A Deeper Dive Into Dilemma Actions

Here is a link to an interview which provides a clearer picture of a concept which I mentioned in my last post.  The interview was given by Srdja Popovic on the Democracy Paradox podcast and was posted on March 7, 2023. Srdja Popovic is the founder of CANVAS (The Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies). CANVAS provides training to organizers who need to wage campaigns of strategic nonviolent resistance in order to liberate themselves and their people from oppression and build durable democratic societies. 

In the interview Mr. Popovic emphasizes several points which have also been mentioned on my blog, The Well Run Dry.  In particular, he talks about how essential it is for the organizers of a movement of strategic nonviolent resistance to start by developing a wise master strategy.  He also talks about why movements need leadership in order to be successful and why so many "leaderless movements" of spontaneous mass protest have accomplished so little over the last two decades.  He explains the concept of a dilemma action and shows how it can be a powerful tactic when wielded by skillful resisters who implement this tactic as part of a larger, well-formulated grand strategy.

The points he makes fit in well with my most recent post, which makes the case that struggle groups who wish to win need to evolve their tactics in order to fit with the ever-evolving nature of the space in which they struggle.  This particularly applies to the methods of protest and persuasion listed by Gene Sharp in books like From Dictatorship to Democracy.  I have mentioned previously that the methods of protest and persuasion are among the weakest methods of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Yet they are not useless - they can still augment the power of a resistance movement as long as the tactics of protest have evolved to meet the changing nature of the struggle space, and especially as long as these methods are part of an entire suite of strategically chosen tactics which accomplish more than just protest.  Calling for mass protest marches is not a tactic that fits the present times, due to the extreme ease with which an oppressor can neutralize this form of protest by injecting violence (including vandalism) into any such protest marches.  Feel free to listen to Srdja as he describes more innovative and effective tactics of protest.

How Tactical Tools Adapt or Die

In a few previous posts on this blog, I have pointed out that relying on mass protest marches as the sole tactic of a struggle of strategic nonviolent resistance is as stupid as the British High Command's insistence on constant daily frontal assaults against German positions was in World War 1.  This observation may be disputed by some, yet the observation points out the fact that practitioners of strategic nonviolent resistance have often learned valuable lessons from the study of armed conflict.  In particular, it is possible to notice those commanders of forces who made the most out of limited resources in order to achieve surprising victories.  It is also possible to notice and study those commanders who were inept, hidebound, or who otherwise doomed themselves to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory - even when these commanders started out with overwhelming numerical and material advantages.

And it is possible to trace how tactical tools evolve in their composition and methods of use as they are deployed by wise commanders who are observant, willing to listen to different perspectives, and who otherwise display the characteristics of reflective practitioners.  So let's consider in this post how the experiences of World War 1 influenced the development of infantry as a component of the armed forces of modern nations.  At the outset it must be said that the poor use of infantry by the Allies throughout much of World War 1 led to large losses on the Allied side.  From 1914 to 1916, it was also true that the German military suffered heavy losses as well.  However, the Germans seem to have been the quicker to realize how massed artillery and machine guns had altered the battlefield, and what tactical and strategic adjustments were needed to make their fighting forces more survivable as a result.  On the other hand, the British and French forces continued to use outdated and obsolete tactics in deploying their infantry, with the result that a casual observer might be forgiven for concluding from the British example that dismounted infantry had become obsolete.  But infantry as a tool had definitely not become obsolete.  This was shown by the German development of the concept of defense in depth.  Defense in depth greatly reduced the effectiveness of British and French artillery against German defenders, and enabled the Germans to inflict heavy casualties on British and French attackers while suffering relatively few casualties of their own.  The Germans also developed a more flexible skill in maneuver warfare which made German forces highly dangerous and much more survivable during the German offensive of 1918 than the British and French had been in previous Allied offensives. (To their credit, however, the British army became much more effective toward the very end of the war, when they also began to implement defense in depth.)

After World War 1, those nations which had observant and teachable commanders and generals carefully studied the battles of the war in order to apply lessons to their own armies.  As a result, the militaries of the United States and other powerful nations began to make changes to the tactics of infantry deployment, switching from trench warfare to the use of foxholes in the defense, learning also to deploy elastic defense-in-depth, and beginning to learn new techniques for offensive operations at the small unit level and beyond.  However, the Germans once again proved to be far ahead of their peers in applying these new lessons, as demonstrated by the World War Two deployment of the blitzkrieg method of combined arms offensive warfare.  Learning by observation of enemy tactics, tools, and technologies on the part of both the Allies and the Axis powers led to the continued evolution of infantry by the armies of these nations, including evolution of technologies such as the assault rifle, the armored personnel carrier, and the tools of combined-arms assault, as well as changes to small-unit offensive tactics which resulted in the development of the traveling, traveling overwatch, and bounding overwatch dismounted squad formations.  The result is that a modern army which has incorporated modern tools and techniques for the deployment of its infantry can easily defeat a military which digs long lines of trenches for defense, which is rigid and inflexible in its use of artillery, and which day after day at regular times sends its infantry troops on assault in neat lines of men who move at a slow walk.  (By the way, according to a number of historians, this inflexible style is what characterized the British army in World War 1 under Sir Douglas Haig.)

In other words, by observation, learning from history (and especially from mistakes), and responding to that learning by making the necessary tactical innovations, the infantry as a component of modern militaries has continued to make itself relevant even to the present day as a key component of an effective fighting force.  What lessons can we take from the infantry's continual self-reinvention to apply to the field of strategic nonviolent resistance?  

Well, let's take the methods of protest and persuasion as a key category of the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance.  As I said at the beginning of this post, I have argued that the use of mass protest marches as the sole go-to tactic of resistance is stupid, because this has become the method of resistance which oppressors are most equipped to meet and to counter.  But does this mean that the entire category of methods of protest and persuasion is now obsolete? Not necessarily.  It is true that the methods of protest and persuasion are among the weakest methods of nonviolent action, just as it is true that the squad-level dismounted small infantry unit is the weakest troop unit in warfare.  But just as the squad-level dismounted unit is still relevant in war-fighting, the methods of protest and persuasion still have value in the battlefield of 21st century strategic nonviolent resistance.  What is needed, however, is an evolution of tactics, of tactical thinking, and of methods.  And these tactics and methods must be deployed by wise leaders whose tactical and strategic thinking has evolved with the times in order to remain relevant and effective.

A hypothetical, yet concrete example may be helpful.  Suppose you are a resister against the fascist Trump regime and you want to weaken his pillars of support.  We know that the white American evangelical/Protestant church remains one of the staunchest pillars of support of the Trump regime.  (By the way, that shows just how little white American evangelicals are actually interested in obeying the words of Jesus!)  Let's say that you want to plan a series of operations designed to weaken this church as a pillar of support of Trump.  You could adopt one of two possible approaches.  The first would be to gather as many people as you can by means of Facebook, Reddit, or other social media announcements in order to besiege as many churches as you can with armies of protesters carrying picket signs to show your outrage over the white evangelical support of Trump's fascist policies and imperial overreach.  To make things even more interesting (and stupid), let's say that you want to repeat this same tactic Sunday after Sunday for several weeks in a row.  Let's examine such a tactic through the lens which Peter Ackerman provided us in one of his Fletcher Summer Institute lectures.  In particular, let's ask what is the purpose and what are the risks of such an action, and how likely it is that such an action would achieve its stated goals.  Below is my summary of possible answers to these questions.

• Purpose: To attempt to shame the white American evangelical church by expressing outrage over its hypocrisy, its worship of secular power, and its use of religion to support the oppression of the poor and nonwhite in the U.S. and throughout the world.
• Likelihood of success: very small.  Why? In attempting to shame these people by means of a series of mass protest marches, you are attempting to appeal to their better angels.  But most of them don't have better angels.  They are perfectly willing to do or to say whatever it takes in order to maximize their secular economic and political power and supremacy, regardless of the morality of their actions.

