to a planet to a galaxy — and the play is interspersed with audio clips of Watts’ teachings.

Buddhism is a heady religion, though, so some people might prefer instead to go for the simpler philosophy of Taoism, which resembles, in some respects, western stoicism in its simplicity and its reverence for the laws of nature. The good news there is that the holy book of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, is about the shortest holy book out there.

Eastern religions also mesh particularly well with the work of the psychedelic authors, people like Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Moore. Leary’s colleague at Harvard before they were both expelled, Richard Alpert, even left behind the world of LSD and mushrooms to become the Buddhist monk known as Ram Dass.

Eastern religion aside, the field of indigenous American philosophy is also particularly exciting of late: the Potawatomi ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote a book, Braiding Sweetgrass, that is a philosophical look at how we can mesh Native American understandings of nature and myth to rebuild a connection with the earth we’ve destroyed. This is part of a much larger movement in indigenous communities to reposition humans as caretakers of the earth, rather than dominators of it. Outside of indigenous circles, movements like witchcraft and neopaganism have developed ideologies that re-center nature, viewing humans as part of a web, rather than as the top of a pyramid.

Western philosophy is not hopeless either: we have our own philosophies that thrive in times of upheaval or chaos, including stoicism and the delightfully bonkers religion of Discordianism:

Discordianism is what I’ve personally gone with: it acknowledges that human brains might not be capable of fully comprehending the universe, and as such, aren’t capable of building a 100% “correct” ideology. Instead, it argues we should treat ideologies and worldviews as tools that can be picked up as needed, and dropped when finished. I love this because it allows me to play with every worldview, without ever taking any one of them too seriously.

Next steps

Once you have the scaffolding of a basic philosophy or belief system under you, once you’ve identified what brings your life meaning and have learned ways to boost your attitude on a day-to-day basis, then all that really remains is to explore, learn, and live life. Finding meaning and purpose in life, is not, in my experience, a matter of stumbling across the correct answer and having the problem fully solved. It is a practice and a mindset that needs to be reinforced and cared for.

The good news is that the process of doing this can be fun. You learn to enjoy the journey rather than fixating on the destination, and you can make space for exploration, for relaxation, and for good old fashioned messing around. In the words of the great Kurt Vonnegut:

“I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around, and don’t let anyone tell you any different.”

How have you managed to fight nihilism? What philosophies or thoughts have been helpful for you? Share in the comments below!

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If I could have dinner with one fictional character, there is a pretty good chance I’d choose Neil Gaiman’s Morpheus, a.k.a. The Sandman, Lord of the Dreamworld. This is not so much because I’m taken with the fictional universe which he inhabits (though I am), but because as a journalist who is interested in things like dreams and imagination, I am annoyed by my lack of access to the statistic-keeping bureaucracies of our collective unconscious.

Specifically, I’d want to ask him: What are the numbers on the American Dream? How badly have its numbers been dropping over the past 20 years? Which demographics still believe in it? Are they primarily white, male, Republican? Or is it still a dream of immigrants? F. Scott Fitzgerald pronounced the American Dream dead in 1925, Hunter S. Thompson did the same in 1972: what, in Morpheus’s professional opinion, gave the dream such resurrectory powers? Or is that a property of all dreams?

I am pretty sure Lord Dream would hate our dinner. But I need to know: a dying dream is a big deal even on an individual level. In America, where basically all that unites us is our collective belief in the brutal fiction we call “The American Dream,” the consequences of that dream’s death may well be catastrophic.

And it’s been a rough 20 years for the bright, shining city on the hill. The 2007 economic collapse, the demoralizing forever wars, the election of a literal fascist to the Presidency and the attendant decline in democratic mores and respect for human rights, the rise of powerful racial justice movements that question the very history the Dream is based upon, the Walls built by both Republicans and Democrats to keep out the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free — it’s a shock there’s still anyone who believes in the American Dream.

In 1952, Langston Hughes wrote his famous poem “Harlem” about the Black experience in America — I suspect its words ring true to plenty of people outside that community as well.

“Harlem” by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

There’s a good argument to be made that the American Dream has always been a fiction, that its professed egalitarianism has never been available to women, Black Americans, people of color, or the indigenous people who were murdered en masse to make room for the city on the hill. But it’s a problem when dreams collapse — something else needs to built from the rubble, and in spite of the American Dream’s many flaws, there are far darker visions of the future waiting in line to take its place.

Ideological collapse

Leaving behind a destructive ideology is potentially the best thing a person can do in their life — but it’s also intensely traumatic. And it is happening to a lot of people in the country at the moment.

Just take religion: In 1972, roughly 90% of Americans identified as Christian. In 2020, the Pew Research Center found, that number had dropped to 64%. In the same time, the number of Americans identifying their religious affiliation as “none” rose from 5% to 30%. If current trends hold, by 2070, Christians could be a minority in the United States, while “nones” could be a majority.

While as an agnostic atheist, I am happy to see people leaving conservative, destructive institutions like the Catholic Church, I also know from experience: religious transitions are hard. When you do it, you lose community, you lose comfort, you lose an afterlife, you lose an understanding of the cosmos, you lose the basic structures that have been giving your life meaning.

And that’s just religion. A lot of people aren’t just losing their religion, they’re losing their belief in an economic system, a political order, and in basic moral principles. They’re losing their belief in a future in which we don’t backslide towards fascism, in which we keep our planet livable, in which things actually improve. All of this combined is devastating.

When the ideologies upon which we build our lives collapse, it’s easy for us to fall into one of two alternatives: first, we can seek the comforts of fundamentalism, whether that’s religious or political, and second, we can fall into nihilism, where nothing matters and everything is pointless.

Neither one is productive. But the work of building something new is an immense task; the work of a lifetime. And how are you supposed to do that work when everything is just so fucking bleak all of the time?

Hope in the Dark

For the next four weeks, we’ll be exploring a new theme on Better Strangers: “Hope in the Dark.” The title is cribbed from Rebecca Solnit’s seminal book, first published in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, and re-released every few years when something else terrible happens.

It is a history of the people who fought against totalitarian or imperialist forces with no real hope that their actions would ever amount to anything. How did those people — people like Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi — manage to find meaning in what they were doing even while it seemed hopeless?

Solnit’s book has had a lasting impact on me — in the middle of the dark Trump years, it showed me that people fought on in far worse situations than mine. Since then, I’ve written extensively on this idea. The first thing I did that got me any attention on TikTok was a series I called “The Anti-Despair Reading List,” which was based on an article I’d written on my former blog (article and first video in the playlist linked below. Also, I’ve compiled my current list on Bookshop.org).

