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The farthest extreme of this kind of individualism is where personal lifestyle
becomes personal purity and identity itself is declared some kind of a political act.
This is where subcultures start to feel like cults. I think a lot of you know what I mean.
Any strategy based on individual change is doomed to fail because oppression is not an individual condition.
It's a group condition and it will require group action.
The defining characteristic of the oppositional culture is that it consciously claims to be that cradle of resistance.
Here we have this list of the kind of adolescent concerns.
The thing to know is that the adolescent brain is still under construction.
They used to think that our brains were built by the time we are 12; it's completely not true.
The brain may reach a certain size by the time you're 12 but all kinds of stuff is going on for another 10 years in there.
But basically the areas that are responsible for impulse control, for planning, especially long-range planning,
for considering consequences, and for managing emotional states, they go offline a lot when you're a teenager.
So adolescents cannot understand cause and effect. Their brains cannot make the connection.
And they are really bad at long-term consequences so they're prone to risk-taking, lightning flashes of anger
really impulsive behavior, and overall emotional intensity, and that's really the hallmarks of the age, right?
This is the phase of life when this question of “who I am” takes on such extraordinary importance.
And there is nothing wrong with that. It's your job when you're 15; it's to figure out who you are and what you're gonna be, what you're gonna do.
The problem is when that takes over and becomes the guiding principle of this whole culture.
So the idea of authority is rejected out of hand, whereas a serious resistance movement would in fact be training appropriate people for leadership.
On the alternative culture the enemy is seen as this constraining set of values;
conventions are the problem rather than systems of power.
So their main program is attacking boundaries, rather than injustice.
This has had serious consequences across the left. It's been pretty much a disaster for women and girls.
The creators of this counter culture weren't just any teenagers, they were middle class, they were privileged, and they were male.
This is not necessarily a great combo.
Alienation may be a good place to start; you have to start somewhere.
"This world is not working for me. Why?" A lot of us started the path that we are on
by feeling alienated as teenagers and so we start to question. That's what teenagers do really well.
But it can't stop there because to build a resistance movement you need loyalty and you need solidarity, and alienated individuals
are, by definition, alienated. They can't do loyalty and solidarity. You gotta get over that and start to make common cause with people.
Second half of my chart: This concern of identity, who I am,
it takes on this importance that outweighs what one might actually do.
The counterculture as we know it is a product of this psychology and that's where it's been permanently stuck.
The concerns of adolescents, so the gifts and the shortcomings of the age,
are the framework for the alternative culture and those community norms and habits have become accepted across the left
in what Theodore Roszak calls "a progressive adolescentization of dissenting thought and culture."
He said that in 1968, I think. It's really great when you find out, somebody else thought of this,
but then you're like, well I'm like 40 years behind already. He already had this down.
[Lierre repeats:] The "progressive adolescentization of dissenting thought and culture." He was absolutely right.
So this is the motto of the Wandervogel: ["Our lack of purpose of our strength."]
I'm not joking, this was their motto. "Same characters, different costumes",
Abby Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It.
On the positive side, the gifts of youth are that incredible moral vigor, that fearless courage, the passion, the idealism.
Every movement needs an infusion, constant infusion of those things. Honestly, by the time you're 30 it's pretty well over.
You need the young people to come and give you that again. But the alternative culture stops that vigor from effective action,
and when you can't fight power all you can fight is each other.
So this is what Florence Kennedy called "horizontal hostility" and this is our diagram:
In the first panel, the king has all the power and he's really happy because the little people haven't figured out they can fight.
In the second panel, they've made solidarity with each other and they're fighting back; there is resistance. The king is not happy.
In the third panel, they've cut off any concept of resistance. They don't believe they can fight up the hierarchy.
All they can do is fight with each other. So horizontal hostility is what they're left with.
This can be a feeding frenzy of things like gossip, character assassination.
In more militant groups in can end with paranoid accusations. In the worst instances in ends with people shooting each other.
Ultimately it's caused by fighting horizontally rather than fighting vertically, up the hierarchy.
But if the only thing we can change is ourselves, and if our best tactic for social change is lifestyle changes,
then indeed examining and critiquing the minutiae of people's lives feels like a righteous activity.
If in the end it reminds you a little bit of junior high school, well, there's a reason for it.