• Risks: Very, very high! Why? Because of the following factors:
• Your protest marches will provoke a violent response from the organs of right-wing power in this country.  In particular, you can count on Trump taking over the local police forces, sending in troops from the regular military (and not just the National Guard), and initiating a massive crackdown on civil liberties.
• To facilitate and legitimize that violent crackdown, the fascist element will inject violence into your protest by means of agents provocateurs.  They will then blame the outbreak of violence on you and your fellow protestors, using such organs of right-wing media as Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp media empire (including Fox News) to make their case.  On the TV screens in every household there will be scenes of rooms full of stone-faced middle-aged men sporting buzz cuts and wearing blue uniforms who announce that in town X or city Y the police had to "declare a riot" because of the actions of "subversive hooligan elements bent on sowing CHAOS because they HATE AMERICA!!!"
• By your protest marches you will make your opponents look like innocent little lamb martyrs who are being "persecuted solely for the name of Christ" (that is, being persecuted merely for being "innocent and nice people"), thus boosting their standing in society and actually strengthening them as one of Trump's pillars of support.  And you will get yourselves painted as "attackers of the Constitution's guarantee of religious freedom".

So we see that such a direct deployment of mass protest marches would actually not work in weakening the white evangelical church as a pillar of support because it would not persuade the members of that church to abandon Trump, and because Trump and his fellow fascists would easily be able to turn the effects of such protests against the protestors, thus actually boosting the power and prestige of white evangelicalism.

Now let's consider the second approach.  Suppose you have studied the changing battlefield of strategic nonviolent action and you decide to deploy a smarter tactic of protest.  Your goal remains the same: to weaken the white American evangelical/Protestant church as a pillar of support of a fascist regime.  But instead of calling for massive protest marches to picket as many churches as possible, you talk to your physical, flesh-and-blood neighbors and say, "From now on, let's each put out a sign on our lawns every Sunday which says 'THIS SUNDAY, I AM WASHING MY CAR.'" And let's say that you all agree that at the hour in which most churches have their Sunday services, you and your friends start washing your cars.  Moreover, let's say that you video yourselves all washing your cars at 11 am every Sunday and post those videos online.  Let's say that you make it abundantly clear that your choice of 11 am every Sunday for car-washing is an act of protest, your sending of a signal that you will not be attending church on Sunday because the churches have become the corrupt handmaidens of a fascist regime.  What can Trump or his goons or the liars who work for Rupert Murdoch possibly do to counter such an act of protest?  

What I have described in this second approach is what is known as a dilemma action.  (See this also.) And it is a tactic of dispersion, which is much harder to repress than tactics of concentration. It is also an action which has the capacity to produce massive amounts of backfire if the oppressor tries to stop it.  For instance, if ICE or Marine Corps troops violently seize someone and beat him up simply for washing his car on a Sunday morning, how will such an act look in the eyes of witnesses?  Won't such a response produce serious questioning of the Trump regime, as well as serious revulsion toward that regime?  Moreover, as the idea of washing your car on Sunday (or pulling weeds, or cleaning your gutters, or my favorite - sleeping in!) catches on, the revenue and attendance numbers at most evangelical churches will start to show a definite decline.  And there will be very little they can do to stop it! (You can also boost the effectiveness of your tactic by making bumper stickers that say "I AM NOT GOING TO CHURCH THIS SUNDAY" or "I'M SLEEPING IN THIS SUNDAY.")

Thus we see that just as in the use of weapons and tactics in war-fighting, a method or category of methods of nonviolent resistance can remain relevant and effective as long as the practitioners of that method or of those methods continue to evolve their capacity for tactical and strategic thinking.  A key to the evolution of tactics of nonviolent resistance can be found in the methodology which the German army used to re-invent itself on the fly during World War 1:

• Perception of the need for change
• Solicitation of ideas, especially from the front-line units
• Definition of the change
• Dissemination of the change
• Enforcement throughout the army 
• But in this case, since we are dealing with a civilian movement rather than a military operation, the word "enforcement" may be too strong. For the members of civilian movement organizations, a better way to phrase this is the building of a culture of discipline throughout the organization.  This discipline must facilitate adherence to wise strategy.  An essential part of this discipline is the maintaining of strict nonviolent discipline.
• Modification of organization and equipment to accommodate the change
• Thorough training
• Evaluation of effectiveness
• Subsequent refinement

Note: the above outline is quoted from The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine During the First World War, by Timothy T. Lupfer, published in July 1981.  (I told y'all that y'all need to read some books!)

Brain Failure in L.A.

Those of you who read this post will be able to tell at a glance that I don't follow the news closely.  It took a next door neighbor's relatives for me to find out today that there have been ongoing protests in Los Angeles over the immigration policies of Donald Trump.  I knew about the No Kings rally.  However, I did not know that the protests in Los Angeles had continued after that rally.  It turns out that even though I did not know about the continuation of the protests, I could easily guess the turn which these protests have taken, as noted below:

• Some of the protests have turned violent.  This violence has included vandalism and property destruction.  (NOTE TO ANY BONEHEADS WHO SAY THAT VANDALISM AND PROPERTY DESTRUCTION ARE NOT THE SAME AS VIOLENCE: VANDALISM IS VIOLENCE!) 
• The violence of some of the protests has given the Trump administration and various law enforcement agencies ample justification for an overwhelmingly heavy police/military presence in Los Angeles.
• The violence of some of the protests has given the Trump administration and the major right-wing media outlets in this country a gold-plated opportunity to portray those who oppose Trump as lovers of chaos who want to bring chaos into America.
• I strongly suspect that at least some of the violent actors in the protests were and are agents provocateurs either paid by the Trump administration or inserted by various police and Homeland Security units in order to strengthen support for the Trump regime by discrediting the critics of Trump.
• The protests were ongoing throughout the entire month of June and into July of this year - EVEN THOUGH THE PROTESTORS COULD SEE THAT THE PROTESTS HAD BECOME VIOLENT AND EVEN THOUGH THE VIOLENCE INJECTED INTO THE PROTESTS WAS BEING USED BY RIGHT-WING MEDIA TO DISCREDIT THE PROTESTORS AND THEIR CAUSE.

I just want to say that normally I don't TYPE IN ALL CAPS as it comes off sounding like I'm shouting.  But in this case, I am!  I hate Trump as much as any decent person ought to.  I hate the demographic from which he has emerged, as well as the members of his pillars of support.  But what makes me extremely angry is when I see people who claim to hate Trump and who claim to be part of the resistance against Trump choose tactics and strategy (or a slap-dash, boneheaded failure of strategy) which can so easily be hijacked by the very regime they claim to oppose.  A truly effective resistance uses a multitude of tactics, and is not fixated solely on the tactic of mass protest marches.  A truly effective resistance is able to switch to tactics of dispersion if its leaders see that tactics of concentration have begun to lose their effectiveness or to be derailed by violent agents provocateurs.  Hint to the boneheads: mass protest marches are a tactic of concentration!  A truly effective resistance is guided by a wise strategy and is implemented by actors who display tactical ingenuity and creativity.  And among the most important of all, a truly effective resistance is composed of people who maintain strict nonviolent discipline, as they know that allowing any violence - including property destruction - hurts their cause because it hardens the oppressor's pillars of support!