I’ve also written quite a bit about having kids in such dark times, and my questions about whether becoming a parent was the right move.

This month, I want to focus more specifically on the battle against nihilism, and the attempt to build a worldview in which we can be rational, thoughtful creatures who understand the predicament humanity is currently in, but also get to experience things like wonder and joy.

To that end, I’ll be providing a guide for how to claw your way out of nihilism next week, an interview with an expert who helps people transition through the “dark night of the soul” the week after that, and, of course, a short story on the topic to paid subscribers at the end of the four weeks.

As always, I’d love to hear comments on what people hope to hear during this run of articles!

I haven’t written a listicle in nearly six years, but I’ll do it for you, dear readers. I came of writing maturity in the clickbait age of the internet, so I’ve learned to loathe the medium, but this is “Revolutions” month at Better Strangers, and we do not seem to be living in particularly revolutionary times. So my “how to” article for the month would be wasted on “How to mount a revolution.”

Instead, I want to address a major problem with our current political landscape: political despair. We’re not ever going to get to a better future if people can’t imagine it, and you can’t start imagining it if you’ve resigned yourself to hopelessness. So I want to offer a list of things you can do to start deconstruct the despair mindset and start to engage politically in a meaningful way.

1. Adopt a hope mindset

Good news on this front — next month’s theme is “Hope in the Dark,” so I’ll be focusing on this topic a lot more in the coming weeks. But the first thing you need to know is that “hope” and “optimism” are not the same thing. Optimism is the belief that things will turn out well. Hope is a commitment towards making things turn out well. I talked a lot more about that distinction in the article below:

The best book on the subject is Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, which was first published on the heels of George W. Bush’s reelection. It is republished every time the Republicans win an election cycle, but it is not just for angsty liberals — this is, at heart, a leftist book, about people fighting against extraordinary odds in truly hopeless moments in history. Buy below:

2. Study real change campaigns

Hopefully this month’s coverage of revolutions has already given you a few resources on this front, but if you feel like nothing can change, the best place to start is by looking at the way people have changed things. Last week on TikTok I discussed the radical roots of the famous Gandhi misquote, “Be the Change,” and how radical groups like the Black Panthers managed to completely change the way the American government treats childhood hunger through their local organizing efforts.

The simple truth is that change is the only constant, and when you learn to accept that, you can stop being ruled by change, and can instead learn, as Octavia Butler put it, to “shape change.”

The records for this are extensive — even in failed revolutions, lingering side effects of the attempt to make society a better placer have lived on. So instead of asking if change is possible, acknowledge that it is, and start asking how to change the world. The people who have changed the world had a tendency to leave notes. Read the notes.

3. Focus less on federal than local

My wife — who works in state government after years working at the federal level — likes to say that the federal government is like a battleship. It’s huge, and because of this, it’s hard and slow to turn around. State (and local) government, she says, is more like a speedboat. You can go fast, you can change fast, but you can also get ahead of yourself.

Part of the reason the current political landscape is so bleak is that our federal government is in absolute shambles right now. The House of Representatives is run by a wingnut, the Supreme Court seemingly walked out of a Rush Limbaugh wet dream, and the President and DNC lack the vision and the charisma to adequately fight them. So trying to change things at this level means making a commitment of years for, likely, very small incremental changes.

If that sounds exhausting to you, get off of the battleship and onto the speedboat. Even in red states there are winning causes — such as abortion rights — that you can get behind and affect real change on. Even better, these successful local and state campaigns can be upscaled into national campaigns. All change has to start at the grassroots.

4. Purge your algorithms of doom.

The primary cause of doomerism is spending too much time on the internet. This is not to say that things aren’t bad in the world, it’s just to say that internet algorithms exploit your negativity bias to exaggerate how bad they are. So if you’re feeling particularly hopeless, you might need to Get Off The Internet™.

If that’s not possible, then you can at least try to juke your algorithms a bit. Start getting your news from reliable news sites (I find that I get a good cross-section of left-leaning news by listening to NPR’s Up First, the Democracy Now! headlines, and by sporadically reading the Intercept, the Guardian and Al-Jazeera. Happy to get other recs in the comments!). Cut out commentary as much as possible, and consider that nonfiction audiobooks are a valid alternative to news podcasts (more on that in the article below).

Finally, unfollow Doomers. People who say “we’re fucked,” or “the world is doomed” or “Giant Meteor 2024” may be funny, they may even be right, but the attitude is insidious and demoralizing. Consider:

* If Doomers are wrong but you believe what they’re saying, the result is you’ll give up on life, possibly missing out on doing really cool shit that you would have enjoyed. Possibly missing out on helping to save the world! Worse, what if we can fix things, but enough people bought into Doomerism that we just let the oncoming catastrophe happen?

* If the Doomers are right and you reject what they’re saying and work for a better world anyway, then at the very least, when the world ends, you’ll have made life a little better for people in your corner of it.

5. Take an educational approach to posting

If you are going to stay on the internet and you are a prolific poster, consider taking an educational approach to posting. What this means is:

* Cut back on hot-takes and outrage. It’s okay to feel big things about the news, but consider expressing them privately rather than publicly, as internet flamewars are an absolutely useless way to spend your time.

* Focus on posting information and context. If you have an area of expertise that is relevant to the topic at hand, that’s worth sharing! Otherwise, share information from reliable sources.

The internet is a powerful educational tool when used as such. It becomes a problem when it’s built around clicks and attention-grabbing, because this is where we get stuck in echo chambers and in useless fights. Remember: It’s okay if only 3 people read your post, it might make a real difference for them.

6. Find out what people are already doing in your area

There are already political interest groups in your area that are doing work in your community. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time to find your people, but engaging with people who are already doing the work can be an enlightening and invigorating experience. When I decided to put my activist efforts towards climate change, I found that there was work to be done on our town’s Environmental Commission (which is part of the local government) through local non-profits that were, among other things: protecting wildlife, cleaning local rivers, fighting new fossil fuel developments, addressing food insecurity, fighting environmental racism, promoting native plants, pushing storm run-off legislation, and battling eco-anxiety.

This work does not have to be limited to traditional electoral politics or traditional non-profits: you can also find local mutual aid networks through organizations like Food Not Bombs and Buy Nothing.

7. Use your local library as a mutual aid/educational resource

When I’ve discussed libraries in anarchist forums, there’s a subset of people who get extremely annoyed with me for discussing a government institution as a potential venue for mutual aid and radical education. But the fact remains: in many communities, the library is the only remaining public space that is literally open to everyone.

