This commentary is by Tim Stevenson, a community organizer with Post Oil Solutions from Athens and author of “Resilience and Resistance: Building Sustainable Communities for a Post Oil Age” (Green Writers Press) and the forthcoming, “Transformative Activism: A Values Revolution in Everyday Life in a Time of Social Collapse” (Apocryphal Press).
There came a point in the late 1970s when, after being a full-time activist and community organizer for 15 years, I realized I was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the adversarial model of producing change.
The incessant hostilities and militant confrontations, blaming others for the state of the world, and making them responsible for the changes we saw as necessary through a practice of trying to bend them to our will with political power was burning me out. Notwithstanding the worthy ideals of peace, freedom, equality and social justice that we espoused, activism largely consisted of power struggles.
Rather than devoting ourselves to actually creating the liberating alternative, we were focused on fighting our enemies. As I came to realize, not only did this approach skim the surface of problems, it actually replicated a “revolutionary” variation of the very behavior that we judged as unacceptable in our enemies. In attempting to accomplish our purpose, we were attempting to supplant their power hierarchy with one of our own, something that we saw as realistic given the political world we lived in, and was exempted from criticism because, unlike our enemies, our use of power was “liberating,” not oppressive.
We have long been blind to how this preoccupation with exerting control over others has corrupted our liberating intentions because such an outlook is so natural to us as civilized human beings. Though our respective purposes are ostensibly quite different, our approach to achieving them are startingly similar to those who we oppose.
In short, what I have continued to learn over the years is that the means we employ are not simply the way to realizing the end we wish to achieve. They are ultimately the end, itself.
Which brings us to the present time, the collapsing world we are living in, and the need to create a transformative alternative that allows for a survival worth surviving to.
It has become increasingly obvious that the ego-based way of life that has dominated our civilization has run its course. Its obsession with the impossible task of trying to control life has inevitably resulted in a practice of attempting to exert power over life, human and nonhuman alike. The failure of this approach is evidenced everywhere in our society — especially around matters of gender, race and class — but nowhere is it more apparent than in the climate crisis that has enveloped us, and is threatening humanity, as well as countless other living beings, with extinction.
Despite the mounting evidence that the civilized way of doing things in the world is counterproductive to realizing a happy existence for all, we nevertheless continue with efforts to realize positive change by trying to force circumstances to conform to our vision of what should be.
What has consistently been missing in our activist practice is one that focuses upon the importance of how each of us go about living our daily existence, right now.
The present moment is where our reality exists: This is where we create the world we actually live. How we proceed, from one moment to the next, determines where we end up. Only when the “future” exists in the life-affirming values that we are consistently exhibiting now, in the prefiguring behaviors of the present when the revolution is taking place within the revolution, does the desired liberation manifest. In the memorable words of the late congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis, “In the space between the world as it is and what we long for it to become, we are called ‘to live as if’ the possibility we aspire to is already present.”
Democratic transformation and social morality do not arise when the values that underpin them are not lived as a matter of everyday course. We cannot have a liberated existence that at the same time is not intimately connected to the values-infused behaviors that are the foundation for such a way of life.
Despite its inspirational language, our democracy is little more than a yellowing parchment unless its fine-sounding words are consistently translated into and acted upon with commensurate deeds. This is a responsibility that each of us has who desires to live in a democracy: We ourselves have to be that democracy. Only then is the revolution transformative.
This does not mean that being a living representation of the virtuous world we call for will necessarily produce that world. All we can ever do is take care of ourselves, and be true to the good person we are born to be. The only one we can ever change to the way we believe people should be is us.
But this is no small deed. In so doing, we create a living moment of a liberated existence, however transitory. This is good enough. For it is only in this passing moment, and the one that follows, where the transformation we seek comes alive.
