Effective activism
To be an effective activist requires both careful thinking and decisive doing. One of the failures of liberal institutions and intellectual elites to move our society forward results from their frequently doing too much thinking and too little doing.
But it is also unhelpful to do too much doing and too little thinking, a tendency that appears to have become more prominent as a result of more and more activists being radicalised via social media, and thus arriving at the work with very shallow theorisations of the world, their grievances, or what they want to do about them.
Put simply, the main thinking that is necessary for effective activism involves three steps. First, developing an understanding of how you believe the world, or some aspect of it, currently is. Second, developing a picture of how you think the world, or the relevant aspect of it, should be. And then finally, working out what you think your contribution can be to moving the world from point A to point B. In other words, first work out what you want to change, and then how you plan to change it.
At the most basic level, simply deciding to show up more and increase your engagement with an issue could be a way to do this. You might think of this as “mobilising yourself.” Of course, unless you’re in a position of considerable power and influence, the impact on the world of just mobilising yourself is likely to be extremely limited.
As such, in most cases, thinking through your contribution to changing the world from how it is to how you think it should be involves figuring out ways in which you can get other people to do different things to what they are currently doing. This is because whichever undesirable state of the world that you identify is invariably the sum product of all of the things everyone in it are currently doing. If changing your own behaviour isn’t enough, you need to find ways to change other people’s behaviour.
You might target important individuals on the basis of a particular decision they could make that would help. You might target the general public, to develop larger support for an idea or an activity. Maybe you try to apply pressure to those complicit in a bad thing, or maybe you try to recruit others to do so with you. You might even try to find ways to challenge or shift the underlying political commitments of those responsible for the state of affairs you don’t like.
The important thing is that however you spend your energy on the issue you are working on, you are able to tell a coherent story about how you think that energy will translate into some person or people doing some different things to what they are currently doing. If you’re writing an article, who is going to read it, what are they going to think, and how will that inform their behaviour going forward? If you’re organising a protest, who will be attending it, whose attention will it get, and how will that impact their behaviour?
There are a wide range of answers one can have to these questions, and no single correct way to reason your way through an effective understanding of your activism. An article might be written as an attempt to change people’s minds. Or, if it’s written for those who already agree with you, maybe it’s designed to inspire them toward a particular type of action. Either way, understanding what the article is trying to achieve will help you do a better job of writing it, and a better job of locating its role in the larger work it falls within.
What’s most important is that you don’t skip the thinking step entirely, because that will result in your energy expenditure being ineffective, and sometimes even counterproductive. I imagine someone might read this and wonder if it’s a critique of those activists who at times engage more emotionally. It is not. Feeling is not only important but is itself a part of thinking, always. We must sit with, confront, engage and be moved by our feelings, and this is also essential to our activism.
However, when thinking is not consciously prioritised, a person’s activism can sometimes become largely informed by feeling bad about a thing and then taking steps to not feel bad about it. As we are all experts in self-deception, we might not so easily see when we are doing this, unless we are proactively thinking about how we are trying to change the world. Of course there is nothing wrong with a person wanting to take steps to improve how they feel; we just need to know when that’s our goal and when it isn’t, if we’d like to be effective.