Libraries are also radically egalitarian in a sense that few other existing institutions are. Want to start a book club, a lecture series, a community organization? There’s a good chance the library will host you for free. Want to create a space where people can share not only books, but seeds, tools, and cooking instruments like cake pans? Go to the library.

Obviously, some libraries are more conservative than others, but if you have at least a fairly progressive library, there’s already an insane amount of work you can get done through the institution. And if your library is conservative — well, see if you can get on its board or its foundation. And start radicalizing it.

How do you battle despair and political disempowerment? Tell us in the comments below!

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Tomorrow, November 11, is Veterans Day in the US. It was not always Veterans Day: November 11th, 1918, was when the first World War came to an end. After that, the day was formally known as Armistice Day, and was honored as such for the next 36 years. In 1954, President Eisenhower changed it from Armistice Day to Veterans Day, so it would honor the Veterans of all wars, rather than just the one.

Broadly speaking, this change was accepted, but one prominent author has since spoken out against the move. Kurt Vonnegut — a man who, as an American Prisoner of War, survived the firebombing of Dresden by Allied Forces at the end of World War II — in his classic novel Breakfast of Champions, wrote that it had transitioned from celebrating a moment of peace to celebrating war:

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

•••

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

In Britain, the Imperial War Museum used film footage from the day of the Armistice to recreate what the final moments of the war sounded like, which I strongly encourage you to listen to:

If you’re in the United States, you are undoubtedly aware that Veterans Day is a moment in which the country exalts the military and war itsel, cynically leveraging remembrance for those lost in conflict for public support of a military which absorbs most of our tax dollars in the name of murdering and impoverishing millions of people around the world. A day commemorating the end of death and the beginning of peace would be poisonous to such a society.

Poppies & “Gas!”

In the UK and in much of the countries of the commonwealth of former UK territories, Armistice Day is celebrated as “Remembrance Day,” and is honored with the mass wearing of poppies on lapels. Tune in to Premier League soccer over the weekend, and you’ll see every player wearing a red flower on their jerseys.

This is a reference to John McCrae’s famous 1915 poem, “In Flanders Fields”:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

McCrae himself would die before the end of the war, but his poem was published at the beginning of the war, and thus before public opinion had begun to turn against the violence.

It became a sort of rallying cry, a “do not let us die in vain” that could rally the public towards the war. It is still used in England much in the way that Veterans Day is used in the US: as a vehicle for rallying continued support for the armed forces.

There is, however, a better poem about the war, one that could not muster the same levels of patriotism and militarism of “In Flanders Fields.” This poem is also by a young soldier, an English poet named Wilfred Owen, and it is titled “Dulce et Decorum Est,” based off of an old Latin quote from Horace: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, which translates to “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

Here is the poem:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Wilfred Owen was killed in action on November 4, 1918, exactly a week before the guns went silent and for a moment, God spoke clearly to mankind.

This is “Revolution” month on Better Strangers, but it occurred to me as I was writing articles on the topic that nearly everyone I know with leftist/progressive views works within the current political system rather than outside of it. I know that the ideal society that these people envision is fundamentally different to the one we currently live in, so I decided to ask a few of them: how do you square what are effectively revolutionary beliefs with working within a deeply conservative system?

As it turns out, I got a lot of wildly interesting answers, so I’m going to make this into a bit of a series, and instead of giving you a bunch of people’s different takes, I’m going to give you one at a time.

Today, we’re talking to Jesse Steele. I’ve known Jesse since second grade: we’ve lived together, worked awful jobs together, and have spent a lot of time talking about radical politics. Jesse politics are more traditionally Marxist, and I am more of an anarchist, so while our conversations are always incredibly stimulating, I suspect that in the coming revolution, the Leninist Brigade he leads will be tasked with purging my petit-bourgeois ass. My only hope is that he puts our mutual love of the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club above such ideological partisanship.

Professionally, Jesse is a senior staff member with a multi-state grassroots organization that helps to organize poor and working class people. His work also brings him into electoral politics at all levels.

Q: Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've gotten the sense that it would be fair to call your politics "revolutionary." How do you square that with working within traditional American politics?

JS: Going straight for the sensitive bits, huh? Yeah, it isn't an easy circle to square. So the work I do exists in this weird sector — this “movement” space — that lives somewhere between traditional American electoral politics and radical grassroots organizing work. I think the primary difference between the work I do now and the broader non-profit industrial complex is the work is 1.) explicitly political — both publicly and amongst ourselves, we talk about our work in terms of building power, solidarity, and fighting for liberation. And 2.) the orgs in this space are membership organizations, modeled after labor unions, with internal democracy structures governed explicitly by and for the communities we organize. 

I could talk all day about funding infrastructure, the strictures of processing all of this through the lens of a 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 nonprofit organization, and what those things mean for the potential of the work, but I think a ton has been written about that elsewhere. What I'll say about my experience of the sector are these three things:

* There's enough wiggle room within the corners of available funding to support truly radical work to some extent. To the extent we believe in political revolution, there's enough daylight there to believe that with enough scale, courage, and coordination, this space can be a site of revolutionary potential. That said — potential deserves a lot of emphasis there. We can't kid ourselves — most of our aims are reformist. If they weren't, the money wouldn't be there.

* While organizations that might consider themselves more truly revolutionary do have far greater degrees of freedom, in terms of their specific ability to build power at scale, and challenge power within the context of the state, they simply cannot begin to compare to the capacity of well-funded movement organizations. There are certainly very real tradeoffs to taking the money, don't get me wrong, but if you're clever enough about it, both in the work you do and which (read: "whose") money you take, there are greater degrees of freedom to pursue a radical agenda than you might think.

* The thing I think about the most is that what's most real in terms of building revolutionary power are the organizing structures we're helping to build among the people. I always think of it like this — either when a real moment of revolutionary struggle happens in the United States, or else when we as organizations grow too radical for liberal tastes, the money will go away almost entirely. So, what, if anything will be left when the money goes? When all the buildings and tech and resources and, most importantly, all the paid professional staff, fall away, to me, the thing that will be left is the relationships people have with one another - relationships that are based in community, trust, love, and mutual struggle. Relationships that are oriented toward fundamentally political aims. As we do our work, even when that work is necessarily "inside the box" and sort of definitionally reformist and non-revolutionary, the power we're building both in order to accomplish those aims and that we grow through pursuing those aims (e.g. through our campaigns) is something that has genuine staying power.

Q: Do you think there's a chance of making the changes we need to the American government within the system? Or are we mostly looking at harm reduction?

JS: Fundamentally, I'm a Leninist. I define myself as a communist because I'm a socialist but I also believe that all of our work drives towards ultimate confrontation with capital, and that the state only exists to resolve the conflict between capital and labor in favor of capital. But, we must capture the levers of the state in the short term if we're going to defend any revolution we're able to mount. That's all pie in the sky though. We can't even get healthcare or get our government to stop funding genocide right now so who knows? 

