Now is the Time to Write for Our Lives
A book, a tv-show, and why we must write
There is something about being suspended 40,000 feet in the air that so consistently provokes bird’s eye view thinking. During a recent flight to New York, I read a book gifted to me by a reader of this Substack titled Beautiful Souls. Written by journalist Eyal Press, it explores the dissent of “ordinary people in extraordinary times.” While I don’t agree with all of Press’ conclusions, such as his casual dismissal of militancy as an effective mechanism to catalyze widespread resistance, his central argument is relevant to today’s political context.
Press argues that “ordinary people,” who he defines as anybody who is not radicalized or engaged in political activism, have great capacity to reject complicity and attempt bold acts of resistance during times of crisis. Press narrates four individual stories in four different contexts, drawing on psychological studies about why people choose dissent over obedience. One of these experiments, conducted by social-psychologist Stanley Milgram, reveals an uncomfortable truth about a human tendency to obey authority.
Milgram’s experiment includes three people: an overseer in a white lab coat, a person taking a paired-word test in a separate room, and a participant asked to press an electrocution button that zaps the test-taker when they answer incorrectly. Milgram deceptively tells the participant that the study is to measure how physical pain impacts test results, which is not the true purpose of the experiment. Instead, the test-taker is an actor and Milgram studies the participant’s inclination for obedience when the authority figure (the lab-coated overseer) asks them to administer pain on another human for something as inconsequential as incorrectly answering a test question.
In a shocking (pun intended) result, Milgram found that 65% of participants continued to press the electrocution button all the way until the actor pretended to pass out. Press writes of Milgram’s study: “It was a startling display of how quickly ordinary people prodded by an authority figure could be turned into brutal sadists, not in Nazi Germany, but among a random sample of accountants, factory workers, clerks, and advertising executives in the United States.”
Startling indeed, but Milgram’s analysis focuses on something other than a human appetite for cruelty. Instead, most of the participants' instincts led them to initially protest the experiment, but when the overseer reiterated that the participant bore no responsibility for the pain of the test-taker, participants reluctantly obliged. Miligram calls this the “agentic-state” when a person “sees himself as an agent for carrying out another person’s wishes and stops agonizing about the consequences.”
Milgram’s experiment is more pertinent now than ever. Press writes: “In a world governed by large, impersonal forces, where the link between cause and effect is increasingly unclear, individuals thrust into compromising situations are rarely at a loss of opportunities to disavow responsibility.” The actions we take, from our consumption decisions, to our labor output, and our political participation, are both increasingly connected to the lives of people globally, and also increasingly obscured.
This is largely a product of global capitalism proliferating through imperial conquest, particularly emanating from the United States. The destruction of peoples and lands globally, including Gaza, Congo, Sudan, Haiti, can be traced back to us: policies of our elected officials, the taxes we pay, the industries we labor in, the things we consume. We may occasionally see the end-result, the suffering of people in the global South, on the news, yet we are seldom forced to directly face the consequences. There are also countless methods built into our society to deflect responsibility up or down the rungs of power.
The hit TV show Severance depicts this conundrum. Workers at a biotech company called Lumon are tasked with refining encrypted data. It is clear to the viewer that Lumon is up to no-good, but the workers are not privy to Lumon’s wrongdoing, and despite the mysterious nature of their work, they push the company line that their work serves a higher, positive purpose. As the story unfolds, the unsavory nature of their work becomes more apparent until they are faced with the reality that they are deeply complicit in the harm of others. The characters can no longer put their heads down and obey. In a climactic moment, a character named Irving, who had previously been the most loyal employee, declares: “Let’s burn this place to the ground.”
I think Stanley Milgram would have approved of this narrative. During a subsequent experiment, Milgram placed the test-taker (actor being “tortured”) in the same room as the participant (person pressing the torture button). He found that the percentage of defiant participants who refused to administer torture rose from about one third to more than 60%, even when the overseer insisted they continue pressing the button. This finding offers a powerful counterbalance to people’s proclivity for obedience. When directly faced with the harm caused by our actions, we are much more likely to object. Closing the distance of complicity spurs dissent.
Back to my 40,000-mile-high reflections, this conclusion indicates a responsibility of us storytellers. Our task in resisting empire is to fight the state’s abdication of responsibility by closing the gap of complicity. In other words, by telling compelling stories of how people’s lives are entangled, we can combat cognitive dissonance and condition dissent.
This is not an original revelation. Some of the most prolific writers across genres, who happen to be my personal favorites, have made the same point.
“Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” - Ursula K. Le Guinn
“A writer is by definition a disturber of the peace. He has to be. He has to make you ask yourself, make you realize that you are always asking yourself, questions that you don't know how to face.” - James Baldwin
Today, the commands we are ordered to obey are increasingly cruel. Complicity with what is being sold as “normal” – mass deportations, denial of reproductive rights, funding endless wars – demands callous indifference to our fellow humans. We are commanded to not see people as people.
The ruling class relies on us putting our heads down and trudging along. They instill the idea that any harm caused by the systems we participate in is not our responsibility, and any good we may attempt could not possibly have a lasting impact. Better to look the other way than put yourself in the line of fire.
One industry that exhibits this relationship is weapons manufacturers. The Twin Cities boasts one of the most robust weapons industries in the world, with five of the seven largest global weapons companies operating locally. Much of the local manufacturing capacity is not actually for bullets or bombs, but for computer chips. In the 21st century, war is waged with artificial intelligence technology and many workers in the defense industry are white-collar computer programmers.
