Where, When and How Do We Start Taking Action to Fix the Polycrisis?

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.

We cannot let ourselves swallow lies. We cannot waste time on them, bother debating them, or be distracted by them in any way.

We have a job. We have to rescue a planet from collapse of the biosphere, and save an entire species from a growing violent wave of brutal tyranny.

Set the lies aside right now. Forever. Let’s put on our thinking caps.

How To Fix Everything: The Long and the Short of It

Nobody can know in advance how long it will take our movement to succeed. But I can tell you this: if we are stubborn, and execute our actions well—and we don’t need to be perfect—we will almost certainly succeed.

Historically, success comes for well-run movements in about 3–4 years. But each case is different.

Nonviolent noncooperation works because it’s powerful, it limits the choices of our opponents, and removes the forces that empower our foes. The notion that some opponents are too brutal and too powerful is simply flat out false. Nearly every defeated foe was no more merciful than the Nazis. The Shah? The British Empire in India? They committed massacres and huge acts of unpardonable cruelty, time and again.

But they weren’t too brutal to defeat. Nobody is.

Yet, the task before us looks impossible. What we start with seems maddeningly tiny and, when you can’t see how it fits into the whole, our early steps seem irrelevant and meaningless. That’s because at the start, the movement by its nature is small and all the trappings of power belong to the foe.

The job is to reverse all that. You can’t say, “I’m going to lose the race” because you are still at the starting line. You need to train hard, and run your ass off when the time comes. That is how you win.

But the early steps don’t directly contribute to our victory. They simply prepare us. We need to identify our tasks, understand what it will take to go about it, and practice so when the time comes, we can do what we must. So, yes, right now we are simply getting together, discussing and spreading ideas. And recruiting more people.

We—both current Saners and those who join us—need to understand our framework for action, why it works and especially THAT it works—it has worked time and time again and this time it can work, too. We must simply care enough to do the work.

Unlike many earlier movements, we don’t even need to figure out the framework for success. That path has been blazed for us by Gandhi and King and so many others with whom you are unfamiliar. What we need to do is adjust our strategy and tactics to our time, our place, and our challenge. Which is work—but quite doable.

Personally, I find this part of our work to be enjoyable. This requires exercising the imagination, which is fun—but also (like Twain warns we must do to write well)—we must have the discipline to kill our darlings. That is, we may come up with brilliant sounding ideas that we love, yet must let them go because they aren’t the best ones for the situation.

Today, millions of people are, rightfully, anxious and afraid. They believe we need to mobilize immediately and hold huge street protests to remove tyrants and save ourselves. This is what we believe has worked because these are the images we remember. People mass in the streets and soon the tyrant is gone. Or strikes back, kills the protesters, and reasserts his power.

But mass street protests rarely remove tyrants. They are usually the last step in a successful movement. These protest essentially announce that the tyrant has already been weakened and is now ready to fall. This cannot happen without doing all of the earlier work first.

So, let’s get back to where we are today and what we must do now.

The Saners and You. Now. Today.

The big picture (simplified for clarity and brevity) is this. We form a group, a movement, built around a vision that people find compelling. The Saners have that. We have decided that our civilization is inadequate, a failure, destroying both lives and the climate of the planet.

We see that civilization is destroying itself, even now when we are taking no meaningful action to change things.

Our vision is that we dispense with the foundations of this failed civilization—greed, selfishness, bigotry, cruelty, hatred, violence and raw merciless power. Millions of us see that this civilization is worse than useless, is something we reject. Something reprehensible.

We want a civilization that enables each of us to live fully as human beings. Right now, we work years, decades, our entire lives in service to elites—often plutocrats, but sometimes dictators, or communist parties or whoever manages to swindle their way to the top.

And not only are the lives of millions—or billions—wasted on nonsense, but in the process WE are ruining the planet for ourselves, for our children, and for every species with whom we share this beautiful Earth. WE engage in all of this destruction to produce mostly useless or unnecessary crap—mountains of it—in service to undeserving fools.

When we think about it, the weakness of the elites becomes clear, and our strategy for victory begins to make sense. The power of strongmen and other thugs comes from our labor, our obedience, our pragmatic fear of political and business elites. We live under a system and a set of rules that puts them—and keeps them—in charge.

We cannot have anything, even food or medicine, without first working for them, doing what they want, what they demand. Even speaking out against injustice may catch their attention and result in our punishment. And others, even those who share our resentment, will stay silent or even support the thugs out of fear.

But.

Once the illusion of omnipotent power is challenged and exposed, it begins to fade. The momentum shifts. And, if we do our part right, we win. That is how this works, how it has always worked.

So, a few of us must go first. We must openly challenge the cruel forces that are in charge. We must do so in a way that clearly shows WE are in the right, and THEY are in the wrong. Ideally, we should do this in a way that annoys the status quo—but that avoids punishment because punishment would look like overreaction, perhaps desperation.

Also, if the thugs DO punish these early acts of disobedience, they risk raising the ire of millions of people. In this way, prickly thugs with little self-control may rapidly grow our movement—and speed our success.

Part of our strategy is to put tyrants into lose-lose situations. But we need to do more than that.

We also need to win over enforcers. That is, the people who serve tyrants to intimidate us, and on command will commit acts of violence against us—we need to win them to our side. We do this with kindness, with relationships, with an appeal to justice and mercy. We do this before there is any direct challenge to existing power.

We can do this because police, military people, ICE, National Guards, and other armed servants to the elites are, in fact, our spouses and children and parents and friends and relatives. They are our loved ones. So, we must talk with people who we know in these positions, remind them who actually cares for them and prepare for the moment when they must refuse to shoot.

This, too, has happened many times. Even some of the cruelest people, true believers in the ideologies of tyrants and thugs, have refused to fire. This isn’t an accident or a lucky break. In nearly every instance, a movement did this.

So, here’s our job for now…

1. Review and remember the ideas you just learned.
2. Spread the vision of our movement, and recruit new members. Tell them they can sign up as a Saner at WeAreSaners.org. (Part of our recruiting effort involves wearing the Green Dot—our symbol.)
3. Talk to enforcers, especially if they are your friends and relatives. Strengthen those relationships. Even if you don’t currently have such people in your life, be friendly with them. Engage in pleasant small talk. Make sure they remember that people are kind and respectful and deserve kindness.
4. Stay in touch and involved with The Saners. Attend online live chats, read the blog, start a local Saners group, join a Saners committee (these will be forming soon), and take action—when the time comes—in coordination with the movement.

The Saners is still small, but it exists. It is a real movement. It is in the process of becoming a worldwide community. We have members in more than 25 countries. We are preparing to do this.

This is the moment—your opportunity to bring a new and better world into being. We will start small, seem insignificant and invisible. But we are preparing to do something wonderful. Something magnificent. Something our children and grandchildren will remember and cherish.

They will remember that, at the critical moment, you stood up for them, committed yourself, and took action to deliver a better society for everyone, everywhere.

Read and sign up at WeAreSaners.org.