To those who want to be identified with righteous resistance, I say, Please, please, PLEASE study the theory and practice of successful strategic nonviolent resistance!  Please understand that if you call for a mass protest march or rally, an autocratic thug like Trump will find a way to inject violence into the protest march so that he can justify deploying a violent military or police response in order to crush it.  As I have said before, relying on mass protest as your sole go-to tactic of resistance is as stupid as relying on daily frontal assaults was in World War 1.  Please, please, PLEASE read some books!  Learn how to organize and deploy such highly disruptive tactics as the stay-at-home, the strike, and the boycott.  It is almost impossible for an oppressor to justify arresting citizens simply for refusing to shop or refusing to go out to an amusement park or restaurant.  Find out what Trump's economic pillars of support are and go after them with tactics that are street-legal, nonviolent, and guided by wise strategy.  Use such strategy and tactics to go after the wealth of the entire Trump family.  Read my previous posts on strategic nonviolent resistance.  Read the book No Shortcuts by Jane McAlevey.  Above all, read the writings of the Albert Einstein Institution - especially Gene Sharp's list of 198 methods of nonviolent action.  (That's right folks - 198, count 'em, 198 methods! Not just one!) I leave you once again with a quote from Theodore Sturgeon: "...and when you see them do that twice in a row you know you got a one-trick fighter, which makes it easy for anyone who knows two, and I know half a hundred."

On Not Needing You, Part 2

This blog contains several posts which describe the psychological dynamics of national and ethnic narcissism.  Those posts have focused particularly on the United States and Russia as examples of deranged, narcissistic nations.  Many experts who have studied personality disorders have stated that the best way for normal people to deal with narcissists is to go No Contact.  In other words, to reduce one's dealings with the narcissist as much as possible and to sever, as much as possible, any relations of dependence on the narcissist.

The world was obliged to follow this prescription against Russia after Russia's thuggish violent attempts to conquer Ukraine.  (Note that Russia's attempted conquest of Ukraine was merely one component of a narcissistic Russian attempt to establish a world empire.)  Now the world is discovering that it is possible to take care of itself and to do beautifully good work without the United States.  The world is not caving to the threat of American tariffs against foreign goods.  And the rest of the world is coming together in surprising ways to create spaces of equity, fairness, and sustainable social arrangements without the involvement of the United States.  The process is actually easier now that the thuggish, misanthropic, racist, murderous regime of Donald Trump has withdrawn from a number of important international arrangements.  In short, the world is beginning to discover that it can live without the United States.  The U.S. may thus soon see how much harder it is to live in a world in which its soft power has been destroyed by self-inflicted wounds.  Check out these headlines:

• "Trump delays tariffs as the rest of the world plays hardball," BBC
• "Can the world be governed without the US?", Inside Story
• "This Fourth of July, the world declares its independence from America", The Guardian
• "To save the global economy, kick the US out of the WTO," Politico.eu

P.S. How do people build soft power in their societies and in the world at large?  Why, by becoming the sort of benevolent, wise, knowledgeable people that everyone else can respect, of course!  But soft power is not built by trying to take other people's stuff, by trying to conquer other people's countries, by trying to disenfranchise or enslave other people, or by trying to play smashmouth with the rest of the world.

A Comment Policy Reminder

I noticed that this blog has picked up a few comments over the last few months.  Unfortunately, I had to delete them.  I greatly appreciate comments from readers even though we may sometimes disagree.  However, as noted on the sidebar of this blog, I have adopted a non-negotiable policy that all commenters must have an ID (Google ID or OpenID) or something similar in order to post comments to this blog. Anonymous comments will not be published.  Unfortunately I must adopt this policy in order to prevent one bad actor from spoiling an entire barrel of apples, to use a metaphor.  So if you are one of the recent commenters, please get a recognizable Internet ID and post your comment under that ID.  Thanks for your understanding.

Peter Ackerman's Accuracy

Here's another short post that is a follow-on to the post I wrote yesterday.  My encounter with the protest march in Portland yesterday got me so agitated that I actually went back to watch a YouTube video that was made by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in 2013.  As long-time readers of my blog know, I believe the ICNC went seriously off the rails from 2017 to 2020, and that as a result they gave some advice that was seriously flawed, both morally, tactically, and strategically.  So in my posts from 2020 onward, I have scrupulously avoided referring to any materials or videos published by the ICNC.  However, I must admit that the materials they published and released up to 2016 are actually quite good.  Their Fletcher Summer Institute video series is a particular example of this.  Also, I've grown to strongly dislike YouTube for reasons which I have mentioned on this blog, yet to this day YouTube remains the best place to find videos of talks and lectures by people such as Srdja Popovic, Jamila Raqib, Marshall Ganz, Zeynep Tufekci, and other scholars of people power, community organizing, and strategic nonviolent resistance.  So to use an analogy, even though I hate the taste of cheese, because I'm hungry and there's nothing else to eat, I guess I'll have to eat this cheese sandwich...

Anyway, the video I am referring to is "FSI 2013: Why Skills Can Make Civil Resistance 'A Force More Powerful'" and it is a recording of a talk which was given by Peter Ackerman, who was one of the founders of the ICNC.  (By the way, Peter Ackerman passed away around three years ago.  I'm sorry to hear of his passing.)  In his talk he makes the point that the development of skills and wise strategy among the participants in a nonviolent liberation struggle is the key to winning the struggle.  He has some interesting things to say about the lack of effectiveness of mass protest marches when those protest marches are nothing more than an expression of collective outrage:

"Well..you know, again, we're always talking about probabilities. But a strategy to go to the street because you're angry - to let off steam - recognizing you probably have a finite amount of steam - that's probably a not good use of your steam.  [Sic] And I don't believe you should...even consider a tactic without understanding its strategic context.  Why would you just go out and do something without thinking it through?...Tactics are not a strategy. [Emphasis added.]  "What makes a tactic have a strategic context is the forethought that comes to it. [Emphasis added.] 

"And the military gets this...as some of you know, I have a son who was in the military and...as a combat officer before he went out on any activity he had to write a 40-page paper about what was the purpose, what were the risks, and on and on and on! We should submit ourselves to that same kind of discipline.  If you don't do it, you're gonna lose!"

To those who want to craft an effective resistance to the autocrats who have taken over their countries (as Trump and the Republican Party have done in the United States), I say the same thing.  Educate yourselves in the theory and practice of effective strategic nonviolent resistance.  Read some books - especially the books published by the Albert Einstein Institution.  Learn to craft an effective strategy of resistance, an effective theory of change.  If you don't do it, you're going to lose! 

Cassandra's Sore Throat

I was planning to meet some friends for coffee (or in my case, green tea) today in downtown Portland, Oregon.  Because I don't have a TV and don't watch the news on my computer, I was completely surprised by the presence of a huge anti-Trump protest rally (one of over two hundred taking place across the nation) which blocked several downtown streets, including the street I needed to take to reach the coffee shop where my friends and I were supposed to meet.  

As readers of my blog know, I am utterly opposed to the Presidency of Donald Trump.  I am also utterly opposed to the Republican Party.  Even though I am a Christian, I find that regrettably, I must now stand in complete and utter opposition to the white American evangelical/Protestant church in all of its manifestations.  So I could certainly sympathize and agree with many of the grievances of the protestors - especially because I am a black African-American.  Yet I must say that the sight of the protestors filled me with a strange mix of feelings.  This mixture of feelings was even more agitated when I gave up on trying to reach my coffee shop friends and parked my car instead in order to talk to some of the protestors.  I learned that many people had come to the protests simply because they had heard about them during this past week, and that they had not received any prior training in the theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Moreover, the protest march seemed at times to be very little more than a nearly inchoate venting of grievances.  

So I asked a few of the protestors if they had ever heard of the study of the theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance.  I stressed that this three-word phrase meant far more than simple "nonviolence."  I asked them if they had ever read any of the books of Gene Sharp or if they had ever heard of Jamila Raqib or Marshall Ganz.  I asked them if they had ever heard of the difference between tactics of concentration and tactics of dispersion.  I asked them if they were willing to start reading the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance, and particularly on the methods of organizing a strike, a boycott, or a stay-at-home.  (One note about that last link: it leads to a webpage written partly by Erica Chenoweth.  While I greatly enjoyed Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, written by Chenoweth and by Maria Stephan, I must say that I did NOT enjoy a subsequent book by Chenoweth titled, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know.  If you want my reasons for disliking that book, please click here.)  I told them that the use of mass protest rallies is actually one of the weakest methods of strategic nonviolent resistance, and that if they wanted to mount an effective resistance to Trump and the demographic he represents, they needed to learn the far more powerful methods of organizing economic noncooperation.  I told them that people who relied solely on mass protests as a tactic did not know what they were doing.  I warned them that people who only know how to organize mass protests can be undermined by the government if the government chooses to infiltrate the protests with violent agents provocateurs.  I ended by urging them to read some books.