There are some serious ethical considerations to this new dystopian era of war, including militaries leveraging AI to massacre people without soldiers having to ever face their victims. Another is that workers in the weapons sector are guarded from the reality of their labor. There are often several layers of protection that enable workers facilitating the war machine to ignore the consequences of the machines they build.
In May 2023, the government of Minnesota announced that it had awarded a company called ForwardEdge ASIC with a $1 million subsidy. Presenting itself as a microchip startup with applications in the healthcare sector and potential to create jobs, the company attended a University of Minnesota job fair and promised to hire dozens of employees from local universities.
Seems innocuous, right? It turns out that ForwardEdge ASIC is a wholly owned subsidiary of the world’s largest weapons company, Lockheed Martin, and their microelectronics are components of F-35 fighter jets, which the U.S. exports to Israel and reports have linked directly to war crimes in Gaza.
I do not know how the average ForwardEdge ASIC worker feels about contributing to fighter jets, but it is apparent that Lockheed Martin goes to lengths to ensure their workers are obscured from the true function of their labor. Both the subsidiary structure and the healthcare application of their product create a smokescreen between workers and the military giant. Their commitment to obfuscating the true output of their operations in St. Paul reveals a fragile dependence on worker obedience. Like the ragtag data-refinement crew in Severance, if ForwardEdge ASIC workers start asking hard questions, they may find reality hard to reckon with.
How do we close the gap of complicity? For one, through incisive political education on the connection between microchips in St. Paul and massacres in Gaza. One local publication, the Land of 10,000 Bombs, publishes grassroots research and personal stories of resistance to Minnesota’s weapons industry.
But we must go beyond political education and formulate campaigns that illuminate shadowed truths. Organizers in Minnesota have staged protests at Forward Edge ASIC’s facility, linking their operations to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Making it impossible to ignore how industries in the United States are linked to the lives of people across the world is another step to inciting dissent. There is a long history of worker-focused organizing in Minnesota, where Honeywell manufactured the cluster bomb used by the United States in the Vietnam War during the 1960s. The goal of this tactic was to convince workers to quit their jobs and pressure their employers to drop military contracts. Several Honeywell employees did indeed quit their jobs due to information shared by activists, with some even joining the anti-war movement.
The ability to change course and resist does not only apply to workers at weapons manufacturers; it applies to anybody living in the United States. We often have no choice but to begrudgingly participate in global economies and political structures that cause devastation around the world, but we always have agency in certain spheres of our lives. We can band with our neighbors against cruel deportations, we can organize unions in opposition to our bosses or landlords, we can care for each other when our government refuses to, we can build alternative life-affirming structures. These things can always be done here and together.
To be clear, no matter how compelling our stories and effective our tactics, not everybody will be convinced. For one, those currently at the top of the power hierarchy, helming the U.S. federal government, are staunch in either their fascist ideologies (Musk) or narcissistic temperament (Trump). These people feel no remorse for their actions. But they cannot successfully execute their hateful agenda without obedience from everyday working people.
Most people–if the layers of responsibility were peeled away, and they were made aware of not only their contributions to global devastation, but also their agency to dissent–are absolutely capable of meaningful resistance. Yet, more than just accessing the proper information factors into the decision to resist. Many knowingly maintain complicity when faced with the consequences of their actions, because they believe that–for example–contributing to weapons production is a noble endeavor. Dehumanizing propaganda spewed by the politicians and repeated by the media is the culprit of these backwards attitudes. This is perhaps most apparent in the U.S. military, where commanders routinely indoctrinate trainees by convincing them that their enemies are not people but “inferior forms of life.”1
This is precisely why we must write for our lives. We are up against decades of propaganda that has manufactured mutual disgust and mutual mistrust among people who otherwise might realize their mutual interest. Our storytelling, our political education and our organizing tactics must meet this challenge head-on, by making it abundantly clear that anybody living in the United States bears a responsibility to resist. Resistance looks different for every person, and there is no shortage of methods to meaningfully contribute. A Waging NonViolence article by Daniel Hunter outlines four broad pathways for resistance under Trump, with room for a variety of applications. Within each pathway, many unique skills are needed: facilitation, research, legal expertise, strategic planning, coordinating actions, conflict mediation, writing, door knocking, event planning, the list goes on. Truly every single person has potential to fill a significant role, or several.
And here lies the third wrinkle to Milgram’s experiment, which offers the most hopeful conclusion. In another iteration of his test, the participant pressing the torture button is joined by a peer (another actor) who is also asked to electrocute the test-taker. Eventually the overseer secretly cures the actor to disobey his orders and refuse to press the button. When the participants witnessed the peer defying authority, influenced by a sense of togetherness, they joined in the disobedience 90% of the time.
I’m sure that many of us reading this are already convinced of the absolute necessity of organized resistance. Things may occasionally, or often, feel hopeless (they certainly do for me). But we must not give into cynicism, because the principled actions we take are contagious. When done strategically with a clear target and defined purpose, we invite others to realize not only their agency to resist, but their potential to successfully enact meaningful change.
Let our resistance be a wave, growing as it glides the surface, swelling with the force of the ocean, engulfing destructive systems and sprouting new ways of being.
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“Dehumanizing the Enemy: The Intersection of Neuroethics and Military Ethics” by Shannon E. French and Anthony I. Jack
May we all find our inner Irvings!