RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 359 Cynicism Or Informed Hope
Episode 359 of RevolutionZ considers the possibility that the biggest barrier to change isn’t raw power, but a story that many people have swallowed about what’s possible? The idea that there is no alternative. That victory is a pipe dream. The associated chapter of the The Wind Cries Freedom considers how cynicism is manufactured, why it passes for “realism,” and how organizers in the oral history's revolutionary process flipped the script by pairing a credible vision with messengers who modeled rigor, empathy, and staying power.
Andre Goldman answers Miguel Guevara's questions in this chapter by describing how schools, media, and workplace hierarchies train us to expect little and accept less. From there, Goldman considers the limits of purely defensive mobilizations. To push back against a figurehead can matter, but it could also leave intact the belief that the underlying order is inevitable. Goldman tells how a pivotal turning point arrived for the movement for a revolutionary participatory society when evidencing the logic of hope became a central priority and activists learned to couple a vision of a principled and feasible future with an associated strategy and priorities until dissent began to signal seriousness rather than naivety and wisdom rather than delusion.
Miguel asks Andre about RPS's militarism boycott as a kind of case study. Andre tells how campus divestment was forced by student activism and felt like a major win until research quietly migrated into private spin-offs. Andre then tells how the RPS approach: transformed to address not just colleges but also corporations and how it learned to protect jobs while reassigning funds from weapons to green transit, schools, clinics, and renewable energy. He describes how the movement discovered and becoming adept at explaining why elites often prefer military budgets over social investment—not for defense or even for offense, but mostly because public goods empower workers and reduce elite leverage, whereas military production does the opposite.
At the same time, in context of the on-going campus organizing about guns and militarism Goldman describes arguing with students about open carry and coming to realize how the open carry debate was more a clash of premises than of values. When a student or townsperson assumes permanent danger, everyone having guns on display can look “rational” as a deterrent against mass shooters who will then know they will get quickly picked off. One side believes a far far less violent society is possible so no open carry, indeed, no to guns more widely. The other side believes that violence is inevitable so that having a gun is one's only defense. The lesson that premises divide dissenters and defenders of oppressive ways changes the argument from moral differences and judgments to differences over the facts of the matter. This then tended to get generalized to fossil fuels, borders, and foreign policy. RPS learned to address vlues, of course, but also the upstream fictitious beliefs that make harmful conclusions feel inevitable to system defenders.
Miguel next draws out Andre about the human side of durable movements, about the need to build confidence, to design for joy and care, and to create visible wins that prove agency. If you’ve ever felt that critique is endless but change feels out of reach, Andre Goldman's stories in this chapter of the roal history show a path for turning analysis into action, and for turning despair into informed hope.
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Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. Unless this is your first time with Revolution Z, you are likely aware that I am interspersing in our flow of episodes a sequence based on a book I have prepared, but which does not yet have a publisher. The book, titled The Wind Cries Freedom, is an oral history of a future revolution. The book is therefore a novel told by imagined future participants, which means it seeks to read like nonfiction. As motive, The Wind Cries Freedom hopes to inspire belief in the possibility of worthy, viable, fundamental change, revolution, and to convey thoughts and lessons that may prove helpful for attaining such change in our time and place, though communicated in this oral history by others from another time and another place. As such, it is rather ambitious. In this chapter, composing this episode, Miguel Guevara, the interviewer who you've met on earlier cases, talks again with Andre Goldman, who you've also met, who tells us about journeying from cynicism to hopeful activism via some lessons of organizing campaigns. To start, Miguel asks, Okay, Andre, where did cynicism come from? The mechanisms weren't mysterious. Excepting the very few groomed for elite status, young people are systematically habituated to defeatism, first in the home, then in school, and later through the daily reproduction of hierarchical roles in workplaces and other institutions. The cumulative result has been a widespread internalization of limits on what one could hope for, on what one could question, on what one could imagine. Such defeatism, paired with relentless individualism and fear of loss, together make it rational for people to pursue only narrow personal gain in response to the system's injustices. Even those slated for the margins of society, a low income, low status, precarious existence, aren't exempt from this pattern. On the contrary, their sense of futility is often more acute. Cynicism is the glue that binds a fractured sick society together, not through solidarity or hope, but through shared pessimism. Dystopia, in this context, functions as a defensive ideology. It displaces utopian aspiration. To find fault becomes not a step toward change but an end in itself. Critique mutates into spectacle. Aestheticized despair becomes the default cultural register. And