The final thing with the Wandervogel:
they create this whole romantic movement, they create this image of the peasant.
The peasants are supposed to be authentic, and anti-rational, in touch with nature, semi-mystical;
their idea of a peasant had nothing to do with actual peasants, who did in fact exist in Germany and could have used some help.
The Wandervogel gets transplanted to the United States; there aren't any peasants in the US.
So instead they take this same template and apply it to two groups.
They get pressed into service for the needs of the privileged.
Generally it's Native Americans and African Americans who get cast as emotional and natural and authentic and childlike and all this.
I'm really hoping I don't have to explain what's wrong with this picture.
Chart again: on the side of the Alternative, this cultural appropriation becomes the norm,
where everybody's spiritual practices are basically your shopping mall.
Because honestly, if the main goal is just to feel better about yourself and have personal transformation, why not just use what works?
It's completely depoliticized.
On the side of an actual Oppositional culture, the main task would be to
protect indigenous communities with whatever solidarity we can offer, and certainly to keep sacred ceremonies from exploitation and abuse.
So that's pretty much the Alternative / Oppositional.
There are plenty of successful resistance movements who have created cultures of resistance that worked long term.
The people over 30 generally lay a lot of the groundwork. That's often for a generation or two.
In the Civil Rights movement you had two groups: the Harlem Renaissance and the Pullman Porters.
They added different things into this mix.
The Pullman Porters were like the bridge between slavery and the Civil Rights movement.
They took a culture of survival, which was hard enough, but they start to build a culture of resistance from that.
Along the way they're accumulating some really important things:
self respect, cultural pride, political experience, and material resources.
Pullman Porters were like anchors in the black community, because they had good jobs that had a lot of security.
All of that was necessary. And then you get the next generation.
You get the college students who are willing to sit down at the lunch counters and face the angry mob.
The four guys who kicked this off were all college freshmen; they were 18 years old.
By the time this was done, 70,000 college students had done sit-ins across the south. They were calling it the second civil war.
That's how many people participated in this.
These were 18-19 year olds. Then you've got even younger kids. This is the children's crusade.
The world was electrified by these pictures. The fact that anybody would turn a firehose on a 12 year old...
And then even younger: this is little Ruby Bridges.
She's single-handedly desegregating the Louisiana public school system.
I gotta say that we've got no right to be standing on the sidelines, wringing our hands:
"We can't do anything" "It's all too much" when a 6 year old can produce this kind of courage.
I think she's amazing. She's got an autobiography; you can read her memoir about what this was like.
The British Suffragists follow a really similar pattern, in that you've got three generations of women who are doing
all this work about suffrage, and abolition, and the labor movement, and they don't get very far.
But they're accumulating all kinds of resources and political experience.
The Pankhursts in Britain were phenomenal leaders of this movement.
They had been involved for three generations in this whole struggle. Emmeline,
who really became one of the leaders,
when she was 5 years old had "Uncle Tom's Cabin" read to her as a bedtime story.
*That's* a culture of resistance. They were *trained* in this movement, and how to think politically. This is a great quote:
"Young as I was – I could not have been older than 5 years old – I knew perfectly well the meaning of the words 'slavery' and 'emancipation.'"
Now in turn, she raises her daughters, Christabel and Emmeline, to be part of the struggle.
They used to cry because they were too young to go to political meetings...just so sweet.
At one point young Christabel says to her mom:
"How long you women have been trying for the vote. For my part, I mean to get it."
Emmeline writes in her journal, was there a difference between
trying for the vote and getting the vote?
She realizes what she has to do: create an organization that puts together
the experience, the accumulated wisdom of the women who've been doing this for generations with that fearless courage of the young.
With her daughter saying "We're not going to lose. We've got to do this."
If she culd make an organization that combined those two things, they would win. She was absolutely right, and that was what she did.
The WSPU was born, and they engage first in massive civil disobedience; they completely up the stakes.
They hound members of parliament, and the prime minister.
They were arrested, went to jail, went to prison, and were tortured.
A specific law was passed by parliament that let them be tortured.
It even used the female pronoun, the prisoner "she."
It was called the "Cat and Mouse Act."
When that didn't work, Christabel escalated the troops to arson.
They blew up golf courses, and mail boxes, historic buildings and railway stations all across England.
That was how women won the vote. You don't get to learn that in school. But that was what they did.
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