The Virtues of Petty Resistance

The Choices We Make and a Popular Re-Set

Sometimes silence might seem the better option when faced with a problem in the world. The danger with Substack is the same danger that we face with our engagement in social media more widely, even as we once talked about politics in pubs. It hides our inherent political impotence as ordinary people in the face of history. By saying, we think we are doing. But let us not exaggerate here. Humans can change their circumstances but the more potent and long established the system in which they live then the more energy and risk is required to effect change at a higher level until that point of diminishing human returns when one ceases to be a human being with a hinterland and becomes an activist. There is thus a fine judgement at every point in one’s life between accepting the necessity for action and accepting that action might be futile and diminish far too much what small pleasure in life you can take.

This is why I tend to see politics as fundamentally bound up with ‘interest’ (that is, one’s material and social position in the world related to personality, needs and desires). Our capacity to understand and make use of any access to power we may have whether as elected officials, administrators or managers, owners of assets or intellectuals with access to platforms is generally linked to our ‘interest’. The Substack ‘mentality’ is merely expressive. It works for people who need to say what they need to say in the world but, as Substack grows, the number of voices increase (much as they do on other social media). The average contributor becomes little more than a source of generalised opinion data for machines whirring in the background. Without a prior following on a known platform, writers become merely aggregated. Authority soon learns that it has nothing to fear from such ‘opinion’. It focuses its political technology on understanding and shaping it for very specific acts – such as a vote on a single day every few years. Politicians will only care about your opinion (and then only as a component of an aggregate) about ten weeks before such a vote. They are as stuck in the machine as we are. They can do no other.

There is nothing clear about the choices we make in this context. I personally welcomed (for example) the election of Donald Trump as disruptor for a variety of reasons much as I welcomed Brexit but my opinion was meaningless when I did not have a vote (the weakest of all possible political powers) in the US Election. If I had one, that fact would now be irrelevant in any case for another four years. I simply believed that my interest lay in the fact that Trump was less likely than the halfwits of Western liberalism (in my judgement on limited information) to trigger a devastating European war that might go nuclear. The belief, however, had no political force that I might deploy other than the pleasure of shaking up liberal friends with an alternative opinion. Yet Trump has opened the door to reminding the political class, intellectuals and the deep states of the West that they are not ruling through divine right and can be made (after admittedly massive effort and expenditures by billionaires) accountable in favour of the rounded and flawed human beings that we are rather than the cold corporatised interest of a social machine or of people role-playing an identity.

But I have no illusions. Trump is no angel. He has been given awesome powers (the greatest ever possessed by a human being given the unprecedented military and economic might of his country). A misjudgement by him could thrust us into more serious difficulties even than the light weights we have on the DNC or in Starmer’s cabinet or represented by Scholz in Germany could do and that is saying something. The President of the US is also constrained by a Constitution that permits ‘politics’ (undertaken well over the heads of the people who gave Trump his mandate) to weaken his disruptive ambition and play a waiting game until the old corrupt order can be restored. A weakening empire declines slowly as strong Emperors get displaced by makeweights until a Romulus Augustus emerges and the thing is put out of its misery. The reaction to Trump from the political classes in the satrapies of his empire could also mean pressure on our freedoms as a defensive reaction within a total weakening system.

So, each of us at a different time in life, with different obligations to others, with different access to resources, different levels of knowledge and experience, different personality traits and anxieties and hopes, finds ourselves with a problem. Our awareness of our inherent individual impotence, while politicians plod their way towards economic decline, social collapse and war, may stop us from any action at all. We may also be deluded into thinking that ‘writing’ and ranting on social media change things in any meaningful and immediate way. Do we assess the situation clinically, calculate exactly what influence and power we have in the world, consider what compromises may be necessary to change things and then act or (on that same assessment) do we hide in our burrows and hope to survive any coming storms?