Most hopeful take on this, which on optimistic days I believe, is that the only reason the successful socialist revolutions we've actually seen in the world have only failed or been quickly overturned because we — the American empire — made concerted efforts to be the bigger bully and to reverse those gains. Examples are myriad: see the entire 20th century. Political revolutions like Chile prove especially vulnerable to overwhelming and well-funded violence. But given the odd position of the American empire now — a vastly diminished force with nonetheless unquestioned and more or less unchallenged global military dominance — I sometimes believe that if we managed political revolution here, it might actually stick because there's no bigger brother to come and smack our hand out of the cookie jar. With a violent revolution, all such bets are off as we'd be fractured and vulnerable and who knows what would happen, but I do think if there was a world in which we dared to imagine a socialist regime taking peaceful transfer of power over the extant American state — if we're willing to imagine that thing — it's hard to imagine then that some other external force would be powerful enough to disrupt that meaningfully.

On my less optimistic days, I really don't believe anything other than full on revolution will save us. I think as revolutionaries, we have to be ambitious, visionary, and bold, but we have to be really careful not to romanticize revolution itself. Revolution is only glorious once you've won, or when you're looking back. Almost everyone who lives through violent revolution wishes they had been alive during different, more peaceful days. The final fight, when it comes, will bring unimaginable horror before it brings light. The old maxim that always used to give us comfort on the left was always that in the end, over a long enough time period, communism will win. But the climate crisis in particular means that we cannot sit back and allow these processes to run their course. 

A framework I like for thinking about what this all means is one that comes from the Chilean MPL party and articulated in this video from an organization I know really well, Mijente.

I recommend you watch the video, but the basic gist is this: we must build power everywhere, and that there's utility in building that power simultaneously within the state (read: power to move institutions and government), outside the state (read: dual power and mutual aid models that prefigure a better world), and against the state (read: seeding revolutionary energy, building the social and political connections that will ultimately be necessary for revolution, while opposing and rejecting the moral legitimacy of the state as it exists). I think this is useful for understanding the role "movement" organizations can play. 

“Our function in this life goes beyond bearing witness to suffering and clinging desperately to those sparks of love and life and light that we do happen to find in our lives. We can build. We can fight. We really can find everything we need in one another.” 

Q: What's your hope for the future?

This isn't a great time to ask me this question — not feeling super optimistic at this moment. But on a simple level, I think my biggest hope is seeing people do the work. Seeing the resurgence of labor power in this country (the cause of labor is the hope of the world, duh). Seeing poor, near-desperate people with the big boot of this whole fucking system directly on their throats every day decide not to give in to despair. Recognizing that they too have power, that their community has power, that they can fight if they come together, and that sometimes (and just sometimes) they can actually win. The recognition that we are agents of history, not witnesses to it. Our function in this life goes beyond bearing witness to suffering and clinging desperately to those sparks of love and life and light that we do happen to find in our lives. We can build. We can fight. We really can find everything we need in one another. 

On a more zoomed out level, what I hope that can mean is that the rolling crises of capitalism (financial, climate, political, etc...) produce opportunities for reimagining our relationships to one another, to the state, to the earth, and to capital. I think the horrors we experience or bear witness to can be radicalizing moments, and that each successive one seems to reveal more and more how morally bankrupt, functionally inept, and hostile to humanity our current regime is. That even at the bottom, we can imagine — we must imagine, the possibility of a better world. I have to believe that we are capable of finding that in ourselves, and that we're capable of finding it in others, and then between one another. We have to do the work though — we have to remember that the safety net that catches all who fall out of political engagement isn't apathy, but fascism. If we don't do the work to reach out, to build, to organize, we will see those radicalizing moments move people more deeply into fascism rather than into imagining a new socialist world. 

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Yesterday, across England, Guy Fawkes was burned in effigy, 418 years after he tried to blow up parliament as part of the pro-Catholic Gunpowder Treason.

In the 21st century, Fawkes has come to represent something very different from what he did in his life: in his time, Fawkes wanted to restore a Catholic monarch to the throne of England, someone who would answer to the papacy in Rome. He could not have possibly wanted a more centralized government.

But in the 1980s, a comic book antihero named V donned Fawkes’ face as a mask, and thanks to the popularity of the comic, V for Vendetta — and its eventually movie adaptation — Fawkes switched in the collective unconscious from being a notorious papist terrorist to a symbol of the global anarchist movement.

While Fawkes, as the Guy who tried to blow up Parliament, is undoubtedly a cool symbolic figurehead, his actual historical status as a terrorist in the service of Catholic totalitarianism makes him a weird anarchist symbol. It also doesn’t help that the Fawkes mask has been used in a stunningly wide range of protests: against Scientology, against Middle East dictatorships, during Occupy, by the Anonymous hacktivist group, and by the morons who stormed the US Capitol on January 6th, to name a few.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, anarchist ideas deserve more attention from regular people, but are usually given short shrift in civics lessons. This isn’t that surprising: a movement that opposes authority is hardly going to be given a fair defense by the authorities themselves. I myself got a master’s degree from one of the world’s leading political science institutions, and still never once was given a clear definition of what anarchism was — I had to learn it for myself. (For a primer on basic anarchist ideas, watch the video below, or read this).

Anarchists are pretty good at expressing a vision of what the ideal society might look like. But how our current world gets from where it is to where the anarchists think we should be — that’s a lot trickier. The anarchist vision of utopia is so wildly different to the world we currently live in that it’s hard to imagine anything so alien ever coming into existence.

That does not mean, though, that authors haven’t tried. It’s worth taking a look at a few of them.

The violent overthrow: V for Vendetta

I love V for Vendetta, but it is better as a work of fiction than as a work of anarchism. Writer Alan Moore was perhaps the world’s best comics writer at the time, and was doing a riff on superhero comics that also served as a criticism of Margaret Thatcher’s England in the 1980’s. The 80’s are when the UK really started stepping up its notorious mass surveillance, and Moore (accurately) saw the Thatcher government as a slide towards fascism.

He pulled on dystopian works like Orwell’s 1984, imagined a slightly-futuristic fascist England, and then built his story around the imagery of Guy Fawkes blowing up Parliament. The comic has aged extremely well since then because since he and artist David Lloyd designed their totalitarian London, London itself has grown to look a lot more like what they designed. Moore has commented on the eeriness of living in a world he only once imagined, full of creeping authoritarian surveillance and full of people wearing his antihero’s haunting mask.

