What follows is the second part in our three part series on how the principles of nonviolence bring about positive, meaningful change for society and can help us to finally arrive at that every elusive “better tomorrow” that has always been promised by those in power but which has never actually manifested.
You can find Part 1: The Protests here and Part 3: The Way to Tomorrow here.
Last week, I began a series of articles explaining how we triumph over the government and its willingness to use violence and brutality to terrorize people into obedience. In that article we explored the tools of nonviolence specifically as tools to confront the police on the streets and to win mass support from the populace and win concessions from those in power. Today we move beyond the limited view of winning simply the moment. And unlike the endless, meaningless, purposeless mass ritual of voting, which does nothing but manufacture the consent of the masses and ensure their submission to the ruling political elites who profit from the ignorance of the masses (see the image above), we want to act in ways that will help us to actually win the day and create a better tomorrow. In this conflict, as in all others, the tools of noncompliance, civil disobedience, and nonviolence are far more powerful tools than bullets, bombs, and mass slaughter to win not just the day, but to revolutionize society. These tools will help us build a better society for all on the foundations of peace, liberty, justice, and prosperity by eliminating the most violent, oppressive, and warmongering institution in society, that Mother of All Monsters- the State itself.
Expose The State
If anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.
(Matthew 5:40)
Jesus taught His followers that when they were stripped of their possession by corrupt laws that allowed the powerful to rob the poor that they should strip naked in court and throw at their accuser their very last possessions, the cloak that acted as their underwear, and stand naked in front of everyone. By doing so they exposed those around them to the very corruption and evil of their actions, ruining the masquerade of the law with a stark revelation of the truth. The magisterial dignity that those in power use as a foundation for their authority isn’t merely lampooned by this act, it is exposed as nothing but smoke and mirrors altogether. At the same time the disadvantaged and politically powerless were able to seize the moment and communicate with clarity and sharpness about the true nature of the “law” as an instrument of oppression. We can do this today, making ourselves open object lessons of the corruption and evil of the system, in a number of ways.
By refusing to be violent we expose the State for the machinery of brutality that it is at heart. It always justifies its violence, its extortion, its theft, its rape and sexual assault, as being for the “common good” and because it accords with “the law” it is supposedly different than the looter robbing a Target or a rioter burning down a 7-11. When you become the victim of brutality even though you have never offered any physical threat or harm you rip this mask off the State and show the government for what it really is -not a Bride waiting upon the Bridegroom but a Whore riding upon a Beast. Once this is known the hearts of the people will turn against it and the whole house of cards begins to crumble.
Outside of nonviolent action there are a lot of different forms of direct action that can take place. For example, if at a protest you should make yourself as harmless as possible. No protective gear. No masks. No shields. No clubs. If it is warm, no jackets. Expose yourself completely so that when the cops show up in their full riot gear, armed to the teeth, ready to kill instead of looking tough and powerful they look ridiculously over prepared and stupid. The fact that they are nothing but a violent domestic military becomes obvious. And, if they hurt you, they are revealed as being evil for all the world to see. It may seem paradoxical to some, but the truth is that when you are at your most physically harmless you are at your most powerful and therefore most dangerous to the State itself, which means you are not harmless at all.
You do always have the option of going naked as well. Strip before the State and its enforcers to reveal how naked we all are before their cruelty. This may sound humorous and it isn’t without its dangers. But America is a contradictory society when it comes to sex -at once being drawn to anything remotely seeming overtly sexual while reviling against those who actually are overtly sexual- and as an act of “guerrilla theater” it doesn’t just capture the attention of those around you, it provokes media attention to pay attention to you. That creates the moment where your message about the evils of the State can be laid bare for the shameful truths they are. You will have weaponized your nakedness to strip the State down to its naked truths. And if anyone hassles you over it, remind them you’re just following the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Overwhelm The State
If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
(Matthew 5:41)
As a tactic this one is fairly straightforward. Sometimes the best thing to do to shutdown the system is to glut it. You fill its cop cars, its prisons, and its jails. You have so many being constantly arrested that every cop is so busy arresting people that they cannot do anything else- including trying to attack those not being arrested. The system can only hold so much. So you overwhelm it. And in overwhelming it, you shut it down. You, in essence, use the system against itself until it is paralyzed with its inability to do anything. And then, when it is full to the rafters, it will either have to break its own laws about treatment and occupancy or it will have to let you go. It doesn’t have the bedding, food, water, or space to do otherwise.
If it does the former then it opens itself up to crippling suit after suit that takes from it precious treasure and time. If the latter then you merely go from the jail cell back to the front of the protest. In these ways you apply enormous pressure to the system itself, to the point that it cannot function. And when it cannot function it cannot go about the legal rituals that act as its justifications and mental loopholes that justify the system in the eyes of the masses. As that system breaks down so will the trust of the people in the organization which uses that system as justification for its existence.
The outcome of this will be to make the laws unenforceable and the actual job of the police -to violently compel obedience to the State- likewise impossible. Mass noncompliance will overwhelm them with more law breakers than they will have place for them. Those lawbreakers willingly going to jail will then overwhelm the system itself and cripple its ability to do the job it claims to do. There are more of us then there are of them. We can keep constantly overwhelming their system by filling their jails to the brim and occupying the attention of every single cop while still carrying on active and powerful nonviolent protests and getting well rested and refreshed people cycled in every day. They cannot. The mere act of doing their job will exhaust them beyond weariness and not only will their ability to do their jobs be broken, so will be their will. This will cripple even the ability of brutal totalitarian regimes to enforce their will on the public. Without our mass compliance they have no power. Through peaceful means we will make their domination impossible and live as if it didn’t exist at all. In doing so it will become reality.