Hiding in our burrows may not actually be a bad strategy so long as we are lucky in choosing our burrow. After all, when the dinosaurs died out, it was the tiny mammals in burrows who emerged to evolve into us. There is something to be said for relying on private virtue and watching Rome burn from the safety of a distant hillside villa – so long as the barbarians do not take it into their heads to look in your direction. Life is short. Governments rip away your ability to pass on security to your children in order to fund oligarchs in the Eastern bloodlands but, if you have no children (or dislike them), all you have to do is make an actuarial calculation of how long you have got and build a bunker to last that length of time and then the barbarians can have what’s left.

The alternative (very existentialist this) is to embrace the theoretical absurdity and futility of engaging in isolated individual resistance to a collapsing and inept ruling order yet have the intelligence to know what you can actually achieve without destroying yourself and those you care about and then decide to act, regardless, where you can because you do not want to live in a burrow for the rest of your life. There is, I suggest, a bridging position between fearful isolation and all-out possibly self-destructive activism. The Trump victory was proof that millions of resistors could cause a classic split in the ruling order and give us an administration that would challenge the failures of late liberal capitalism. I tend to socialism based on the community nation state but I recognise that the irony of the situation may be that libertarian economics within a capitalist structure may actually be preferable to the current system, one in which the upper middle classes plunder the rest of the population, repress the aspirations of the working class population and pauperise future generations with a spurious form of class corporatism.

From this latter perspective, the article on Substack, the tweet on X, the conversation in the pub start to cease to be quite so futile and absurd if they can become aggregated into a stubborn form of revolutionary resistance where the implicit threat is that such an aggregated ‘opinion’ can eventually overturn existing elites democratically. It may perhaps be the basis one day for street resistance in extreme circumstances especially against any form of war which is not a direct defence of the homeland from a direct unprovoked attack. Currently the idiots are actively provoking an attack. I do not believe we should hide in a burrow if we think those idiots in Westminster and the old fool currently in the White House are going to immolate us: no burrow can survive a 10 kiloton bomb. We have to make it known that we will not merely protest against war but organise after the war (if anything is left) against whoever leads us into war.

There is a lesson here from the French Resistance against the German invasion where many different ideologies from communism to monarchism came together to counter an unwanted occupation and a servile government (which we now have in a lower key). But what was most interesting about that resistance was that many of its fighters were not ‘activists’ at all. They were village butchers or bakers, railway workers and many other trades and from all classes who simply saw something was wrong, rose up, acted. When the matter was settled, they returned to their jobs, putting to one side a world of garrotting and bombs for ordinary life again. The dodgy politicians may then have taken office again but an entire society and culture had been effectively re-set. We need such a re-set now.

The entire system depends on our atomisation but an attitude of resistance permits everyone threatened by the State or bullied into submission by authority to know that they are not alone and that, if they get unlucky, the rest of us will sustain their morale until they can be ‘rescued’. All for one and one for all!

Of course, I am not likening the lacklustre Starmer Cabinet, the DNC or Chancellor Scholz to the Nazis. They are not that interesting. Their evil (a term I can justify on another occasion) is the insidious evil of grey conformity and lack of imagination, of clinging on to power by their fingertips because they can do no other and of complete ignorance of the minds, needs and anxieties of those that they manipulate to gain power. It is a petty evil that results in complicity in the unnecessary slaughter of young Ukrainian conscripts, in the bombing of children in Gaza (though sadly Trump will be no better here) and in punishing the poor for being poor and offering them plates of rhetoric instead. You cannot eat words and words do not cure you of disease.

What I am saying is that petty evil requires at least petty resistance – the willingness to say that things are not right, to find new people to support who will challenge the power of these corrupt gnomes, to show solidarity with those with more courage or opportunity to call the villains out, to be prepared to vote not for a better manager of the system but against the system, to become (in effect) revolutionary within the law (fixed by dodgy lawyers though it is) and democratically (corrupted though it may be). Every small bit of resistance to a broken order, one that might lead us into nuclear immolation and grand larceny by the state to pay for its excesses and failures, might be futile on its own but the massification of such resistances will eventually bring that order down. So, how about it? How about a re-set.