Generate alternatives. Risk, cultivate, and systematize dissent.

Generate alternatives; that is, feasible ideas for better ways our communities could operate, and for our own better roles within them. Probably most new ideas come from recombining old ones, so it’s important to have good raw materials and ways to mix them. Below I write about building better stories from what we know ("Connect the dots"). Visual arts, music, plays, poetry, Carnival, all these are indispensable to democratic movements, especially when we can all participate. They help us illuminate conflict, expose corruption, reinforce our commitments to each other, convey experience from one generation to another, strengthen the culture of resistance, imagine and explore new roles and possibilities.

Psychoactive drugs are another traditional way to recast experience.



Risk, cultivate, and systematize dissent.
Bystander studies suggest that in scary and confusing circumstances a single person can help others understand the problem and take responsibility for solving it. In case studies of how people deal with crimes in process and other emergencies, there are usually no readily available authorities or established procedures, so effective response really depends on one or a few people taking the initiative.

Most of our environment is chock full of authorities and established procedures. When they bungle and fail, however, we still need folks from the rank and file who can look at situations in a fresh light and respond in new ways. Here I refer to the political issues that come up in organizations, such as how they serve the community; whether they abet or offer alternatives to the destructive forces in the larger society; how managers treat members, staff, and constituents. Sooner or later, staff, members and constituents have to face or deliberately smother questions about goals, acccountability, resource use, equal opportunity, and the like. When officeholders fall short, it’s up to the rank and file to get the organization back on track.

Because the authorities generally regard such upstarts as challengers, I’ll call them dissenters. The question here is, how can we dissent effectively? How can we solve problems when established systems and leaders fail, and in the long term replace failed authority with something more democratic?

An effective dissenter is really just a good organizer in a special environment. Professional organizers may work in communities suffering profound injustice, but they themselves are a little outside the main institutional framework. They may not, for instance, have to answer to the same bosses their constituents do. They usually have some access to outside sources of income, assistance, ideas and protection.

People inside an agency or business are more constrained by material incentives and punishments, and also by the roles they play. Researchers point out that accepting a particular job or position almost always means accepting the organization’s rules, aims and leadership. And many organizations may have perfectly useful and productive purposes. So when the organizations mess up, dissenters can’t easily slip into the adversarial role common to many organizers. On the other hand, dissenters in potentially useful organizations can refer to official or shared goals to help both co-workers and supervisors reexamine the track they're on.

Otherwise an effective dissenter does what community organizers do: starts with the concerns and understandings people already have, puts issues in context, links immediate problems with structural faults, helps colleagues build solidarity, models ways to challenge authorities. One thing managers know very well is that the type of questions raised determine the type of answers --What should we do about Saddam’s threat to the United States?-- so dissenters have to raise questions the bosses won’t.

Neil Sheehan's A Brighting Shining Lie is largely the story of intermittently successful dissent by a John Paul Vann, a skillful U.S. officer in Viet Nam. While never wavering in his support for the U.S. war, Vann was honest enough to see many of the flaws and costs of official strategy, and ornery enough to push hard against his superiors. For instance, he fought for years against the meatgrinder approach to fighting the Viet Cong. Eventually, he won over many generals and opinion-makers to his ideas-- helping to prolong the war at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. In any case, he survived the anger of his superiors, and got a hearing for his views, by cultivating allies outside of the line of command (the press, powerful friends in the military, civilians in the policy apparatus who admired bravery in combat), carefully documenting and publishing his claims, offering big-picture ideas, alternative explanations for the military's failures, and apparently practical solutions, winning a degree of freedom of action within the bureaucracies, and then building credibility through his achievements. His strongest protection through many bitter policy battles was that he shared with the generals and presidents the main goal of winning the war (whatever that might mean).

