The Nonviolent Revolution Is Here

Photo by Bhuwan Bansal on Unsplash

The world is changing and We The People are driving the change.

We have begun. It’s about to become a whole new world. Anything that doesn’t violate physical law is a real possibility.

We need to finish the work we’ve begun. We need to end kingship. We need to end bosses. We will refuse to be enslaved.

We are rejecting more than the current despot. We are rejecting the stupidest and cruelest ideas in human history.

WE are now shaping events.

No Single Trigger

What surprised me was how much initiative We The People took. We didn’t wait for some single triggering event. We didn’t like what we were seeing so we just agreed to stand up and say NO.

Now, there may be a trigger coming. Some particular event may occur and intensify our movement. We may quadruple overnight—or grow even faster than that. This is simply a pattern of history, part of the dynamics of popular revolts.

In Egypt, a street peddler named Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself in protest. A year later, the whole Middle East was in turmoil and Hosni Mubarak was overthrown by nonviolent resistance. Why that event? Who knows?

The murder of George Floyd by a racist police officer started a huge movement here in the United States. Overnight. Yes, this was a horrible act—caught on video and widely distributed. But so was the earlier murder of Philando Castile. Why did the earlier event not spark a popular revolt?

Still, the No Kings protest represents the beginning of something big, something that seems like a clear popular revolt against the cruel regime in Washington. While many things sparked it—the slashing of our paid benefits, and especially the violent ICE terrorist attacks against random people—it is more than just opposition to the present government.

The ground was cleared by earlier movements—events that were considered failures because afterwards the Old Order remained. The protests in Seattle in 1990 at the WTO. And especially Occupy Wall Street and the worldwide copycat occupations.

The plutocrats managed to fend off the popular uprising—the People’s Campaign of Bernie Sanders. All the corporate presidential candidates dropped out and united to stop the popular revolt. Had they delayed, Sanders would have won the Democratic nomination in 2020.

They knew it. We know it.

All over, People’s candidates are breaking through, but with a money-poisoned system, We The People will not win within rules heavily weighted against us.

We will win every election we can—look at NYC!—but we will really win through nonviolent noncooperation. We are beginning to understand the weakness of our oppressors. We see how they control us, depress our wages, continue keeping us tired and desperate and fearful.

We are realizing that it’s all a ruse. The regime has no power. Our governments and corporations are headed by impotent weak old men. Furthermore, the head of the United States government is also downright stupid.

The “smart” ones aren’t stupid but they are deluded. They have had so much power for so long that they believe they are invincible. Our appearance in the streets in every state on No Kings day mystified and surprised them.

They are terrified and doing everything possible to pretend that everything is normal, that they are in control. They want to think nothing has changed and they especially want US to think nothing has changed.

Everything has changed. The crack in the old ways has appeared. We have pulled back the curtain and see that the “Wizard” is a confused, shrunken foolish old man.

Unlike the Wizard of Oz, our phony “leaders” are not well-intentioned. Indeed, they have send armed terrorists into the streets, hoping we will be afraid and demoralized and that we will give up. They bomb Iran and gut our paid benefits and lie hoping we will be overwhelmed and distracted and defeated.

What will happen? History suggests that these tactics will fail, will backfire, will anger us more and grow our movement bigger and faster.

There will be another stupid mistake by the tyrant. One of his many cruel acts will be the next trigger, and after that, it will become clear to everyone that We The People will win.

It’s impossible to predict timelines and even now defeat is a possibility. This is still ours to lose, but we can only defeat ourselves. We are too numerous and too powerful to be defeated by a few stupid self-important losers and their goons.

The Impotence of Fake Power

Political and commercial power has always been fake, a chimera, a lie.
Leaders throughout history and up to today have no power whatsoever. They are often a single individual, or, at most a few thousand self-important thugs. They do nothing. They are too few and too lazy and too unskilled to create anything. They don’t build buildings or grow food or produce medicine.

They don’t design or manufacture weapons of war and they sure as Hell don’t fight wars.

We The People do everything. We The People have the numbers, the ability and the power. We have all of it. But we exercise our power on behalf of our oppressors. We have been fooled, swindled.

We have been stupider, much stupider than some other victims. For example, slaves in the American South—indeed slaves everywhere throughout history—were not fooled. They needed chains and overseers to keep them in place.

We have been particularly foolish. We have been willing slaves. We have been told that this is the only way and we believed them. Many still do.

But all of us are learning and now the old order is losing its grip. Any sensible odds-maker would have to bet on The People.