this culture doesn't just tolerate hopelessness, it elevates it. To be seen as mature, intelligent, worldly, one has to admit a steady single of hopelessness, and quite often hostility too. To want justice appears naive, even stupid. I interject. I do that every now and then as I'm reading this oral history. This fellow, Andre, is quite literate. He appears to be uh maybe a bit on the academic side. I'm not sure. He is at any rate a very cogent speaker. It continues From our experiences on campus, ah, he is on campus. It doesn't take long to recognize that the same forces have been operative in communities, workplaces, and virtually every other social setting. Defeatism wasn't merely a passive response. It was the product of an active process. A system that depended on inequality and domination, could not afford for people to believe in their capacity to act. So instead, the system cultivates a belief that change is impossible because of human nature itself. Again and again, we encountered variations on this theme. Quote, this is the way it has always been. Why can't you see that? Or, quote, maybe your intentions are good, but people are too selfish, too violent. Even if you win for a while, it will all come back. It was rarely formulated as an intellectual position. It was more like an ambient assumption, the atmosphere of dis an atmosphere of disbelief, a kind of ideological smog. And that's why we concluded that any viable, radical project had to engage not just with the structures of power, but with the psychic infrastructure of defeatism. Cynicism was not simply an obstacle to strategy. It was the precond for passivity. Pessimism, particularly when cloaked in the garb of analysis, is remarkably effective at undermining the possibility of change. You could observe this almost formulaic pattern. Information would arrive, an event, a study, a policy shift, and irrespective of its actual implications, it would be interpreted in a manner that emphasized ultimate hopelessness. Always the spin turned toward immobility, structural inertia presumed, power unshakable. This was ideology that presented itself as sober analysis, as common sense. Once you began to notice this pattern, you could see it permeating media commentary, academic discourse, and everyday conversations. And even with awareness, it remained hard to counter. After all, history, when selectively curated, could be marshalled as evidence for resignation. If you questioned that, you weren't considered critical. You were considered naive, blind. To dissent in a hopeful direction was to risk being labeled unserious, unrealistic, even foolish. So it was an enormous breakthrough, a transformation really, when RPS began to turn that perception on its head. I interject, RPS, remember, Revolutionary Participatory Society is the name for their organization and movement. We continue. When Descent came to suggest not immaturity but commitment, not ignorance but reason, not delusion but insight, when those who refused cynicism began to be seen not as escapists or fools, but as the most serious, insightful people in the room. Miguel asks, how did RPFs do that? The mass resistance to Trumpism, necessary and valuable as it was, didn't sufficiently challenge the deeper foundations of cynicism. It operated for the most part as a defensive movement that sought to repel a particularly grotesque manifestation of existing power structures, not to challenge those structures themselves. The logic was let us excise the tumor so that we can return to the body's normal function. Even if that normal function is riddled with systemic disease. Although to excise Trump was certainly essential, that orientation, unfortunately, didn't combat the prevailing sense that our social system, with its grotesque inequalities and built-in violence, was, for all its flaws, the only feasible framework for life. This was not a unique failing. It echoed earlier episodes of struggle as well. The nineteen sixties, for example, saw immense courage, creativity, and political insight. There were bursts, often profound, of moral clarity and collective joy. But those ruptures in the tide of resignation were not sustained. There was no adhesive, no long lasting infrastructure to carry the momentum forward. As a result, in time, cynicism reasserted itself. The dominant belief, even among many activists, remained that we might stop a war, we might gain voting rights, we might resist this or that egregious policy. But to meaningfully transform the underlying order of things, that was off the table. Worse, it was seen as juvenile to even entertain the thought. In such a climate, radicalism shrinks to the scale of boutique activism. One might have a small affinity group, a collective, a working group, but the idea of mass collective action aimed at long term structural transformation would be dismissed as fantasy. Such ambitious thoughts stopped entering people's minds. Even victories were interpreted through a defeatist lens, acceptable only if limited, only if temporary. The notion of winning everything was not just considered unlikely, it was seen as fundamentally unserious. Vision was unrealistic. It was only in the immediate run up to RPS, through a hard won grassroots shift in consciousness that many organizers began to move beyond this defensive posture. They began to internalize the necessity not only of rejecting particular expressions of oppression, but of affirmatively creating a path toward a wholly different society. Not just ending a war, not just halting ecological collapse, not just outlasting fascist tendencies, but constructing new norms, new institutions, new relationships, a different world. But that shift didn't happen overnight. The insight that revolution was not only necessary but possible moved from being a marginal idea that circulated among a few, to becoming a strategic orientation that informed what many people actually did. It wasn't a