Plus, he was right: the U.S. was losing the war. As with any situation, most folks won’t be ready to stand up against business as usual until they come up against problems that can’t be solved through established mechanisms. Unfortunately, that means too that insulated insiders can be quite comfortable even as clients, customers and the wider community suffer. Only when people in the organization start to feel the pinch of community problems do they have much incentive to change. It’s the dissenter’s job to help colleagues understand the problems they face, trace them back to root causes, and think about lasting solutions.

Dissenters can also serve as models of how to speak up in the face of authority. That means taking risks, and also winning sometimes. In this role challengers really have to keep focus; if they’re easily silenced or marginalized, others will learn only to keep their mouths shut. As with society in general, particular institutions have developed through long practice blunt and subtle instruments to contain and smother challenges. Bosses might transfer trouble makers to unpleasant or dangerous jobs, fire them outright, or subject them to daily sneers and smirks, and scribbles on the restroom walls.

One thing dissenters don’t want is to get boxed into the gadfly role. By definition, gadflies are bothersome but not important, easy to wave away or slap down. They have few allies and cannot move their agenda. Their lack of success scares off potential allies and discredits their ideas. Remember the studies of how people reacted to counterarguments? Weak, unsuccessful attacks on the dominant line act almost as inoculations against further criticism (Atkinson 749), blocking any hope of change. Once a classmate criticized a visiting tycoon from W.R. Grace for that company's involvement in processing radioactive materials. The executive easily and authoritatively deflected the criticism, described the glorious national future made possible by nuclear power, and made my classmate look shallow and unrealistic.

Supervisors have reason to tolerate a gadfly or 2 in the ranks: first, to preserve an appearance of openness; second, as examples of what happens to troublemakers, how easily their ideas can be trivialized and their lives made miserable; and third, because in times of crisis unorthodox solutions may indeed save organizations. But dissenters rarely get credit for their foresight and practical successes. We end up with the same arrogant ignorami in charge, the innovator even further isolated, different but related mistakes made over and over. It’s very hard for gadflies to become authorities. Ask Ralph Nader.

A couple things might help us avoid this trap:

• our credentials. Ordinarily I’m terribly suspicious of the way we claim merit. Even in our more democratic organizations we sometimes give special attention to Ph.D.s or media stars. But I accept the fact that we do and must prejudge people on the basis of mere bits of information. After all, we demand that the big shots back up their claims. So let us political workers tell folks what are the sources of our ideas. We needn’t throw around titles or graduate degrees. And we can explain why we think it’s important that our partners in social change know a bit about our personal experience. Burke’s Educating for a Change (p. 49) has a good take on this credentialing business.

• consistency without being stereotyped. Sometimes I think of dissent in an organization as a story told over a long period of time. We’re trying to get others to understand and buy into a more democratic way of thinking. So all our small and large political choices within the organization should add up to a coherent approach.

At the same time, we don’t want to be slotted into the stereotypes many people have-- bleeding heart tree-hugging professional-class do-gooders, and so forth. Obviously, the more other folks know about us personally, the harder it will be for them to reduce us to cartoons. We can approach questions as if they haven’t been settled yet (which is usually the case anyway; they've just been hidden). Most important, we can avoid treating other people as stereotypes, so that we respond to them and not to our own preconceptions or conceptual boxes. As always, that means that we learn from others as we hope they’ll learn from us.

By the time others are able to predict our take on issues, hopefully they will have a deep understanding rather than a superficial, dismissive response.


• a problem-solving approach: tackling the problems people feel most acutely, linking them to the aims of the organization and larger system failures, and cultivating the discussions that lead to solutions. Redefining situations to help us understand the true causes may be the dissenter’s greatest contribution. His political understanding helps him make these connections, but the links themselves are folks’ interests and experience.


• attention to the process issues, and how the decisions are made. The more voices that can be safely heard when we make decisions, the better the chance we have of seeing clearly and solving our problems. But it’s very touchy to demand better process-- likely to upset our superiors, because they know procedure determines results, and frighten our colleagues, who may have long since made their peace with unfairness and incompetence, and just want to keep their heads down. Certainly we don’t want to be the kind of obstructors you see now and again, skilled constipators whose only power comes from their stamina in preventing everyone else from moving forward. But if we succeed in making room permanently for broad participation in decisions --not just our own-- we can have a lasting impact.