They politely listened to my near-diatribe and graciously answered my words, yet I must wonder how it must have felt for them to be button-holed by a total stranger and lectured for several minutes.  If any of them are reading these words now, my deepest apologies for any heartburn I caused in you.  Nonetheless, I have over the last several years felt like the Cassandra of Greek mythology who was condemned to scream out warnings which were not heeded by her hearers.  Then again, maybe things are not as bad as I sometimes fear.  After all, tactics of economic noncooperation effectively drove Elon Musk out of his role as one of Trump's henchmen.  These tactics have almost bankrupted the Tesla corporation and are starting to hurt Starlink, which is another of Musk's businesses.  And things like these boycotts should be proof enough to my fevered brain that I'm not the only one who can come up with a good idea.  Still, like Cassandra, it's hard sometimes to resist the urge to scream my head off...

Repost: A Clarifying of Stance

Although I don't have time to post extensively right now, I do check my stats from time to time.  I have noticed how some readers have focused on posts which I wrote several years ago from an overtly pro-Russian point of view.  However, in 2016 Russia revealed itself to be a wolf in sheep's clothing, a toxic and narcissistic wanna-be empire run by a thieving little man in a bunker.  To understand how I view Russia now, please read the posts linked on the sidebar of this blog, particularly, "A Clarifying of Stance."  As for the pro-Russian posts, as they come to my attention, I am either editing them or making them entirely invisible.

Legible To Machines?

Here's another short post.  I have a Chinese friend who is a software engineer.  I think her husband may also be a software engineer.  Anyway, we have been having a friendly semi-disagreement about the capabilities and impact of AI on the future of industrial society.  (It's always a good thing to have friends who are willing to disagree with you!  This helps to keep your thoughts and conclusions healthy!  She also knows more about computers than I do...)  She sees AI as somewhat inevitable due to its rapidly increasing capabilities, although she recognizes some of the potential harms that may result from the increasingly widespread use of artificial intelligence (including large language models or LLM's) in society.

As one can tell from reading some of my most recent posts on precarity, I am a bit more skeptical about the ability of AI to take over a majority of human cognitive tasks.  And in re-reading (or in my case, re-hearing the audiobook version of) Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott, I've been wondering how much of the power of present-day AI is the result of our society having been remade in order to become more legible to AI.  Scott points out the many ways in which the ruling elites of past and present societies have remade their societies in order to make them legible to the command and control organs of the State, thus facilitating easier command and control of their subjects.  Yet these schemes of legibility have often had painfully unforeseen consequences.  How have major corporate interests made our society more legible?  How have their methods also facilitated making our society more legible to large AI deployments such as chatGPT and Gemini?  What are some of the consequences we are likely to see from this re-making and its resulting increased legibility?  I wish I could ask James C. Scott such questions, but unfortunately he passed away last year.  Looks like we'll have to figure things out ourselves...

Repost: Gantry Collapse

I must apologize for not writing a new post in a while.  Unfortunately, we in the U.S. are reaping the consequences of the curse that reads, "May you live in interesting times." This curse is commonly cited as originating in ancient China, but it was actually uttered for the first time by a British politician in the early 20th century.  (However, the Chinese do have the following deliciously appropriate phrase: 宁为太平犬，勿为乱人, which can be rendered, "Better to be a dog in peace than a man in chaos!")  

Anyway, the effort of dealing with national chaos (and its trickling down to the local level) has me quite busy, so I won't be writing a lengthy post in the near future.  However, I have been thinking about the current chaos as well as the architects of that chaos, namely Mr. Donald Trump and the Republican Party.  I am also thinking of one of the chief enablers of Trump, of the Far Right, and of Republicanism - namely, the white American evangelical/Protestant church and its subculture.  This is a church which claims to know Jesus, yet whose members hate their fellow human beings if those human beings are not American or white or rich or English-speaking, and whose leaders practice and tolerate the most egregious predatory sexual behavior - including felony-level sexual assault, pedophilia, and rape.  Reading the latest news about evangelical sex scandals and the culture which enables perpetrators to continue in the ministry made me think of a blog post I wrote over two years ago.  Therefore I am presenting to you the link to Gantry Collapse, for those who want a blast from the recent past.  Please note how that post documents the process by which religion used as a tool of domination eventually loses its power to dominate.

Non-Starlink Alternatives to T-Mobile?

It is heartening to see how much of the rest of the world is responding to the actions of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.  Several boycotts of goods made in the United States have sprung up, and these are growing.  Unfortunately, some of us may find that we are still beholden to the Trump administration and to Elon Musk, due to hidden dependencies in existing products and services.

Musk owns SpaceX which operates a fleet of Starlink communication satellites.  I just found out today that T-Mobile has teamed with Starlink to increase its phone coverage.  This is distasteful to me as I am a T-Mobile customer.  Does anyone know of a cellular or Internet service provider who has not partnered with Starlink?  If so, please let us all know.  In any case, I may wind up canceling one of my Internet access plans with T-Mobile in the very near future.  One thing to note: T-Mobile was acquired by Deutsche Telekom in 2001, so perhaps economic boycott pressure can be applied to other holdings of Deutsche Telekom as well.

Oh, and here's a message to Mr. Trump: you don't get to tell people that it's illegal for them to refuse to spend money on a particular product.  I can't see you sending your jackbooted cop thugs into people's houses to force them to buy a Tesla - especially when those people live in other countries.  You should be more careful when you run your mouth.

Effective Cures Versus Social Placebos

Today's post will be short.  我很忙，所以我没有很多时间！Anyway, here goes.

Over these last few weeks, I've heard of at least one protest that took place to oppose the new policies of the Trump administration, and there is a call for at least one more protest to take place sometime in the next few weeks.  I can definitely understand the anger and distress many people are feeling because of the revived Presidency of Donald Trump.  (Ah, Trump! To what may I compare him? Perhaps to a vampire that wasn't effectively dispatched - maybe the people who drove a stake into his last Presidency did not use a stake made of the right kind of wood.  He certainly seems to be a zombie revenant from a horror movie...)  However, hearing of the revival of mass protest in response to the revival of Trump, I feel the need to repeat myself.

So once again, let me say this: the use of mass protest in these days as a tactic or strategy of resistance is a very bad idea.  I say this for the same reasons I mentioned in previous posts on strategic nonviolent resistance.  First, mass protest is actually one of the weakest of the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Protest merely registers an opinion - it does not have the power to coerce power-holders into taking the protestors' opinion seriously.  Second, autocrats and tyrants have by now figured out very effective ways of destroying the effectiveness of mass protest rallies and marches.  All these tyrants have to do is hire thugs and goons as agents provocateurs to infiltrate the protest marches in order to commit violence.  Then the tyrants have a ready-made justification to violently crack down on the protests and to move closer to martial law.  Third, it seems that too many people who have organized protests in the United States over the last several years have treated mass protests as their sole go-to tactic of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Thus the tyrants whom these protesters oppose are easily able to skirt around this one tactic.  Remember from my previous posts on this subject the lesson of the British strategic failure in World War 1 in the 20th Century - a failure that consisted of Sir Douglas Haig's insistence on daily frontal assaults for months on end in a war of attrition that Britain would have lost had it not been for the entry of the United States into the war in 1918.  Or, to quote Theodore Sturgeon, "...and when you see them do that twice in a row you know you got a one-trick fighter, which makes it easy for anyone who knows two, and I know half a hundred."  (Gene Sharp knew at least 198 tricks!)