Dissolve The State
Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you. (Matthew 5:42)
The State perseveres because it has convinced people that it is needed, that without someone to beat, cage, rob, and murder them people would just go insane. Well, the riots have revealed the exact opposite- that the product of the State is violence and insanity. All of its outcomes are twisted, mediocre, and ultimately only about extending or protecting its power. But most people do not know this because they have been mentally conditioned to think of the State as the Secular Messiah who can deliver them from all their woes.
Getting around this mental conditioning – perhaps brainwashing considering the idolatrous effusions of love and subjection we are taught to pledge to the State and its glories from childhood- can be the most difficult task of all, but it is the most necessary. Everything else we do will only be half-measures if we do not wean people off their illusions of safety and reliance upon the State because, as the history of the United States demonstrates, the bend of Statism is always towards greater and greater totalitarianism. Minarchy is merely the ante-chamber of the total state. If we do not pull the people away from their faith in the State then the result, at best, will only be a momentary pull back of the policing powers of the State; momentary because they will increase again and again, sometimes slow and sometimes quickly, until they arrive at where they are now once more, and perhaps go beyond. If we hope to make things truly better, to cripple racism, nationalism, sexism, and all other forms of hatred and take from them their soul-crushing power, we must get rid of the State itself.
So, how do we do that? Said simply, you replace it.
There are many terms for this, the main two being Constructive Programs and Parallel Institutions. Without going in depth into this concept, something that could be its own long article, the brief explanation of this idea is that in order to replace the system of oppression you have to construct a system that offers the people what they believe the oppressive system does, minus the oppression. So if people believe that the government feeds the hungry then we must build systems of charity that feed the hungry. If people believe the oppressive system grants them protection then we must build systems that help them feel safe and which can use the power of peace to counter violence and bring unity and friendship to nominal enemies. If people believe the oppressive system offers education, then we have to build a system that puts education within the possibility of the poor. If people believe the State should manage justice, then we must build parallel institutions that help people achieve justice. And so on, ad infinitum.
One of the great things about these institutions is that they’re multitudinous. Instead of one top down model being forced onto hundreds of millions of people that is insanely expensive and fails to accomplish almost all of its most foundational goals, by building parallel institutions we build a plethora of systems that can be adapted to the wants and needs of the parent and student. This diversity is one of the greatest strengths of these constructive programs. They allow people to find or develop systems that serve not just their needs but which can be adopted and adapted by others to meet their needs and improve their lives. Secular or religious, black or white, natural born or immigrant, men or women, there are many needs we all have that overlap with others and are also totally unique to us. Parallel Institutions create ways that we can help each other in a large variety of ways whereas the State forces you to serve its ways and forms.
These institutions are essential. We can achieve victories, even great victories using the power of nonviolence, noncompliance, exposing the State for what it is, and overwhelming its systems, but we will never triumph over the State until we can show that it is never needed. And if we don’t triumph over it then it will lay like Nidhogg gnawing at the roots of Yggsdrasil, eating away at every advance made, increasing its power at every opportunity, inciting hatred and divisions along whatever fault lines it can, seeking to destroy anything that gets in its way, and ravaging the world in the process. Our work will only ever be half finished and always in peril. So we must have these institutions to ensure people never revert back to the State out of desperation once it is gone. As we build them we will draw people to them while exposing the State for what it is and people will voluntarily turn away from it. After all, why would you allow yourself to be robbed, beaten, caged, and killed by this malformed thing that neither you nor anyone else needs, when everything you need can and is being provided privately and peacefully? There will not need to be a war or bloodshed on our part, no need to rule by blood and horror, in order to “win” our freedom. We will simply be free and the State, deprived of its extorted wealth and having no power over a fearless people, will dissolve like so much sea foam in the ocean breeze.
And when it does, these institutions will continue on serving the needs of the people who will neither want nor need a return to the old ways of oppressive violence and robbery in order to get even the semblance of justice. After all, why would you settle for a shadow of the thing when you have the thing itself, why settle for a picture of bread when you have a fresh loaf in your hands? This is one of the great blessings of nonviolence. Dr. Chenoweth, found that nonviolent movements are far more likely to usher in less oppressive political institutions and are much less likely to devolve into conflict than violent revolutions, which typically end in equally oppressive political system as the one before and that in turn inspires further civil war to overthrow the new regime. But even her studies were done within the confines of the Statist mentality. Understanding the poison of the State we can take the power of the system farther. We can move beyond the State altogether.
End of Part 2.
Coming Friday, June 19: How We Win: Part 3- The Way to Tomorrow
The next part will move beyond how we deal with protests and the State itself to the outcomes of nonviolence, noncompliance, civil disobedience, and the dismantling of the machinery of oppression that is the State and the ending of its endless war against society. We will look at how using the tools of love dismantles hatred, brings peace, and increases love amongst all peoples, ultimately replacing discord with reconciliation, and moving us forward towards Zion, the Beloved Community.