The roles we take on are a big part of how we make decisions-- who gets to participate and how big a say they have. For most of us, when we join an organization, we are accepting a particular role with particular rights and responsibilities, including all sorts of limitations on how we should act. Sometimes these role boundaries are the hardest thing to break out of (Atkinson 739-43). So helping people rethink their roles in a group, for example by emphasizing responsibility to overall goals rather than any arbitrary division of labor, can prepare us for taking on a bigger part in decisions.


• great patience. For instance, we ought to take the time to explain to our colleagues what we’re up to, and why we choose a particular direction, without assuming they already know or share our frames of reference.

It also takes patience to keep reassuring folks that taking responsibility will most likely help them, despite the risks. And however ambitious our hopes might be, we can let each other know that we have specific goals, and that changing business as usual will not bring chaos or commitments we can’t handle.

When it comes time to confront the higher-ups, we cannot assume our colleagues’ support unless we have organized it. Neither the truthfulness of our points of view nor how helpful we’ve been to our colleagues can assure us that others will stick their necks out when we take risky positions. Expecting loyalty because of past personal ties is likely just to generate resentment: Don’t put me in that position! Neither should we misinterpret the incessant complaining people do in some organizations. Rather than warnings of a volcanic eruption, sometimes the grumbling signals no more than passing gas; afterwards, the complainers feel better.

We all make our private accommodations with our masters, and, absent organizing, we dig out almost one by one. A dissenter can pass ‘round the shovels. One shovel might be reflecting a colleague’s own understandings back at her, including her sense of responsibility. But even when other folks agree with us in private, in public they may well prefer to let us do the heavy lifting alone. Concerted action requires both leadership and deliberate, public commitment by the group; it takes organizing. It’s hard work over a long period of time.


• rehearsal. The best way to learn how to talk out of turn is to prepare for it, and try it out first in safe circumstances. Moss describes how grade school kids learn to defend each other against sexist slurs:

What worked, it turns out, was not reading about people who defy gender stereotypes. What affected students’ attitudes and behaviors was learning and practicing what to say when gender bullying occurs.
Children in the practice group were more likely to say they would intervene when they felt excluded or thought a peer was being unfairly targeted. Perhaps more importantly, the practice children, unlike their peers in either the control group or the modeling group, actually spoke up when Bigler’s team set up an elaborate post-test that created an opportunity for students to speak up after a sexist remark.
Researchers discovered something else, too, something unexpected: Practice group students began teaching the ‘comeback’ refrains to peers. Almost a year later, many students in the modeling group --who had never been taught these expressions-- knew them verbatim (54).

Dang! These kids not only apply what they learn, they show others how to do it as well! That's what we call community education.

So when our colleagues complain about this or that, we can ask, So how would you say that to the boss? What’s the best way to put it? And practice saying the exact words we might use. A lot of people will back off right away, refusing to admit even the possibility. So we might have to do lots of reassuring, while helping folks clarify both their own self-interest and their superiors’, and use that to craft their messages. Some people have already adopted the strategy of letting others take the risks. But when problems get big enough, more and more people understand that doing nothing is risky, too.

I’ve met several folks much more savvy than I about office politics; what do you think?


It remains to be seen how much we might generalize responses in very specific situations to broader political issues. For one thing, we already have the catechism of corporate and religious responses to a very wide variety of problems; we tend to turn to these automatically, no matter how ineffective they might be. In that study of bystander reactions, what if the subway riders had decided that the sick man was just a drunk? In that case, not only would they not help the man, they might fear him, and see anyone who did help as a molly-coddling do-gooder whose efforts would merely encourage dangerous, deviant behavior.