The most effective methods of strategic nonviolent resistance remain those which have the following characteristics:

• They reject all forms of violence.  This includes sabotage and property destruction!
• They employ an entire suite of tactical tools, and don't rely on just one or two tactics.
• They are able to motivate large numbers of the oppressed to withdraw as much as possible from providing any economic or political support to an oppressive regime.
• They are thus able to impose serious, sustained, long-term economic and political costs on the oppressive regime.

The most damaging costs that the oppressed can impose on the tyrant and his pillars of support consist of economic costs.  To impose these costs, the oppressed must create  alternative ways of getting their needs met, both individually and collectively.  They also need to understand what constitutes true "needs."  We need food, clothing, and shelter.  We do not need to watch the Superbowl or drink beer or go to Disneyland or buy a Tesla or become addicted to consumerism or attend churches that preach American patriotic fascism.  Individual and collective self-reliance and frugality remain potent weapons.  These weapons must be deployed as a lifestyle of resistance by which the oppressed withdraw from a corrupt prevailing order so that they can build a righteous alternative order.  This withdrawal is what weakens the corrupt prevailing order to the point that it collapses.  This can work even against a chump like Trump.  Imagine, for instance, the impact of a sustained, long-term stay-at-home strike or a sustained, long-term mass boycott of certain consumer goods sold by businesses that support Trump or that benefit from his policies!

So if you are a reader of my blog, and you want to join a righteous resistance, and you think I may have something good to say, please read my previous posts on strategic nonviolent resistance.  You can find links to them in the sidebar.  Thank you!

Ned Ludd's Latest Incarnations

This spring I bought an electric vehicle.  I bought it because I was tired of living in thrall of the terror of high and unpredictable gasoline prices, and because I was tired of financing (in my own small way) the geopolitical ambitions of thug nations with large oil reserves.  I bought it used from a rental agency instead of new because I am a cheapskate.  (And proud of it!)  I bought an EV that is not made by Tesla because I find Elon Musk to be emetic.  

My purchase of an EV was accompanied by a bit of research on the expansion of the EV market in the United States, as well as the progress of the rollout of clean energy both in the U.S. and worldwide.  In my research I discovered the unsurprising fact that many spokespersons from the white American evangelical/Protestant church are virulently opposed to the widespread adoption of both EV's and renewable energy.  I haven't looked too deeply at their reasons (some of which can be found here), although it wouldn't surprise me to hear that some pastors and other mouthpieces are probably claiming that EV's are yet another step to the emergence of a one-world government which will force us all to take the mark of ... the BEAST!  Pardon me while I roll my eyes at that one.  I do know that their chosen Presidential candidate is opposed to EV's.  But I'm not.  In fact, I like EV's.  I especially like mine, even though it's on the cheaper end of the spectrum.  

However, I have not yet paid for a home charging station.  This means that once every three or four weeks over the past five months I've been going to a local fast-charging station to top off my battery.  The charging station I've been using is part of a network of charging stations owned by an outfit called EVGo, a subsidiary of LS Power.  This past week I discovered that my favorite charging station was vandalized by people who cut the charging cords for all but one of the chargers.  On the same day I found out that the chargers had been vandalized, I discovered that this vandalism is part of a nationwide trend.  (See this and this for instance.)  Please note also that while much of the vandalism is motivated by a desire to make a quick buck off of stolen copper, the vandalism is also motivated in part by anger against the emergence of electric vehicle technology and the continued rollout of clean energy.  Evidently this has become a global phenomenon.  As a phenomenon it seems to me to share many characteristics of the anti-mask/anti-vax COVID denialism that was recently so prominent among the rank and file members of the Far Right in nations such as the United States.

It's telling that the police in my town have not been able to prevent the ongoing destruction or vandalizing of charging stations in my city.  Indeed it seems to me of late that the police are engaged in a passive-aggressive game in which they claim that because they can't so easily get away with committing unjust violence against those of us who do not have white skin, this of necessity means that they can't "do their jobs" in protecting our city from criminals who are caught red-handed or from motorists who drive like bats out of ...  I freely admit that maybe this last bit might just be my paranoid cynicism talking.  If you agree with my self-diagnosis, please "flap a napkin at me" as Barney Greenwald asked of his audience in the Caine Mutiny.  Or douse me with a bucket of cold water.  I promise I'll say "Thanks - I needed that!"  Meanwhile, I guess I'll be calling an electrician this week to get a home charging station installed.  Because, you see, I'm not going to give up my electric car.

Stopping To Smell the Roses (And Other Roadside Allergens)

It's been a bit since I wrote a new post for this blog.  Yet as I have discovered from recent comments to my blog, people are still visiting, reading, and making comments.  I want to take this opportunity to thank those who are still visiting this site and to explain my hiatus.

I remain deeply interested in the subject of economic precarity, not only in the United States, but throughout the developed world.   Therefore I'm still planning sooner or later to talk about those elements of precarity which I have not yet discussed, particularly regarding the coping mechanisms of the precariat.  However, it must be acknowledged that in order to say anything intelligent, I need time - time to think, time to do research, and time to synthesize my thoughts and research into a coherent post.  Writing some of the posts I want to write will be a rather heavy lift.  (I compare my attitude toward these posts to the attitude someone might have toward carting a huge pile of sand one wheelbarrow at a time after having worked at manual labor all day!  I know that sand needs to be moved, but please, not just yet...)

Another thing is that now seems to be a good time to take a bit of a mental health break.  The world at present is in a chaotic state due to the actions of rich and powerful people with narcissistic tendencies.  (I am thinking particularly of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.)  By their deeds they scream for attention, which seems to be a major motivation behind their choice to do such deeds.  Yet paying attention to these people and their deeds can be quite draining to the rest of us.  I am choosing right now to take a bit of a step back so that I can focus on the things in my life which are under my control and which I believe I have been called to do.  Focusing on that work helps me reclaim my agency.  Thus one of the things I have been doing is to read some big-picture books that provide the framework for identifying long-term social trends.  Also, I've started learning Mandarin Chinese.  I have my reasons, one of which is to gain the ability to understand China myself rather than hearing about China solely from increasingly right-wing American mass media.  Plus, it's just fun! - although I must go slowly.  (I've gotten to the point where I can tell you that 我有两只猫...)

I do remain interested in following the long-term outworking of certain social trends in both American and global society.  I am still very much convinced of the truth of such statements as, "Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap."  I firmly believe this applies to those who violate the Biblical mandate for social justice.  Thus it is interesting to see how the white American evangelical/Protestant church has begun to reap some unexpectedly bitter consequences.

Take climate change, for instance.  The white American evangelical/Protestant church has for decades engaged in magical/wishful/denialist thinking in its refusal to acknowledge the reality that the Earth's climate is changing due to human economic activity.  So it's rather biting to see how the ongoing climate crisis has begun to affect conservative, patriotic, Rethuglican churches, both in the Bible Belt and elsewhere in the U.S.  This year at least one church was hit by a tornado while services were in progress, and an increasing number of conservative right-wing churches are finding that property insurers will no longer write policies for them.  Indeed, a large number of churches are finding that their existing property insurance policies are being canceled.  It's not that property insurers are asking these churches about their politics.  It's just that so many of these churches are in areas that have now become susceptible to catastrophic weather events and/or wildfires.  Thus they have become a bad insurance risk.  Then there's the effect of the massive evangelical abuse scandals on availability of liability insurance coverage for churches and their staff.  It's telling to think that churches must now think of such things.  Maybe God isn't really on their side after all.

Anyway, please stay tuned to this blog if you're a regular reader.  I should start posting again in late November or in December, unless something occurs to me that does not require much bandwidth in order to write about, in which case I'll post sooner.  Thanks, all!

