In the Face of Escalating Violence
tl;dr: Violence and spectacle are escalating by design. The moment calls for protest and resistance. It calls for deeper relationships and ethical seriousness. It is time for world-creating practices that help us become a people.
Violence is ratcheting up. This is not unexpected. But it is still shocking. Brown bodies have been rounded up, caged, and expelled from day one. But now violence comes for those who dare stand in solidarity with the most vulnerable.
Ezra Klein nails it when he talks about:
Propaganda of the Deed:
It describes how the administration governs through highly visible, often unilateral spectacles. Dramatic actions meant less to solve problems than to send unmistakable messages about power and precedent. Acts that aim to rupture expectations and normalize a new reality, signaling that rules, institutions, and international constraints no longer meaningfully bind the regime.
If the regime governs through spectacle, then the question is not just how to oppose it. The question is how not to be shaped by it.
Movement and Resistance
I am in awe of the courage and beauty that we are witnessing from the resistance in Minneapolis right now.
I am blessed to be in relationship with many people who know much, much more about resistance than I do. Folks who develop leaders (shout out to the Ayni Institute!). People who study, teach, organize, and actively experiment with making Beautiful Trouble, finding Beautiful Solutions, and practicing Nonviolent Direct Action.
Know that anywhere you are, you can plug into organizations and networks of people who have experience. People who have been preparing for this moment. Ours is a multi-generational project.
Go to a No Kings protest and you will find folks who are only now getting activated. They are marching along with people who have spent a lifetime connected to a broad spectrum of social movements. A diversity of approaches to the change that needs to happen.
Know that there are lessons to be learned from all over the world. That in this hemisphere, much of Latin America holds generations of skill, strategy, and wisdom for contending with the repression of militarized regimes. (My friends and clients at Skylight Films have done a beautiful job of documenting these struggles.)
And of course, there is much to learn right here at home. Let’s pay attention to what Jemar Tisby recently called out:
White Americans keep looking to 1930s Germany for lessons on authoritarianism, but they ignore Black Americans who have survived it here.
Slavery, Jim Crow, and racialized state violence are forms of American authoritarianism. The refusal to learn from that history and from the people who lived it is one reason for the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. today.
My Two Cents
I want to be humble with what I can contribute here. I have spent all of my adult life working with leaders of social movements. People who have been doing their darndest to help us live our way into that other world that our hearts know is possible.
To say this is not to stand outside the tradition of resistance, but to speak from within it. The truth is, mistakes have been made. Opportunities have been lost. A whole subculture fell under the rapture of an ideology that lost all touch with “regular” people. Too many were seduced by a politics of resentment.
But this is not an indictment. Mistakes are always made. This is the only way we learn.
The path to justice is walked by an elephant. And that elephant is made up of many parts. My aim here is to say a few things about the part I know something about.
This is the time to be open and welcoming.
The images of masked agents of the state perpetrating arbitrary violence do serve as “propaganda of the deed.” Numbing us, like the frog in that slowly boiling water. But right now, at these early stages of shock, we can trust that a whole lot of people see what’s going on. And they just know, they feel, that this is simply not ok.
This does not mean that these previously unengaged Americans are anywhere near ready to buy into the “whole package” of social justice values. It is not the time to sell the whole agenda. People don’t do well with all-or-nothing propositions.
This is not a retreat from politics. It is a different theory of how power moves.
Can we learn to welcome people who are afraid of being pigeonholed into a discourse that they are uncomfortable with?
I believe it is up to us. I believe we can develop the sophistication and maturity to engage with people who want to stand for liberal democracy even when they are not ready to dismantle the whole edifice of the only culture they know.
We need on-ramps. And those early rungs of the ladder must be especially warm, caring, patient, welcoming. They must become an antidote to the anxious and quiet suffering that too many people endure.
Networks of Resilience: Nurture Trust & Relationship
Go deeper. Much, much deeper. With the folks you already know. The people who share your values. The ones that you anxiously talk to about the news. Those who are already going to the protests.
Our social web is dangerously fragmented. The culture keeps us impossibly busy. Dangerously isolated from one another.