We The People are done taking orders. We are taking control.

How Does This Happen?

People in every state and around the world feel it. We feel something coming. We understand that the old order is unstable, is weak, is overwhelmed by events. Even as we fear the brutality of the fascist-plutocrats, we know they are doomed.

More and more of us even know the 3.5% rule. This is a pattern of history that notes whenever an active People’s opposition grows to 3.5% of the population, the People have always won. Historically, that’s true. Researchers have found absolutely no exception.

In the United States we are nearing 3.5%. By some accounts we have already exceeded it. In any case we are, at worst, close and the No Kings movement is growing. More national protests are planned for the near future. They will continue until the King is gone.

But how can such a small percentage of people change everything? What about the other 96.5%? What about the huge numbers of people—including armed enforcers in the military, in ICE, in police forces—that remain loyal to the old order?

Here’s what happens. Once it becomes clear to everyone that there is a large active People’s revolt—when we see protests in the street, defiant and assertive demanding justice—EVERYONE sees. This changes the dynamic.

Defections begin. Some people quietly refuse to carry out the despots orders. Others boldly quit and openly denounce the despot. Disobedience begins, expands and becomes a real possibility.

This refusal to obey grows. People refuse to do the work required to keep the tyrant in power. In every case, at least early on, the number of those defying the regime is a small percentage.

But the momentum is against the despot and even as the fascists retain power—they still have armed enforcers, and people doing their work—the decrease in numbers makes the power structure not dependable.

Very very few people want to be the bad guy. Only psychopaths willingly terrorize, beat up, torture and kill other people—especially on behalf of a tyrant. Yes, it is actually moral force—probably the most underrated force in human history—that enables We The People to defeat today’s tyrants. It’s the same power that empowered unarmed populations to end the regimes of Marcos, of Ceaucescu, of Milosevic.

This same force will end Trump and MAGA. But it will go much further than that. This is a bigger and more consequential event than earlier unarmed uprisings.

The People’s Civilization

Earlier movements failed to change the world, but it opened and informed minds. We understand how and why we are being used. We understand what price we are paying as servants of tyranny.

Our manipulation and abuse has become visible to us. The entire structure of our society, of our civilization is fundamentally wrong. We will do more than remove a tyrant. We will replace a horrible abusive and astoundingly stupid culture and system with a sane, caring one.

Ideally, we will figure out and fix the biggest problems quickly. This is necessary because our biosphere—the ability of the Earth to support human and other life—has been severely damaged and is nearing collapse. So, our time to really fix things is short.

We cannot settle for slow, incremental reforms. Had this revolt taken place a quarter of a century ago, that might have been possible. But not today.

What we need to learn—and do differently is this.

We need to start from the fundamentals. What does Nature require of us? What is essential to live? The answer is food and shelter. But beyond those essentials, we should also have medicine (modern healthcare) and a supportive community.

What can we (and should we) end? We should end hierarchy, labor that produces unessentials—that is MOST labor must end—and all forms of abuse and cruelty. We don’t need nations, which are essentially military units designed to control domestic populations and murder foreign ones.

We don’t need corporations, which abuse both people and the Earth, decimating everything in its way to maximizing profits.

We must remember that the cost of labor is very, very high and we must minimize labor—less is better. Why? Because life (human and other life) is TIME. When we spend it producing useless crap, we run down the clock and squander the gift of consciousness. Along with that, labor uses energy and resources and ruins the planet, dooming future generations. Because we allowed the old order to go on so long, our planet is in serious danger of environmental collapse. We must grind work to a near halt.

We must, together as communities—not as bosses and workers—produce healthy food and share it with everyone. We must produce medicine and provide healthcare to everyone. We must live as communities, people who enjoy each other’s company, who play together, daydream, learn, tell stories, produce art. The focus of life, after doing the minimum necessary to meet our physical biological needs, is to live as humans, social beings who recognize that life is short and precious and something we can enjoy together.

This is much more than merely removing a tyrant. This is recognizing our situation, the nature of human existence and making the most of the human condition. We are social beings, natural artists, born with a capacity for joy, and with a history of community that constitutes a far greater portion of our species existence than the wrong turn we took a few hundred years ago.

We need each other. We need our imaginations. We need our brains and our science. We don’t need—indeed, wholly reject—exploitive hierarchical structure.

This is the possibility we are opening for ourselves and our children. Let’s talk about these possibilities, work out how we will achieve them. Let’s finish off the tyrant, yes, but let’s be ready to go beyond that.