desperate outburst, it wasn't a scream into the void, it was the beginning of something self-sustaining. Miguel asks, so how did it happen? How was this reversal, this countering of deeply rooted cynicism made real? I would say it was due to two mutually reinforcing factors. First, the articulation of a credible, coherent vision for an alternative society. A vision that wasn't utopian in the derogatory sense, but was based on historical knowledge, practical possibility, and moral clarity. And second, and just as important, was the character and comportment of the activists themselves. People who carried that vision did so not as preachers or zealots, but as thoughtful, mature, empathetic participants in shared struggle. In other words, the messengers were often as important as the message. When activists could model hope without sacrificing rigor and model compassion without losing strategic depth, they began to dismantle the idea that to be thoughtful one had to be despairing, or worse, reactionary. Miguel continues, were there other lessons, specifically from the militarism boycott? There was, as I came to understand, more nuanced but no less critical realization. We had been organizing to compel our universities to halt their collaboration with military agendas. That in itself was commendable. It suggested not only a refusal to support atrocities, but a vision oriented toward constructive alternatives. However, even within that ostensibly forward looking posture, a fundamental problem emerged. The issue was this. What would actual success mean? What would victory entail? If our universities divested for more research, if they shut down the relevant labs, would the research cease? Of course not. As some of our critics, those who resisted our campaign, had seen, perhaps more clearly and earlier than we had, the research would simply migrate. It would reconstitute itself in the private sector. Often, the very same university personnel who had overseen the original work would form corporate spin-offs. These would, in some cases, operate in the very same facilities with the very same faculty, only now under different names and with different legal status. The university would wash its hands of the research in a legal or optical sense, but the practice, the complicity would continue unabated. This phenomenon was, in essence, a large scale instance of the not in my backyard fallacy. That is, we objected to war research happening on our name, on our campuses, with our funds, but as long as it continued elsewhere, out of sight, out of mind, we were meant to feel absolved. It was an act of moral displacement, not moral resolution. The instruments of war production remained intact, even if they now carried different institutional affiliations. This recognition brought into Sharp reliefs a hard lesson. We had to seek, but we could not afford to be satisfied with partial victories, especially if those victories amounted to mere shifts in form, not content. If campus movements were to be meaningful, they had to address but also reach beyond the university. They had to take on the corporations themselves. They had to confront not only MIT, Stanford and Michigan, but also the Pentagon Raytheon and Boeing, the full spectrum of war-making institutions. So our focus expanded. By the time this became deeply clear to me, I was out of school, and many of us who had come up through the campus movements were now building links with workers in the war industry. But unlike earlier anti war efforts that called for an immediate halt at the cost of massive layoffs, we approached the issue differently. We did not say shut it all down now. We said transform it, retool it, redirect it, maintain employment, but reallocate purpose, preserve people's livelihoods, but redirect the labor into socially beneficial ends. I recall vividly one protest. Activists had surrounded a weapons manufacturer. It was high tension, helicopters overhead, threats coming in constantly. Because of its classified status, the company was considered quasi military. Technically, to protest it was to confront the state directly. We called out, we want war firms like yours to work against global warming and for equity. We want Congress to reassign funds from building bombers, missiles, drones, and tanks to producing green transit, schools, clinics, and solar plants. A worker replied with visible anger and anxiety. Yes, and after you put us out of work, how do I feed my kids? Answer me that. After global warming floods the world, how do you live your life? Answer that. But even before then, why should you lose your job? Why shouldn't this factory, this expertise, this infrastructure be used to build things that help rather than harm people? We argued that the choice for war production wasn't primarily about military necessity or technological complexity. It was about elite power. War spending doesn't empower workers, social spending does. But that is what elites seek to avoid. Another worker shot back. You expect me to believe that war spending trumps social spending because building high tech weapons avoids empowering workers? Yes, we do, we said. You could have better conditions, more meaningful work, even higher income if your labor serves social ends. But that would empower you. It would make you less dependent, more capable of organizing, more assertive. And that is what elites fear. Not weapons, not war, but the agency of the people who make society run. His reply was brief, almost reflexive. Owners are in charge, and we would interject, yes, for now, but not forever. That exchange captured another insight we began to internalize. Why does a society so relentlessly pursue militarism over humanitarian production? Why does it persist in pouring resources into tools of death rather than instruments of life? The answer we came to see was not war related, but ideological and class based. The threat wasn't from foreign powers. That