The Billboard Blitz Continues

 

One of many evangelical billboards which have sprung

up lately in my city...

I have stated several times in this blog that I am a Bible-believing Christian who seeks to follow the New Testament.  However, that does not mean that I support everyone and everything that is called "Christian" nowadays in the United States.  One of the assertions which I have made in this blog over the last five or so years is that the sort of "Christianity" embodied in white American evangelicalism has nothing to do with doing to others what one would wish to be done to oneself, nor does it have anything to do with loving one's neighbor or providing material help to those who are in material need.  Rather, the words and deeds of white American evangelicalism show that these evangelicals have simply made themselves into a tool for amassing secular earthly economic, political, and cultural power.  White American evangelicalism has become an expression of national and ethnic narcissism, a mere civic religion designed to bolster the power of one particular tribe and to justify the bloody deeds which that tribe has done in its bid to Make Itself Great.  (Maybe it was never really anything more than that!)

One of the ways in which white American evangelicalism has made itself a political tool is by its evil marriage to the Republican Party and to those political parties to the right of the Republicans.  The white American evangelical/Protestant church has repeatedly asserted over the last several decades that the Republican Party is the party of "godliness" and that it is the duty of Christians to vote Republican, to salute the Flag, and to be rabid patriots.  Thus it has been interesting to see the appearance of billboards such as the one pictured at the side of one of the streets in my town - especially during this election season.  Like the spread of smallpox pustules, the growth of mold colonies, or the sprouting of mushrooms, these billboards have become ever more numerous during the year and a half from the time I first noticed their appearance until now.

Most of these billboards are at least as shrill as the one in the picture, although a few outdo even this.  I am thinking of one such billboard next to a freeway in my town, which reads something like "Where are you going? HEAVEN or HELL?"  I can agree in the abstract with some of the messages of these billboards.  For instance, I do believe that Jesus is alive and ascended to the right hand of God.  However, I cringe when I hear this statement shouted shrilly from a billboard.  To me, the greatest evidence of the risen Christ is that those who claim to be His followers are being transformed into decent people.  Being shouted at by a billboard is very much less than convincing - especially when so many of the shouters who pay for such billboards have been caught in all kinds of scandals and have backed all sorts of really creepy political candidates.

But shouting billboards do tell us one thing.  They tell us that the shouters likely have lots of money.  To shout from a billboard for one month costs around $1200 for a small billboard of the type typically seen next to a four-lane urban street.  If you want to keep shouting and you want to use the same billboard, monthly costs after the first month run around $1000.  That means that to blast a message from a billboard for an entire year costs over $12,000.  Multiply that by fifteen or twenty billboards and you can see that someone somewhere is paying serious folding money to do his shouting!  And the cost increases even more if the shouter uses large, multi-panel billboards for his shouting.  I don't have an exact figure for the number of billboards now being used for the religious billboard blitz in my town, but I can imagine that the cost for this year alone will run at least $500,000.  If the same sort of billboard blitz is taking place elsewhere in the U.S., that means that the backers of this campaign have deep pockets.  

Yet that money may largely be going to waste, as the burgeoning number of exvangelicals, "Nones" and churchless Christians in America indicates.  I for instance have not gone to church since March 2020.  It may be that American evangelical civic religion is turning into a broken weapon.

Voices In My Head...

As part of my efforts to satisfy my monthly craving for foreign (especially non-Western) fiction, I was scouring the Internet several weeks ago for audio recordings of classic Chinese fiction.  I find audio recordings to be really handy, since these days most of the time that I would spend in actually sitting down to read anything is taken up in reading technical literature for my business.  That is why although a few months ago I picked up a used copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I haven't yet read more than a few pages.  On the other hand, how different would things have been if I had been able to find an audio recording of the book narrated by a Latino voice actor! (And no, I will definitely not watch the Netflix version!  Many things that Netflix touches get turned into garbage.)

Anyway, back to classic Chinese fiction.  During my Internet searches, I found a website called the Chinese Lore Podcast produced by a man named John Zhu.  As he states on his website, his mission is to bring classic ancient Chinese literature to Western audiences who don't speak Chinese.  The classic works he covers are very long, so that re-telling the story contained in one book takes between three and four years' worth of episodes.  However, Mr. Zhu's re-telling is done with humor, fresh perspectives, and helpful insights into various historical aspects of Chinese culture.  I listened to his re-telling of the Water Margin (水滸傳), and am working my way through his re-telling of Investiture of the Gods (封神演義).  One characteristic of both stories is that each tells of an imperial center that is in decline due to internal corruption, and each shows the effect of that decline and corruption in the lives of the ordinary people of the land.  In the case of the heroes of Water Margin, the corruption and decline was partially and temporarily reversed, although some of the chief heroes were at the end cheated out of the enjoyment of that reversal.  I haven't yet finished Investiture of the Gods, yet I know from the historical events on which the story is based that in that story the decline could not be reversed, since the corrupting cause of that decline lay with the emperor himself.

Stories of imperial decline have held a growing fascination for me since the days of the corrupt U.S. presidency of Donald Trump from 2016 to 2020.  I fervently hope that we don't get another taste of Trump starting in 2025, yet the possibility of such an outcome has once again stimulated my interest in reading (or in my case, listening to) stories of corruption and the resulting societal decline resulting from that corruption.  Thus I have been listening with interest to Investiture of the Gods.  Note: in Investiture, Jiang Ziya is a cool character.  He's the brains behind the good guys... However, while Investiture does focus somewhat on the corruption and resulting decline at the center of the Shang dynasty during the reign of its final emperor, it also spends a lot of time in describing epic battles between massive armies who are sometimes helped and at other times hindered by the intervention of superhuman creatures with special powers.  If that sort of thing is your main interest and you've worn out all your Star Wars DVD's (for those who still own DVD's), then Investiture of the Gods should be right up your alley.  

Now I can enjoy a really good sword fight scene about as much as any other U.S. male, yet my interest in listening to Investiture lay more in tracing how the outworkings of corruption at the top of a society lead to the fracture of that society and the fracture of the power base on which the people at the top rely.  So I was motivated to search for nonfiction accounts of that sort of fracture.  And I chose to search particularly for examples of recent corporate decline and collapse.  This choice was partly motivated by my recent exposure to a book about the ethical failures at the Boeing Company which led to serious and sometimes fatal problems with the 737 MAX airplane.  As I previously mentioned on this blog, the problems within the Boeing Company are symptomatic of almost all of American late capitalism in the first half of the 21st century.  Thus it is fairly easy to find examples of once mighty and dominant U.S. corporations which have crashed and burned within the last twenty years.  

One such corporation is General Electric.  From my perusal of the book Obliquity by John Kay, as well as a brief examination of the history of GE, I had some idea of what to expect when examining GE. I knew I would find a company which started out by trying to make itself an industry leader in the manufacture of artifacts of beautifully good work that meets necessary needs, yet which lost its way once it made its primary goal the continuous growth of shareholder dividends and stock price.  According to many sources, this shift was most strongly exemplified in the reign of former GE CEO Jack Welch, who boasted 40 straight quarters (or ten years) of exceeding Wall Street projections of GE stock earnings growth.  Unfortunately, he did it by means of "creative earnings manipulation" according to a number of sources.  That manipulation included firing or laying off massive numbers of people in order to cut costs, as well as speculation in real estate and other debt markets through the subsidiary GE Capital.

I sought to learn more about the finer details of the decisions that derailed GE, so several days ago I bought an audiobook copy of Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon by William D. Cohan.  I was particularly hoping to learn the role of Jack Welch's leadership in the demise of GE.  As far as Cohan's book, I can only say that while there were good points, there were also bad (or weak) points.  The book's good points include a fairly accurate history of GE's early days.  For instance, Cohan rightly points out that GE was not actually founded by Thomas Edison, but was founded against Edison's wishes.  This is contrary to the mythology which has sprung up around GE.  However, Cohan fails to mention that neither Edison nor GE actually invented the world's first commercially available incandescent light bulbs.  (That honor actually goes to William E. Sawyer.)  Cohan also implies that GE was materially involved in the invention and development of the world's first turbojet engine.  That also is not true.  The first jet engine for aircraft was actually invented by a British air force officer and engineer named Frank Whittle.

