"How are you feeling?" Quite an unusual way to start a webinar about organizing the dissenting voice under great pressure. But I like that sort of thing, so I obediently join in. Wavering is the word, I think. Tossed back and forth between outrage and laughter. Because that is what it is: ridiculous. In the strange jumble that the political stage is these days, so many bizarre things are happening that I very often have to laugh.
The golf course
An example: Musk is firing employees of the US federal government en masse under the guise of efficiency. Because many civil servants are said to be working from home and secretly playing golf on the boss’s time. Says Trump. Who always works from home and, in the full month or so that he has now been president, has spent no fewer than nine days golfing instead of working. That makes me laugh (with thanks to Jimmy Kimmel).
And fun fact: Trump has already spent $10.7 million on golf. In one month. If we extrapolate that, it will cost Americans half a billion by the end of his term. Nice savings for Musk. But he doesn’t look at that. Nor at the 3 billion in subsidies that go to the fossil fuel industry every year. Not funny.
Doomscrolling
So while the world is on fire, I laugh at a list in The Guardian of all the jokes about Trump and the phrase "Amusing Ourselves to Death" comes to mind. It turns out to be the title of a book by Neil Postman from 1985. His argument: television amuses us in such a way that we mainly take in ‘disinformation’ — misplaced, irrelevant and superficial information that primarily creates the illusion of knowledge. Forty years later, that still applies, although the medium of television has been replaced by social media. And bingeing this kind of entertainment is just as effective as doomscrolling: the feeling that you are doing something by greedily taking in information and being left wavering.
What can you do?
The key question is: what can you actually do? Zoom out and devise a good strategy: determine that point of intervention through which the balance of power shifts, with the help of a smart campaign. In The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch suggests that the strategy for bringing Trump down could be to consistently point out how corrupt he is – as a number of his opponents are already doing. Navalny was doing exactly this with Putin.
An old trick, of course, is to keep your opponents so busy reacting that they never get around to setting a strategy. Or to distract them from consistently carrying out that strategy. For example, by losing funding: the focus shifts to raw survival. Being busy surviving can paradoxically lead to you running alongside your bike because you don’t have time to get on it. However difficult it may be, sometimes you have to slow down in the chaos in order to zoom out and regroup. And if you could use help with that: S&L can help you determine on which playing field and with which tactic you can have the most impact. For that radically better world, we are happy to think along with you; you know where to find us. Meanwhile, I’m going to think about how to get over my weakness for lame jokes.
Not on the golf course 😉