V for Vendetta is a lot less about anarchist theory than it is an indictment of fascism and people’s willingness to live in fear of their governments. On that count, it is great — but anarchists generally don’t believe it would be a good thing to have a single charismatic superhero overthrow the government.

Historically, anarchist movements within larger violent revolutions have been crushed. There are complicated reasons for this, but partly, it’s because revolutions have a tendency to cause power vacuums, and in the ensuing chaos, most of the groups involved are vying for power. A group that says “what if we gave the power to everyone?” tends to not win the day. With that said, anarchists have managed to set up small pockets of anarchist utopias in the midst of revolutionary chaos. Examples include:

* The Paris Commune (crushed by French government)

* Makhnovist Ukraine (crushed by Trotsky’s Red Army)

* Revolutionary Barcelona (crushed by Stalinists)

* Zapatista Autonomous Zones (still in existence)

* Rojava (still in existence, but under attack by the governments of Syria and Turkey, as well as ISIS)

Regardless, the sheer size of modern nation states and their armies makes it difficult to imagine, say, an insurgent British or American anarchist force managing to get enough people to overthrow the government. So anarchists don’t usually spend a lot of time planning to go the V for Vendetta route.

The flight: The Dispossessed

The most renowned anarchist utopia in fiction is Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. LeGuin neatly works around the need for a revolution by setting her story on a different planet. The planet — which resembles earth during the Cold War, with a liberal state and a competing authoritarian state fighting proxy wars in the smaller countries — has a moon, which the anarchists have been effectively exiled to, after their sect became too powerful on the home planet. In exchange for being granted their anarchist utopia, the anarchists are expected to give the two superpowers on the home planet shipments of the materials mined on the moon.

While this wouldn’t be argued as an ideal anarchist revolution by virtually anybody, as it turns out, it is how many egalitarian/anarchist societies have functioned historically. In James C. Scott’s book The Art of Not Being Governed, he talks about societies in upland Southeast Asia that managed, until the middle of the 20th century, to never fall under the power of a nation state.

These societies — derogatorily called “hill people” by the rulers of the valley kingdoms below — managed to survive by either fleeing from the state or by paying some form of tribute or making some sort of trade with them. By nature, Scott explains, these societies were egalitarian and were ever shifting — their ethnicities were blurred, because basically anyone who ran away from the states was welcome.

LeGuin uses her sci-fi device then, to recreate something that has in reality existed for millennia, not only in Southeast Asia, but in other difficult-to-reach areas of the world, where it was easy for people to flee from the long arm of the law.

Pockets of freedom: Infinite Detail

For around 30 years, anarchists have spent a lot less time plotting overthrows of the government, and instead have focused on building autonomous zones. The concept was first explained by the controversial anarchist writer Hakim Bey, who advocated for “Temporary Autonomous Zones” or areas where one could rapidly build a small-scale anarchist society and then dismantle it before the state could swoop in to repress it.

The most exciting form this idea took was in the Reclaim the Streets movement in Britain, where activists would swoop in and throw spontaneous street parties in public roads. The argument was that roads should be for people, not for cars, so during these parties, they’d be temporarily “liberating” streets for the public. They’d offer free food, games for kids, live music, even bouncy castles. When police showed up in riot gear, they would often quickly abandon the zone, only to construct another one later on.

In some places — particularly extremely left-wing neighborhoods or sections of a town, the autonomous zones have been able to become more permanent. In these places, certain laws may not be enforced, and certain practices may be accepted that are not allowed in other spots. Tim Maughan’s fantastic Infinite Detail imagines a sort of technological autonomous zone springing up in the left-leaning neighborhood of Stokes Croft in the city of Bristol in the UK.

The book follows the residents of the neighborhood (which they call “The People’s Republic of Stokes Croft”) as they try to build a sort of oasis where people are free from surveillance by the government and by corporations, and where the internet resembles less the modern algorithm-driven corporate hellscape it’s become, and more of the democratic, collaborative network its early advocates envisioned it as.

The book also follows the residents of Stokes Croft after a post-apocalyptic event where a group of hackers managed to crash the internet, taking the global economy down with it. UK society devolves into being ruled by street gangs, warlords, and quasi-governmental paramilitaries, while people who built the pre-crash Stokes Croft oasis work to sustain a vision of freedom that suddenly looks very different in the post-crash world.

Maughan is not, to my knowledge, an anarchist, and is mostly interested in problems around technology and the internet. But Infinite Detail is perhaps the best book I’ve read that explores whether, in our dystopian times, we can still try to build spaces and pockets where autonomy, freedom, and community are the core values, even as they’re surrounded by authoritarianism, greed, and the brutal realities of basic survival.

From my perspective, this is the only viable way in which the very good ideas that underly anarchism can begin to be put into practice — by enacting them right here and now, in the spaces underneath and in between the decaying structures of our modern society. Autonomy and self-rule are things that have to be practiced: if you overthrow a dictator, but the entire population is used to being ruled over, they’re likely to slip back into being ruled again. So at least as important as “how do we dismantle an unjust, exploitative system?” is the question “how do we learn to build something better underneath?”

On that journey, you could do worse than to start with V for Vendetta, The Dispossessed, and Infinite Detail.

This week on Better Strangers:

* For Halloween, we talked about John Carpenter’s 1988 movie They Live! and how it neatly explains some leftist media theory.

* For the Wednesday column, we talked about Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline and the strategic and moral arguments behind nonviolence and sabotage.

Coming next week:

* For Monday’s Book Rex, we’re going to be looking at anarchist revolutions in fiction! Specifically, we’ll be talking about Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, and Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail.

* For Wednesday’s column, we’re talking to left-wing activists who work within the system. Is government/activist work just harm reduction until the revolution comes? Or can good stuff still get done in American democracy?

When I was a kid in the 90s, it was a cliche that conservative white men all suddenly got really obsessed with World War II the minute they entered middle age. It was part of a midlife crisis, I suspect, in which they realized that the only things they’d read since graduation were Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Book of Virtues, or a business how-to guide written by either Jack Welch or Donald Trump’s charm mentor, Norman Vincent Peale.

World War II history represented a safe space in which white men could engage intellectually with a topic while also not being exposed to anything remotely resembling criticism of the United States, its policies, or its history. There was a whole cottage industry that sprung up around this obsession, from Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation to Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan.

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As I am inching towards middle age, I am hoping that I go through a similar obsession, but instead of obsessing over World War II military tactics, I want to get obsessed with revolution and the Cold War. Given that this month’s theme is “Revolution,” I figured I’d kick off the month’s round-ups by discussing some revolutionary history resources!