The book's bad or weak points include the fact that Cohan glosses over the fact that Jack Welch's "rank and yank" system of firing those at the bottom ten percent of his staff in annual performance reviews actually created a toxic culture in which people strove to be in the mediocre middle because that was the safest place to be in the organizational culture.  Cohan also glosses over the impact of Welch's massive layoffs and other downsizing initiatives on both GE's products and on the workers who were let go.  And Cohan glosses over the impact of Welch's "creative earnings manipulation" on the future of GE - especially with regard to the reliance on the GE Capital subsidiary to make quarterly earnings targets.  The book goes on to lay the vast majority of the blame for the decline and fall of GE on Jeff Immelt, the CEO who succeeded Welch in 2001.  (While Immelt had some serious managerial weaknesses and GE under Immelt certainly made some serious errors (see this for instance), from other sources I get the impression that it was Jack who sailed the ship of GE into treacherous shoals.  Jeff was simply not equal to the task of getting GE away from the rocks.) Meanwhile, Jack Welch is portrayed as a Really Swell Guy overall.  Indeed, at times the book reads like a secular hagiography of Jack Welch and of GE.  Cohan's book in some ways reminds me of another book I listened to last winter: Family Reins: The Extraordinary Rise and Epic Fall of an American Dynasty by Billy Busch.  The publisher's blurb for this book touts it as an expose of the factors which led the Busch family to lose the Anheuser-Busch beer company to a foreign conglomerate.  Yet it actually reads as a self-indulgent portrait of the Busch family - almost an auto-hagiography of Billy Busch himself.  

Books like these make me wonder not only about the future of capitalism in the United States, but also about the future of serious scholarly study of the failures of American capitalism.  There is a crying need for such serious, rigorous, objective, well-informed study - especially in light of the number of formerly large American companies which have either been bought up by foreign investors in the 21st century or which have gone bankrupt and disappeared.  Otherwise people of the future may well be forced to look with perplexity at the monumental wreckage left behind by such companies, unable to discern the clues to their crashing end except that they were run by Really Swell Guys who somehow bear no culpability for the mess that has been left behind.  Meanwhile I am left wondering a few things myself, namely, whether the unrealistically optimistic group expectations fostered by a steady run of unrealistically good news actually doom organizations when those organizations are suddenly forced to face really bad news.  Also, how completely do the characteristics of corporate decline match the characteristics of imperial or societal decline?  Good questions, no?

And now back to the next epic battles of Investiture of the Gods!

The Coping Mechanisms of the Precariat: Prelude To The Great Resignation

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity and the precariat.  In the last post in this series, I introduced the concept of a social nonmovement.  To quickly review, a social nonmovement is the spontaneous, unplanned emergence of a set of social practices among a large number of people, among whom these practices begin to encroach upon and ultimately disrupt an existing status quo.  The concept of the social nonmovement is introduced and explored in Asef Bayat's book Life As Politics.  What is especially relevant to the precariat is the emergence of social nonmovements among the poor and powerless in response to the pressure inflicted on these people by the rich and powerful masters of an existing status quo.  These social nonmovements encroach upon and weaken the power of the masters of the existing status quo, yet they frequently operate outside the notice of these masters even as they weaken the power of these masters.  However, sometimes a social nonmovement catches the eye of a large number of the privileged members of a society - especially when the social nonmovement appears suddenly, spreads quickly, and achieves a massive amount of disruption in a short amount of time.

Such a social nonmovement is the Great Resignation - a time in which massive numbers of people decided that their jobs were such a royal pain that they refused to take anymore, and quit.  Most scholars and journalists consider the Great Resignation to be one of the outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic which shut down much of the American economy in 2020 due to the failure of then-President Donald Trump and his Republican Party to effectively prepare for the pandemic.  These scholars and journalists consider 2021 and 2022 to be the peak years of the Great Resignation, and some of these even say that the Great Resignation is now largely over.  However, there are minority voices such as journalists at the Harvard Business Review who say that the Great Resignation is actually a long-term trend which began at the beginning of the last decade and is still continuing.

Most people who have been alive for any length of time realize that throughout history, worker attitudes have fluctuated between job satisfaction or dissatisfaction in cycles that are reminiscent of the alternation of yin and yang in ancient Chinese philosophy.  In today's post I hypothesize that the 1960's in the United States were a time of increasing job satisfaction for an expanding number of people.  However, in making such a hypothesis, I am confronted by the difficulties which social scientists have had in defining what exactly is job satisfaction, let alone in figuring out how to measure it.  (See, for instance, "What is Job Satisfaction?", Edwin A. Locke, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1969.)  Nevertheless, a 1982 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics supports my hypothesis, noting that in 1973, 87 percent of workers were either very satisfied or moderately satisfied with their jobs.

Yet that picture has obviously changed over the years.  In 2017, an organization called the Conference Board provided a chart outlining the historical measurement of U.S. worker job satisfaction from 1987 to 2016.  According to that chart, worker satisfaction was at or below 50 percent during five of the eight years of the presidency of Republican George W. Bush.  According to the 2022 "Job Satisfaction Chartbook" from the same source, job satisfaction "is the highest it has been in a decade" at 60 percent.  Yet according to the Achievers Workforce Institute, two-thirds of employees are thinking about leaving their jobs in 2024.  This was also true in 2022, according to the Institute. This is yet more evidence that the Great Resignation is an ongoing trend.  (Maybe the people who answered the Conference Board surveys in 2022 weren't fully sharing their feelings...)

Now declining job satisfaction can be tolerated by workers for a time, yet as it intensifies, it leads to a point in which people decide that the pain of staying in an existing intolerable situation exceeds any potential suffering involved in making a change to that situation.  And workers have from time to time reacted explosively to their workplaces as illustrated by songs like "Oney" (written by Gary Chesnut and sung by Johnny Cash) and "Take This Job And..." (written by David Allan Coe and sung by Johnny Paycheck), as well as idioms such as "going postal."  (By the way, I do not condone or encourage workplace violence!)  But stories about successful quitting have been made to seem like the sort of rare events that are beyond the reach of most working stiffs.  Yet the undeniable fact is that during the last years of the last decade and the first years of this decade, a huge number of people found themselves pushed into quitting.  It is natural to ask what factors pushed so many into quitting at around the same time.

I will not definitively answer that question today.  However, I will suggest what I consider to be the likely factors.  Treat my suggestions as hypotheses, if you will.

• First, there is the erosion of the power of organized labor, an erosion which actually began with Republican President Richard Nixon's wage and price controls in the early 1970's.  This erosion kicked into high gear under the Republican presidency of Ronald Reagan and has not slowed down since.  The power of unions to protect their workers from low wages and excessive work demands was thus eroded.
• There is also the removal of the guarantee of lifetime employment for good and loyal employees of large corporations.  This was pioneered by such CEO's as Jack Welch of General Electric and was a direct contributor to the economic precarity suffered by a majority of working Americans today.
• There were the stresses imposed by globalism as wage and labor arbitrage.  This globalism was championed by right-wing, conservative executives of major corporations - the same sort of executives who are in many cases supporting the MAGA hostility to open borders championed by Donald Trump, as they see that sometimes smart people from poor countries can turn the tables on economic systems that are rigged against them.
• Consider also the removal or weakening of workplace protections against employer abuse.  Many employers (as well as business customers), thus unhindered from having to be humane toward their employees, turned some of those employees into metaphorical toilet paper, doormats, and punching bags onto whom these bosses could project their unresolved and unjustified hostility.
• Lastly (at least for today's post), there is the rise of the toxic workplace - a workplace in which bosses either perpetrate or enable bullying and mobbing behavior by popular workplace staff against those who are deemed to be scapegoats.  

