On Tyranny

I have heard a lot about this book. Bummed that I felt an ethical panic that resulted in me leaving my apartment in the middle of the day, unprompted, a week or two ago to go to the book store and buy it.It's short and readable. The question is: is anyone that's likely to pick up a book called “On Tyranny” going to make a decision to adjust their lives to ingest its lessons? I don't know. This is the same fundamental question facing all of these books, from Albright's [b:Fascism: A Warning 35230469 Fascism A Warning Madeleine K. Albright https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1513524068l/35230469.SY75.jpg 56577028] to something as basic as Goodwin's [b:Leadership: In Turbulent Times 38657386 Leadership In Turbulent Times Doris Kearns Goodwin https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1519455513l/38657386.SY75.jpg 60268060]. Anything that promotes a ‘patriotic' value or thing that yearns for us to not passively accept the fall of a great experiment is subjected to a purity test. But I will try to put the crushing cynicism I'm feeling right now aside to think more about this book. I'm trying to do that because I have watched the same ten-minute video of Obama talking about cynicism periodically for the past, what, maybe ten years? (Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxuwazaXOMg). I really do believe that cynicism is a chronic condition that can wrap around your eyes and blind you and then proceed to your heart and hollow it out.The lessons are straightforward. I appreciate the historical element to them. It is one thing to know that everything happening right now has a direct analog in the fall of the Wiemar Republic and rise of Hitler and other fascistic leaders to power. It is another to read it spelled out succinctly and bluntly. I have personally witnessed in my work steps taken that mirror those that occurred back then. It is alarming, and is causing me a sort of crisis of confidence. I have shared with people I work with, and repeated to myself, that we have to remain calm, mindful, and carefully navigate. We cannot let ourselves panic and be pushed back into nothing. That's the goal of all this chaos.p54-55 - “In fact [Churchill] himself helped the British to define themselves as a proud people who would calmly resist evil. Other politicians would have found support in British public opinion to end the war. Churchill instead resisted, inspired, and won. ... Churchill did what others had not done. Rather than concede in advance, he forced Hitler to change his plans.” (emphasis mine, -TB)Back in November, a thing I worked on was quietly shuttered. The phrase, “strategic retreat” was used. It pissed me off something terrible. It was the first time I was majorly angry in my job. There is no strategic retreat. If ground is ceded it must be fought back and time is long and suffering in that time is the responsibility of those who refused to even attempt to hold back the tide. Snyder talks about this a lot in this book: anticipatory compliance. Changing things in an attempt to detract attention, giving up ground to hide or to not attract attention. I understand the want for this, but is there an imagining that by doing this, you are not simply capitulating to the pressure of a despot? I hate that I see people lying to themselves that, if we can just be very quiet and make it through a few years of stress, we can bring all of this back out of a box someday and pick up where we left off.That is not how this works. If you put this in a box, it will be lost. You cannot set your values down. If you hide them, they will suffocate and die within you. They need nurturing and they need exercise.p124 - “If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis: We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance—and then we do something shocking at someone else's orders.”At work these past few weeks, I have heard our current situation described as a “swinging pendulum” and I think this is a manifestation of learned helplessness. I do not believe there is a pendulum. I think there is a clash between good and evil. The pendulum, as they describe it, are bulges in the fight. If you take for granted that the fight is a pendulum and will swing back as a matter of physics, you are ceding the fight.A quote that people go to, that I hear a lot, from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Yet, I so often hear this in a capitulating or passive framing. As if we can simply accept that things will get better. This is something of what Snyder calls the politics of inevitability. King never meant for this statement to be a release from our responsibility to our fellows and ourselves to be the ones forcing the bend. The arc only bends because pressure is exerted upon it. We cannot be passive.I am thinking about this every day. Because I do not know exactly where my role is. How can I use what exceedingly little skill that I have to make any meaningful difference? Is my only role really as someone who might be able to pump breaks or mitigate harm? I don't feel very good about that. I want to do something.Snyder does not demand that we all take to the streets. In some ways, the resistance he imagines is small and obtainable (lesson 12, make eye contact and small talk). In discussion the other day, someone I was speaking to said they think this will continue until something gets people in the street, a sort of general strike. I am skeptical that such a thing is possible in this country. I don't think we have the in-the-streets culture of a country like France or others. Much of our populace is completely captured either in this cult of personality or in crushing poverty, and often both.Still, I think that we all have some role to play. I think identifying that role is non-trivial. I think this book is good reading for those who want to be able to start identifying even small things they can do in their lives to begin.—Notes/highlights:* p35 - You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them.* p37 - “We have seen that the real meaning of the greengrocer's slogan has nothing to do with what the text of the slogan actually says. Even so, the real meaning is quite clear and generally comprehensible because the code is so familiar: the greengrocer declares his loyalty in the only way the regime is capable of hearing; that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place. (Snyder quoting [a:Václav Havel 71441 Václav Havel https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1300059716p2/71441.jpg].)”* p54-55 - In fact [Churchill] himself helped the British to define themselves as a proud people who would calmly resist evil. Other politicians would have found support in British public opinion to end the war. Churchill instead resisted, inspired, and won. ... Churchill did what others had not done. Rather than concede in advance, he forced Hitler to change his plans.” (emphasis mine, -TB)* p66 - You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. The renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual—and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism.* p68 - The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims a president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your retribution.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that the transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Fuhrer.” * Connection to my clinical deprogramming thing.* p71 - [Fascists] used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.* p79- (TB: Snyder is making an analogy between publishing/sharing falsehoods and our behavior driving cars.) We know that the damage will be mutual. We protect the other person without seeing him, dozens of time every day. (TB: reminds me a lot of [a:Erving Goffman 149 Erving Goffman https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1210309065p2/149.jpg]'s facework theory, which was a sociological thing on how people engage with one another with a concerted effort to protect not only their face (reputation, impression) and that of those around them. Has fascinated me since I read about it in the UIC stacks in 2013.)* p81 - “Make eye contact and small talk.” (Lesson 12), then p32: “You might not be sure, today or tomorrow, who feels threatened in the United States. But if you affirm everyone, you can be sure that certain people will feel better.”* p84 - Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets.* p120 - We learned to say that there was “no alternative” to the basic order of things, a sensibility that the Lithuanian political theorist Leonidas Donskis called “liquid evil.” Once inevitability was taken for granted, criticism indeed became slippery. What appeared to be critical analysis often assumed that the status quo could not actually change, and thereby indirectly reinforced it.* p124 - If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis: We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance—and then we do something shocking at someone else's orders. * TB: I have seen our current situation described as a “swinging pendulum” and I think this is a manifestation of learned helplessness. I do not believe there is a pendulum. I think there is a clash between good and evil. The pendulum, as they describe it, are bulges in the fight. If you take for granted that the fight is a pendulum and will swing back as a matter of physics, you are ceding the fight.* p126: “If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And to make history, young Americans will have to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.”