Deep Dives

Easily the most in-depth look at revolution that I’ve ever come across is Mike Duncan’s spectacular Revolutions podcast. It is an extremely in-the-weeds look at revolutions through history, covering the English Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Bolivaran Revolution, the Paris Commune, the Mexican Revolution, and the Russian Revolution. He has stopped with Russia, but one can only hope he comes back someday to cover the anticolonial and communist revolutions of the 20th century in places like Ireland, China, India, Algeria, and Vietnam.

For those interested in the Russian Revolution, the most interesting book I’ve read is China Mieville’s October, which relates the history of 1917 Russia through a broadly Marxist lens.

Mieville’s book is a retrospective, published a full century after the events. For an on-the-ground account, the place to start is John Reed’s famous Ten Days that Shook the World, which has introduction written by none other than Vladimir Fucking Lenin.

Last year, I read my first ever book on the Mexican Revolution, and it blew my mind that this massive event which happened just over our US border was so thoroughly unmentioned in my American schooling. Adolfo Gilly’s The Mexican Revolution (part of Howard Zinn’s People’s History series) is a great place to start.

Finally, if any one person is associated with revolution, it is Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Journalist Jon Lee Anderson wrote an extensive biography of the famed revolutionary’s life, and in the process, managed to discover Guevara’s lost body — he’d been executed by CIA operatives in the Bolivian jungle — to have it returned to Cuba. The story of Che’s life reads like a revolutionary parable: he was radicalized during a trip around South America on a ramshackle motorcycle, made militant by a US-backed coup in Guatemala, and cut his teeth in the Cuban Revolution. The truly interesting part is what happens after they won: Che’s idealism was often at odds with the geopolitical realities Castro faced during the Cold War, and everyone, it seems, breathed a sigh of relief when he left government to become a full time communist revolutionary.

Better Strangers articles on revolution

Obviously this month is about revolutions on Better Strangers, but I have covered the topic in the past, and I wanted to point you in the direction of some of those articles as well:

In 2020, the renowned Swedish climate activist and Marxist Andreas Malm published a book with a spectacularly provocative title: How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

The book serves less as a how-to guide (there are no diagrams for building bombs here) and more as an argument in favor of sabotage as a valid tool in the activist’s toolkit. The pipeline, in Malm’s formulation, is not just a literal pipeline, but the pipeline from new fossil fuel projects like mines, wells, and infrastructure, to future fossil fuel emissions. This, he believes, desperately needs blowing up.

His justification is simple and convincing: if you believe, as virtually all climate activists and scientists do, that the consequences of doing nothing about climate change are societal collapse and potentially the extinction of the human species, then activists should employ all tools at their disposal to prevent that from happening.

His argument is primarily leveled against perhaps the most influential contemporary theorists of nonviolence, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, who in 2012 wrote the influential Why Civil Resistance Works, and laid out the case for engaging in nonviolence. That book has become something of a bible to many climate activists, particularly those in groups like Extinction Rebellion or the Sunrise Movement.

The debate has defined progressive movements for nearly a century now — not only whether violence can be justified in the service of change, but also whether it is tactically necessary for achieving one’s ends.

The argument for nonviolence

Chenoweth and Stephan’s argument also happens to be simple and convincing: after running the numbers on major conflicts since 1940, they found that nonviolent civil resistance has been twice as effective as violent resistance in achieving its ends. And when violent resistance does achieve its goals, it is more likely to result in a slide towards autocracy and dictatorship, or in some sort of humanitarian catastrophe. The majority of their work is an attempt to explain why this might be the case.

First and foremost: Most people view nonviolent campaigns as holding a moral high ground, especially over often violent government forces. As such, they have a much lower bar to entry than violent campaigns and they get way more participants than say, guerrilla armies or street fighters do.

Chenoweth and Stephan found that if a nonviolent campaign managed to pull out as little as 3.5% of its total population for a major event — say a march or a demonstration, or coordinated marches across the country — then the campaign almost always succeeded.

They are also clear that, in order for a campaign to succeed, it needs to use diverse tactics. You can’t just get 3.5% of the country to your protest and give up. You need to also build mutual aid networks, have a media strategy, hold strategic demonstrations, orchestrate boycotts, organize strikes, and build alternative political structures. If a movement is strategic, they’ll get more and more of the general public’s support, and they’ll eventually start eroding their opponents power.

Nonviolent campaigns are not designed to appeal to the goodness in their opponents hearts, and they are not peaceful “kumbaya” drum circles. They are often confrontational, disruptive, and heated, less focused on love and hugs than on strategically eroding an oppressor’s power base. As an example: in the case of civil rights, the strategy was never to make the racists stop being racist — it was to take their power away. So protesters didn’t focus on flipping racist elected officials, cops, or klansmen, but instead making them unpalatable to local businessmen, who saw that racist policies hurt their bottom line after a boycott or a sit-in.

Chenoweth and Stephan found that nonviolent campaigns are effective in democratic and autocratic societies, and tend to be more resilient in the face of violent repression than violent campaigns. On this basis, their finding’s have been wholeheartedly adopted by a climate movement which wishes not just to stop the destruction of the earth, but build a better earth underneath.

The argument for violence (against property)

As a climate activist, Malm has, of course, read Chenoweth and Stephan, and while he is a seasoned veteran in the types of actions they advocate for, he still believes that in some cases, violence — specifically, sabotage — is a valid tool for activist campaigns to employ.

Malm’s argument is that the great “nonviolent” movements, whether that be the fight against apartheid, the fight for civil rights, the fight for women’s suffrage, have all had a large peaceful element with a smaller violent element standing behind it, cracking its knuckles.

Martin Luther King, Jr., the logic goes, would not have been as appealing to the whites in power if there hadn’t been black nationalists like Malcolm X ready to scoop up King’s frustrated supporters when the nonviolent movement failed to make any progress.

Malm’s strongest argument is that the fight against fossil fuels is not a fight against a set of unjust laws, or an oppressive dictator, which is where Chenoweth and Stephan pull their data from. Instead, it’s a fight against a productive economic force. So the only real comparison one can draw historically is the fight to end slavery:

Fossil fuels, like slavery, cannot be the object of compromises; no one would consider reducing slavery by 40 per cent or 60 per cent. All of it must go.

He goes on:

Fossil fuels will not be abolished in a week or two (nor was slavery). It won’t conclude in miraculous fashion, because fossil fuels are not a rickety superstructure like the regime of Slobodan Milošević, swept away by the blow from people who aspire to basic freedoms shared by most everyone else. Business-as-usual is not a sideshow to bourgeois democracy, a relic from an authoritarian age that requires correction — it is the material form of contemporary capitalism, neither more nor less.