Note that the last two factors are the direct result of the creation of a massive power imbalance between employers and employees over the last four decades.  The employees, reduced to a state of naked dependency on capricious bosses and a capricious labor market, were thus exposed to the prospect of either starving or having to meet unreasonable and destructive demands from these employers.  This made the management ladder a very attractive place for abusive, psychopathic, sociopathic, and otherwise personality-disordered people to take root.  Now here's an interesting perspective on the reason why leaders and managers allow abusive workplaces to continue: their continuance satisfies the ongoing psychological cravings of such managers.  A parallel to the abusive workplace is the abusive church.  As "Captain Cassidy" pointed out in a recent post on her blog Roll to Disbelieve, the whole point of creating an abusive power structure is so that the masters of such a structure (and those who are their special pets) can enjoy the psychological thrill of owning such a power structure.  And what is the best way to experience that thrill?  Why, to abuse the people at the bottom levels of such a structure, of course!  Consider Captain Cassidy's third and fourth points from the post I have cited:

• "Nothing is ever off-limits for those who hold power. More to the point, following the group’s rules is for the powerless. The powerful not only do not follow those rules, they flaunt their disobedience."

• "The powerful delight in the most potent expressions of power: forcing people to do things they don’t want to do; rubbing their own disobedience in the noses of the powerless. If power is not flexed, the powerful might as well not have it at all."

Captain Cassidy's perspective echoes what Chauncey Hare and Judith Wyatt wrote in Chapter 4 of their 1997 book Work Abuse: How To Recognize and Survive It.  But just as abusive churches (and abusive white American evangelicalism) have begun to suffer a loss of social power as their abuse has been exposed, abusive workplaces throughout the English-speaking world have begun to suffer an erosion of economic power.  Consider that workplace mistreatment cost U.S businesses between $691.7 billion and $1.7 trillion in 2021, according to a 2021 article in the Journal of Organizational Behavior.  A 2023 Forbes article puts the cost of toxic workplaces to U.S. businesses at $1.8 trillion annually.  According to a 2019 SHRM report, the cost of employee turnover in 2019 due to job dissatisfaction alone was $223 billion.  No matter what number is used, we're not talking chump change here.  What's more, toxic workplace culture has been a key characteristic of companies that either recently underwent scandals or were driven out of business, companies such as Volkswagen, Theranos (and its jailbird ex-CEO), and WeWork, to name a few.

The pinnacle of ecstasy for abusive employers seemed to come in the early months of 2020, in which powerful employers were able to bully their staff (many of whom were stuck in low-wage "service" jobs) to show up for work during the COVID-19 pandemic.  It was that pressure and the resulting threat of actual physical death which proved to be the final straw for many people who had hitherto surrendered themselves to enduring toxic workplaces.  This is also what pushed the upward trend of the Great Resignation into something of a landslide-in-reverse and which catapulted the Great Resignation into the forefront of the American public consciousness.  The next post in this series will examine the paths taken by workers from various sectors of the American economy after they quit their jobs from 2020 onward.

P.S. While I have enjoyed many of the posts on Captain Cassidy's blog Roll to Disbelieve, I can't say that I agree with everything she has written.  For instance, I am still a Christian, whereas she has deconstructed to such an extent that she has rejected Christianity altogether.  However, I can't say that I blame her as I look at the sorry legacy of white American evangelicalism and its marriage to secular earthly economic and political power.

P.P.S. I have mentioned Donald Trump a few times in today's post.  Some from the Right may assert that I should not speak critically of him since he supposedly recently survived an "assassination attempt."  And I must say that while I despise Donald Trump, I do not condone any attempt to assassinate him.  However, when I read that his injuries were not life-threatening (in fact, some reports state that he was not actually hit by a bullet at all), I have to wonder if the whole "assassination attempt" wasn't some kind of publicity stunt or false-flag operation designed to boost his media profile and polling numbers.  I don't have much sympathy...

Book Recommendation - Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

I recently bought an audiobook copy of Peter Robison's book Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing.  It's been a fascinating listen so far.  For those unfamiliar with the story, the 737 MAX is the most recent version of the Boeing 737 aircraft.  It was hastily (and some would say haphazardly) developed by the Boeing Company as a competitive response to the introduction of the Airbus A320neo family of commercial passenger aircraft by European aircraft manufacturer Airbus SE.  Airbus is now larger than Boeing and earns more revenue than Boeing, even though Airbus was founded decades after the founding of the Boeing Company.

One of the reasons why Airbus is now bigger and more influential than Boeing is the Boeing 737 MAX.  The various versions of the 737 have all arisen from an initial design that is nearly 60 years old, and which has been stretched and tweaked in order to compete and remain relevant in comparison to Airbus offerings.  In the case of the MAX, one of the modifications involved increasing the size of the engines and placing them far forward on the wings so that the center of gravity of the airplane was shifted relative to earlier versions of the 737.  This led to a natural aerodynamic tendency of the nose of the MAX to pitch upward at unwanted times during certain maneuvers.  Boeing could have responded to this problem by redesigning the aircraft's control surfaces, but Boeing upper management pushed hard to avoid any modifications that might cost money and slow deliveries of the airplane.  So they resorted to a software "fix" in the aircraft flight control computers that would force the nose of the aircraft down in the event that the computer and its sensors determined that the aircraft was about to enter a stall condition.  There were only a few problems with this solution...  One of these problems was that in budget versions of the aircraft, the computer depended on inputs from only one sensor, and if that sensor malfunctioned, the computer could crash the airplane.  Another problem was that when Boeing sold budget versions of the MAX to airlines (especially overseas airlines operating in the developing world), it did not tell pilots or aircraft owners about this software system.  As a result, there were two crashes of the 737 MAX in 2018 and 2019.  All crew and passengers were killed.  (One other thing to note: this year, in 2024, an emergency exit plug blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX in flight, resulting in an explosive decompression and an emergency landing at Portland International Airport.)

One might ask how such a state of affairs was allowed to develop in an American company that used to be the epitome of American innovation and technological advancement.  Peter Robison's book describes how at the beginning of the jet age, Boeing became focused on being the best, most technically advanced aircraft manufacturer in the world, obsessed with pushing the envelope of aircraft design to produce the world's most advanced and capable passenger aircraft.  For instance, the Boeing 747 was the company's proudest achievement of the 20th century.  But all that changed when Boeing merged with McDonnell-Douglas in 1997, with the result that the focus of the Boeing company became maximizing shareholder value, revenue, and stock price while minimizing costs.  Thus over the next three decades the Boeing Company began to resemble a once proud, strong ox or bull being eaten from the inside by tapeworms.

Robison's Flying Blind is a gripping, exciting, emotive expansion and elaboration of a theme which was touched on briefly in the third chapter of a much drier and more stuffy academic book which I listened to back in 2022, namely, Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly, by John Kay.  In that third chapter, titled "The Profit-Seeking Paradox: How The Most Profitable Companies Are Not The Most Profit-Oriented," Kay tells the story of a few well-known, formerly powerful companies which, to use my own words, began with the main goal to "do beautifully good work in order to meet necessary needs".  As they got really, really good at doing that kind of work, they naturally began to earn lots of money.  But as soon as they shifted their focus from being primarily about doing beautifully good work to making lots of money, they began to destroy themselves.  If you decide to read the book, note that Kay specifically mentions Boeing in this chapter.

Yet this is the character of almost all of American late capitalism in 2024.  This is also the economic philosophy pushed by all of the media outlets of the American Right.  This is not only leading to the hollowing-out of once-iconic American businesses by rich parasites, but is also contributing to the precarity and inequality that define American society at this time.  I can't help but think that this is going to end badly for the parasites at the top.