narrative was propaganda. The threat was internal, a well-organized, empowered population. War production serves as a barrier to that. The policymakers and corporate managers we confronted weren't, by and large, sociopaths. They didn't wake up each morning hoping to murder civilians or devastate environments. Rather, they made cold, rational calculations. Given the choice between worker empowerment and a bloated military budget, they chose the latter, not because it served the public, but because it protected their own status and wealth. This wasn't speculation. It was observable. The economic infrastructure that produced weapons could just as easily be used to produce public transport systems, wind turbines and hospitals. Even now the government could fund that shift. The private sector could administer it. Workers could remain employed, more meaningfully so. But two things would happen if we made that shift. First, poverty and instability would decline. That would reduce elites leverage. And second, the notion that government, and indeed all institutions, should serve everyone, not just corporate elites would gain traction. And that, perhaps above all, was intolerable to those in power. Understanding that changed everything. It made starkly clear the grotesque logic of capitalist priorities. The problem wasn't just greed, it was also fear that a truly democratic economy would erode the foundations of elite rule. Miguel asks, I wonder, did you take any lessons that were more personal? There was for me a key lesson in organizing and in grappling with the structure of people's belief systems, particularly when they're deeply entrenched and internally coherent, though empirically flawed. I was in Texas at the time, giving a talk about the boycott of military linked academic work. It was a large meeting, and unsurprisingly there were numerous questions, many of which revolved around private gun ownership, a perennial issue in certain parts of the country. After the event, I found myself in a discussion, perhaps more aptly termed a confrontation, with a campus advocate of open carry. His position was unambiguous. Students should be allowed, even encouraged, to bring handguns into classrooms. We were standing on a lawn and a crowd formed, twenty, maybe thirty people, listening, engaging, interjecting. What soon became evident and what stayed with me long after, was that we were arguing past one another, not due to incoherence or bad faith, but because we operated on radically different premises. My interlocutor, the gun advocate, took for granted that society was on a steady, irreversible descent. He viewed it as axiomatic that at any moment a violent outburst could occur. Some individual, deranged, nihilistic, might impose his will through force. In this imagined state of permanent danger, his response was internally consistent. One must be armed for self defense. In effect, his logic was a microcosmic application of Cold War deterrence theory, what was then termed mutually assured destruction. Just as the US and the Soviet Union maintained massive nuclear arsenals to deter each other from striking first, he envisioned a student body with everyone armed. In such a scenario, he reasoned, no one could successfully become a bully, nor presumably carry out a mass shooting, because armed students would immediately neutralize the threat. Of course, this formulation disregarded the social and psychological costs of omnipresent weaponry. It ignored the way in which guns amplify conflict, transforming minor disputes into mortal encounters. It disregarded the fact that widespread availability of firearms increases, not decreases, the likelihood of violence. But here was the key point. My adversary didn't deny these effects. He accepted them, but he saw them as inescapable. What I came to realize was that for many such advocates, the descent into social atomization, violence, and distrust was not a trend to be reversed. It was an immutable condition. For them, people are incorrigibly self-serving and dangerous. Civilization is in a permanent state of decay. And from that everything else followed. The gun, then, wasn't merely a tool. It was a last defense in a world stripped of solidarity, of mutual trust, of hope. So I tried a thought experiment. I placed myself in his shoes. I quote, saw what he saw, a society unavoidably riddled with predators, collapsing norms, ubiquitous threats. And from that vantage point, his position became understandable. Misguided, yes, destructive, undoubtedly, but not irrational. For me, the open carry mindset did not mitigate chaos, it normalized and exacerbated it. It projected fear and coercion into every space, the classroom, the street, even the home. It embedded the military ethos into civil society. But the gun advocate would say, You are so damn naive, so damn ignorant, so damn stupid. Escalations happen. They are what they are. Killing killers here and abroad is the only solution. Interfere with killing killers and innocent blood will scar your hands. Yes, corporate and interests, most notably the NRA and weapons manufacturers, manipulate this narrative for profit. But that alone doesn't explain its resonance. For many rank and file adherents, the deeper root is systemic cynicism, the belief that no society can function without an ever present threat of violence. To challenge their conclusion, we first had to challenge that bedrock assumption. That's when I began to see a pattern applicable to many other contentious debates. Whether the topic is guns, immigration, fossil fuels, or foreign policy, the explicit disagreement often masks a deeper one. One can't win the more immediate, seemingly obvious argument, for instance, that students bringing guns to class is catastrophically dangerous, unless one first dislodges the assumption that society is irreparably broken and will always be catastrophically dangerous. Without overcoming that, even patently