Malm advocates not for violence against the police, the state, or even billionaire capitalists, but for violence against their property. The idea is that in a capitalist society, we’ve grown to see someone’s possessions as indistinguishable from their person.

He admits that this is a form of violence, in that it exerts physical force on a thing with the intent of injuring it, but says that it is fundamentally morally different than violence against a person: it’s one thing to set a rich man’s SUV on fire, it’s an entirely different thing to set fire to him.

Destruction of property, he believes, only carries the same moral weight if it’s against something that a person’s life depends on: say, their food stores, the well they use for water, the air they breathe. Climate change, of course, threatens all three.

His criticism of the nonviolence advocates is that the movements they are pulling data from virtually always included property destruction and sabotage:

Chenoweth and Stephan submit that ‘violent tactics include bombings, shootings, kidnappings, physical sabotage such as the destruction of infrastructure, and other types of physical harm to people and property’, which makes it even more impressive that they can name a single case of nonviolence. The fall of the Berlin Wall? People didn’t caress the cement.

Malm does not advocate for violence against people, particularly innocents, saying “it would be catastrophic for the movement if any part of it used terrorism,” but points out that the rich and powerful — think Donald Trump — would call any act of activist sabotage or property destruction terrorism, regardless of whether it hurt a single person.

Does it even matter which side is right?

It is normal and healthy for movements to have disagreements about strategy and tactics. Given that Malm is a Marxist and Stephan at one point worked for Obama’s Department of State in Afghanistan, it’s no wonder that these two camps are not particularly simpatico.

What’s interesting about this debate is that it matters a lot less who is right, and a lot more that the debate is happening. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. did butt heads, but their respective movements both helped move the dial on civil rights. They didn’t have to like each other for this to be the case.

Malm himself admits that radical saboteurs are effectively taking one for the team by making their opponents on the peaceful side of the movement more respectable:

It is the duty of the erstwhile radicals to denounce the new flank and accuse it of undermining their endeavours. If they were to applaud the troublemakers who threaten or commit acts of violence, they would not gain the edge of respectability and receive no invitation to the policy-making chambers.

This was to an extent the strategy of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Provisional Irish Republican Army during the Troubles in Ireland. Sinn Fein denied all connection to the IRA, but their collusion with the renowned terrorist group was an open secret. Their longtime leader, Gerry Adams, was widely known to have been a leader in the militia prior to his rise in the political wing. But the nominal division between the two allowed Sinn Fein to capitalize on situations that the militant IRA created. Peaceniks and militants may hate each other, but their relationship, if managed well, is often symbiotic and mutually beneficial.

As a final note: even though Malm’s book was published under three years ago, it has already been made into a movie. The movie features a group of environmental activists who, tired of protesting and handing out flyers, decide to sabotage a section of Texas pipeline. It is a surprisingly excellent thriller, and you can watch it on Hulu.

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Pro tip: If you want to subliminally embed a subversive idea into America’s collective unconscious, do it while having Roddy Piper and Keith David beat the ever loving shit out of each other for a full 7 minutes.

It does not get much more pulpy than John Carpenter’s 1988 movie They Live. The movie is based off a 1963 short story by Ray Nelson called “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” in which the main character accidentally wakes up “all the way” after a hypnotist’s performance. Now awake, he realizes that humanity has been brainwashed by an alien species he calls “the Fascinators.” The Fascinators are using mass media and mind-control to convince humans to reproduce and consume and obey their every command so they can exploit the earth for all it’s worth.

The story was originally published in The Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy, and you can read it here. It is not particularly well-written, but the idea underneath it is cool, so Nelson had it adapted into a comic in 1986, which is where Carpenter first came across it. You can also read the comic online, but I’ll give you just a taste of the, uh, quality of it here:

Carpenter optioned the comic and the short story to make They Live. He used the film to express his discontent with the rampant consumerism of Ronald Reagan’s America. Which makes it sound loftier than it is — the movie is full-blown pulp. The movie is the source of the famous quote, “I’m here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.” And for a solid 7 minutes of the movie — a huge chunk of its 94 minute run time — the hero, Roddy Piper, absolutely wails on his friend Keith David while trying to get him to put on the pair of sunglasses that will allow him to see the aliens (that was Carpenter’s main change from the comic, other than removing most of the full-blown horniness).

Carpenter is a master of delivering high concept ideas in extremely lowbrow packages, but what’s surprising is just how high concept the ideas are. They appear to pull heavily from the Guy Debord’s radical tract The Society of the Spectacle, which, to the average person, is virtually unreadable.

The Situationists, the Spectacle, and Instagram

Debord was the most influential member of a group of radical libertarian Marxist intellectuals known as the Situationists. While they are not widely known to most Americans, the influence of their work is: Malcolm McLaren drew heavily on their ideas while creating the Sex Pistols, and as such, punk rock is indebted to the Situationists. The modern street art movement — particularly the work of artists like Banksy or Shepard Fairey — is also heavily indebted to the Situationist idea of détournement, which advocates vandalizing capitalist advertisements and images as a way of subverting the capitalist system.

The Society of the Spectacle was Debord’s attempt to explain how capitalism had eroded how we view really basic things like personal fulfillment. Before capitalism, humans defined success and fulfillment as being a certain type of person. The first stage of capitalism shifted us to where we defined success and fulfillment by having certain things. And now, in the later stage of capitalism, Debord said, we don’t even care about having things — we just want to appear to have things.

When this happens, we start having relationships that aren’t with humans, but with the images humans project of themselves. What matters in these sorts of relationships isn’t so much the humans underneath the images, but the things that the humans have centered their lives around, whether that’s around certain possessions, around a certain lifestyle, around a certain ideology, around the way they present their families and their romantic relationships. We’re always, in Debord’s degraded vision of the world, just selling ourselves to others, like we are commodities rather than people.

(This was written in 1967, by the way, a full 43 years before the invention of Instagram, and long before the idea of “parasocial relationships” ever entered our public consciousness.)

Going even further, Debord suggested that in this world, humans would stop being creatures that do things, and would start being creatures that merely consumed things. Mass media — with all of its commercials and suggestions of how people should behave — would come to absorb more and more of our lives, capturing our attention with constant, wild, outrageous spectacles that would only serve to distract us from the disempowered drudgery of our own lives.

Manufacturing Consent (and Content)

As I write this, I am coming off of a month of “rebranding” exercises that I undertook to try and make this site into something that is a little more coherent so I can actually make a living as a writer. I have resisted this sort of exercise for a long time because I’ve been loath to turn myself into a product to sell. Branding has become a ubiquitous exercise in the modern economy, but we regularly forget that the root of the word comes from the act of burning symbols into animals or humans to mark them not as autonomous creatures, but as property.

