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Where, When and How Do We Start Taking Action to Fix the Polycrisis?
Why things that seem small and insignificant are really powerful and essential—and we should be doing them NOW. See free public version of this essay HERE.
The Saners are an activist group, a small but widespread and growing movement (we are in more than 25 countries) that seems to promote tiny, insignificant actions.
But the truth is, the tiny actions are very significant and important and necessary first steps to changing everything. One of the reasons that “people power” is so challenging to apply is that it feels counter-intuitive. Few of us really understand how it works.
I didn’t figure this out. I merely read history and learned from successful activists. But we all need to know these lessons so we realize how to succeed, and in the knowledge that we CAN succeed, are motivated to take the necessary actions.
Giant Street Protests Are the LAST STEP—Following A Series of Tactics That Disempower Cruel Authorities
To make the world significantly better, we need to have a vision of that better world—and we need to disempower the forces that are destroying the one we are now living in. In fact, we must make the world inhospitable for tyrants and thugs, period.
If we don’t do this, our success will be snatched by another thug, and we get: meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Many well-known movements have suffered this fate, and for this reason many people believe that nonviolent noncooperation doesn’t work.
They are more familiar with failure and either don’t know about successes or have heard alternate false explanations of those successes. Oh, and they believe that people are sheep, or lazy, or cruel—by Nature.
So many people have so many false ideas in their heads, gaslit from birth, that it’s a wonder they can think at all.
What they believe about humanity is like what the Southern racists believed about black people. Ah, all humanity is cruel and selfish. Which is a false belief like thinking all black people are lazy and shiftless.