insane propositions can feel like the only reasonable self defense, mutually assured destruction. The general lesson is this under sufficiently grim assumptions, insane actions can appear logical. They're not expressions of malevolence necessarily, but rather of despairing rationality. People adapting to what they think is an unchangeable world. When someone adopts a policy that, on the face of it, appears morally repugnant, it doesn't follow that they are irrational or evil. Rather, they may act they may be acting quite logically from flawed premises. That was an epistemological shift that prepared me for future dialogue across vast ideological divides. I realize that surface disagreements, often loud, intense, and vitriolic, are frequently about conclusions, but the real issue lies upstream in contrary assumptions. Two people can share core values, even share logical faculties, but diverge radically because of what they perceive differs. Miguel asks, it reminds me of advocates of coal and oil. To reach them I had to address my readers thoughtfully, not just shout at them my feelings about societal suicide and call them fools. Exactly. That sort of emotive indictment may resonate among those already on your side, but it alienates the very people whose assumptions we most urgently need to challenge. The real work lies in identifying those assumptions, showing their fallibility, and opening the door to alternatives that are not only morally preferable, but logically sound as well. Bigel wonders, but you can't deny that at the same time that some of the coal and oil executives may have convinced themselves their actions were righteous, or at least inevitable under existing constraints, many of them knew better. They were not ignorant of alternatives. They knew full well that other energy choices were technically viable, economically feasible, and environmentally necessary. They simply chose not to pursue them. And that, of course, in addressing them, removes any shred of ethical ambiguity. Unlike individuals who acted under misapprehension or distortion due to limited or manipulated information, those executives often operated from positions of extensive knowledge and enormous influence. They were aware, and they acted anyway. I agree, and I suspect it would be difficult to find in history any group that has perpetuated such enormous harm with such cold detachment. We're talking about elite sectors willing to imperil the habitability of the planet for everyone else so they can continue to enjoy private opulence amidst public collapse. They retreat to gated estates or climate proof enclaves, while the rest of humanity faces flooded cities, scorched landscapes, famine and migration crises. Naturally, any serious movement aiming for human survival and dignity had to confront that. One of the tasks of RPS was precisely this, to avert global ecological catastrophe while simultaneously pursuing social transformations that would not merely be defensive but cumulative, each gain opening the way to further advances. And there was another lesson that recurred frequently, and I would say is foundational to sustainable organizing. I came to recognize how critical personal confidence is to initiating and sustaining activism. If individuals lack the confidence to step beyond accepted limits to challenge what appears immovable, their capacity for action is severely curtailed. The architecture of mainstream education is in many ways designed to undermine such confidence. It encourages passive absorption, deferral to authority, and above all conformity. So we understood that part of our organizing had to include the reconstruction of confidence, not through empty affirmations, but through shared experiences of agency, success, and mutual support. And we also learned that activism couldn't be allowed to become emotionally corrosive or socially alienating. Of course, no one promised it would be constant joy, but if participation consistently became demoralizing or draining, People would simply burn out. The struggle for a new world had to include space for celebration, for care, for fulfillment. These were not luxuries, they were preconditions for continuity. That's where that particular chapter ended. I wonder if as you hear it relayed, it resonates at all. Do the lessons seem obvious? Do they seem not so obvious but relevant? Do they seem implementable? Is there something here worth pursuing, worth thinking about, worth discussing, worth perhaps refining, worth implementing? Today is october fifteenth. In three days it'll be october eighteenth, the day of this round of No King's demonstrations. I do hope people will participate. I hope to participate. Why? Because these events, while not sufficient to stop Trump, to reverse Trumpism, to win a better world, are necessary as steps in that direction. They help to raise consciousness in people who are not yet aware of need. They help to raise costs that give pause to Trump and his supporters. Hell, if you want, they hope to or they help to prepare the ground for the next American Revolution, for RPS, for something like what our oral historians are conveying to us in these messages and systems and episodes. And then on October 19th and thereafter, perhaps you'll be moved to want to volunteer to help with the next round of national demonstrations or more local activities near where you live or where you work. If so, another little project that I've been helping with called All of Us, all of Capital U Capital S at all of us.org might be useful for you. It's a mechanism by which to find organizations and projects by way of geography or your interests or their needs, which will welcome volunteers to help them with forthcoming efforts. It's a way to get involved more directly and sustainably than attending events, as much as attending events is also important. And all that said, this is Mike Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z.