What’s made me more uneasy is that writers are no longer just writers — they are influencers and content creators, and are expected to plumb their lives and often the lives of their children or significant others for personal profit, all in order to project a certain image to people who are not so much followers as they are consumers.

For the most part, if we wish to make a living off of our craft, we must resign ourselves to the fact that it’s not our writing, our abilities, or our art that this economy finds valuable, but rather it’s our influence in being able to cash in on the trust we’ve built with our followers to sell meaningless products.

Worse still: the fact that we all have to sell something in order to survive in this economy means that we’re all not only complicit in it, but are financially dependent on the system that’s supporting us. Post about revolution on TikTok or Facebook all you want — if you do it well enough, you’ll make those platforms a ton of money by capturing all that attention and putting so many eyes onto ads. If you do anything that actually threatens the system, you can expect to lose the platform and the livelihood.

As a result, we’re all likely to end up saying the same things. Our algorithmic bubbles turn into giant echo chambers where everyone agrees, and money is slowly funneled out of our pockets and into the offshore bank accounts of the immensely rich and powerful.

CONFORM

If you suddenly realized that all of this was true, wouldn’t it feel like you’d just put on a pair of sunglasses that showed you that your entire world was a lie? And wouldn’t you be willing to do anything — including whupping the ass of national treasure Keith David — to get other people to wake up?

Carpenter may or may not have read The Society of the Spectacle, but he’s long been open about his leftism, and in 2017, when neo-Nazis were trying to argue that They Live was about a cabal of Jewish puppetmasters running the world, he pushed back:

A core problem with the writings of Debord and the other Situationists is that they are dense in the way that only French Marxist critical theory can be. This doesn’t mean they weren’t influential: in May 1968, the year after the publication of The Society of the Spectacle, there was a mass left wing uprising against the government of Charles De Gaulle. This uprising was spearheaded by students, who graffiti’d Situationist manifestos on the walls of Paris. After they were brutally repressed by police, trade unions joined in on the uprising and France was virtually shut down by wildcat general strikes that included 22% of the total population. It looked for a brief second as if it would be an actual revolution, and Charles De Gaulle fled the country.

By the skin of its teeth, the government managed to stay in power, and De Gaulle remained in power for a few more years. Part of this was because the government was able to suck the wind out of the movement’s sails by giving large wage increases to the working class (which, to be fair, makes it an extremely effective strike). In the end, only the radicals and the students remained, and they were not sufficient for mounting an actual revolution.

The question facing people who want to see a sea change in how we live in this world is — how do you make the theory easy to understand for people who don’t read political theory for fun? Which is, you know, the vast majority of people upon whom your revolution will depend?

The answer, I think is obvious: You do it by giving the Sex Pistols instruments they barely know how to play. Or by giving radicalized hooligans a can of spray paint and a city full of billboards. Or by giving John Carpenter an extremely small budget to make a movie.

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Hey everyone! I wanted to take a minute to welcome you to the new and improved version of Better Strangers. I’ve been on hiatus from writing new articles for about a month as I’ve done some strategic rebranding work to make this into less of a personal blog and more of a focused publication. So: allow me to reintroduce the publication!

About Better Strangers

TL;DR: Better Strangers is a publication that faces a bleak world with hope, curiosity, and imagination. We are here to help you build a better self and better communities during trying times.

Oscar Wilde wrote: 

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias."

Humanity appears to have forgotten this in recent decades, and instead has fallen into the trap of only envisioning dystopian futures, ones of climate collapse, nuclear apocalypse, and total extinction. If these are the only countries we can see, then they are the only ones we can sail towards.

Better Strangers is a publication that chooses to believe that humanity still has its best days in front of it. It doesn't do this by denying the difficult present, or by putting its faith in Messianic billionaires who promise to build utopias on other planets even as they destroy our own. Instead, we at Better Strangers look at the present with clear eyes, and understand that to build a better world, we need to be able to imagine it first. 

To this end, Better Strangers looks at historical movements that successfully affected change, at philosophies and ideas for coping with the modern moment, and at realistic utopian visions of the future.

Our orientation is broadly left wing and spiritually agnostic — we love engaging with weird, even trippy ideas, but we’re not interested in worldviews that say some people are better than others, or that run counter to established science.

What we publish

Every four weeks, we have a different theme. The first month, our focus is “Revolution,” because we’re going in HARD. We’ve got three broad weekly columns:

* Book Rex — These Monday columns mostly discuss books. They’re designed to distill a book’s main ideas for a reader who might not have enough time to get through them herself. Over the four week period, they’re divided up thusly:

* Utopias or Dystopias — Exploring ideas about what a better (or worse) future could look like.

* Philosophy — Doing a deep dive into theories, ideas, and mindsets for chaotic times.

* History & Practice — A look into historic figures and movements, and how studying them can help us better understand our current moment.

* Pop Culture — A dive into movies, music, and TV shows that engage with the big ideas.

* Weekly Column — This Wednesday column falls into one of four categories:

* Interview — We talk to someone interesting about our theme.

* In the News — We discuss how our big ideas apply to something in the news.

* How-To — We discuss something you can do in the real world to apply the ideas we’re talking about.

* Short Fiction — Once a month, we publish short fiction. For the time being, this column is exclusive for paid subscribers.

* Weekly Round-up — The weekly round-up is for people who don’t want to get three emails a week: we share all of the articles published that week, plus other articles, videos, or resources on the internet that fit the theme. This used to be the Jimble-Jamble, but we’re retiring that, as that was kind of a grab bag and this is a bit more focused.

As a note — the two columns are both available in audio form, either at the top of each article, or on your favorite podcasting platform.

Support us!

The best way to support Better Strangers is to become a paid subscriber. While most of the content remains available to all, paid subscribers get access to exclusive short fiction, to archived articles, and to a portion of our regular articles up to a month in advance of free subscribers. Check out subscription options at the button below:

If you can’t afford a full paid subscription of $5 a month, we are happy to work with you! If you sign up to our Patreon for as low as $1 a month, you can get full paid access. Just pay what you can. If you do have some extra money, you can give gift subscriptions!

Outside becoming a paid subscriber, the best thing you can do is like, comment, and share our work on whatever platform you’re active on. Also please feel free to forward our emails!

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Give me feedback and work with me!

I try to respond to every comment and email from a B.S. subscriber (so long as it’s respectful), so I would love to hear what you want more and less of! I would also love to get tips on stuff I should discuss on this page or look into. If you want to keep it anonymous, I have put together a survey on Google Forms. I’d love to hear from you.

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