This is the time to drop your laptop. To skip the Netflix show. And to visit each other’s homes. To have dinners together. To see our children playing and our teenagers get crushes on each other. To ban phones from our gatherings. And to break out one of those decks that facilitate deep and meaningful conversation.
Your aim is to deepen connection. You will know you are getting below the surface when these become the people you can call on when you are sick. You will know when to bring them soup. The people you will go on long walks with when you feel like you are coming apart.
I grew up in an intentional religious community. It came with many of the problems you’d expect. But there were aspects that were brilliant. Including the practice of having dinner with a different family each Saturday. And it was even more intentional when a new family joined. When we moved from Puerto Rico every single family in the community had us over for dinner, one Saturday at a time.
We were humble people. These were not lavish meals. Home-baked bread, very cheap wine, a song, and a simple ritual before the eating began.
We don’t know how bad things will get. We will need deep relationships to get through any of it. We will need well-honed bonds of trust. Relationships with people beyond our kin.
This is the way folks get through when people lose jobs or get locked up.
This is how we take care of each other as things continue to escalate.
The Moral and the Mythic
If protest is about appealing to power, the moral and the mythic are about becoming a different people.
I think it’s important to get out into the streets and protest. Even when the regime retaliates or ignores it. It is important that we see each other out there together. It is important that we know we are not alone in our circle of concern.
That being said, I am deeply persuaded by Micah White’s The End of Protest. He is one of the people that helped launch Occupy Wall Street. He has some experience with protest.
He uses the word “theurgism” and I always apologize when I repeat it. It’s a great but alienating word. I prefer to call it “the realm of the gods.” Theurgism refers to ritual practices meant to invoke or align with divine powers to transform reality.
Contrast is most helpful here:
Protest politics:
Appeals to power
Makes demands
Seeks recognition or concession
Operates within the logic of the existing system
Theurgic politics:
Performs a different reality
Works through symbols, gestures, stories, and meaning
Refuses the dominant frame rather than arguing inside it
White says that:
The most potent political acts today are not oppositional but world-creating.
Theurgic acts:
Don’t try to convince elites
Don’t ask permission
Don’t primarily seek visibility or virality
Instead, they instantiate a different moral or symbolic order
Examples include:
Mutual aid that bypasses the state
Sacred or ritualized gatherings that reconstitute belonging
Cultural practices that quietly reorganize value and loyalty
These actions work on reality by changing what people experience as real, possible, or sacred.
It is the sort of action that:
Operates below the level of discourse
Reshapes desire, identity, and meaning
Exercises what you might call ontological power. Power over the conditions of belief and belonging.
I call it the realm of the gods because theurgism is linked to myth, ritual, and collective imagination, not ideology.
We are living in a world where fewer and fewer people believe in institutions. Here, what is “legitimate” comes from culture. Not procedure.
White invites us to take the posture of:
Acting as if a different world is already operative
Creating pockets of coherence amid collapse
Letting meaning precede structure
This is why he sees the future of politics less in movements and more in communities, practices, and symbolic orders that quietly displace the old one.
There is no world-creating power without ethical seriousness.
There are obvious risks to this approach. It can very easily become escapism. It can be misused by reactionary and cultic forces. In fact, we might argue that it already has. It is not difficult to see how the regime is held together by a cult of personality. By the myth of a day that “was” and is bound to come again.
But White’s argument is that every durable political order has always rested on theurgic foundations: shared myths, rituals, and sacred assumptions. Whether these are explicitly acknowledged or not.
For it to work, we must engage it as an approach that requires ethical seriousness. Not just aesthetic rebellion. We don’t get a moral pass. Making things right, healing the world, cannot include hatefulness and resentment. This is work that makes a demand on our spirits and our souls.
Our metaphysics matter because we must become actively engaged in the process of growing from a culture that keeps us stuck in an eternal adolescence towards a culture that furthers our maturation. An initiatory culture that develops us into true adulthood. Into worthy future ancestors. Into people who can face a metacrisis.
People who are learning how to come into greater alignment with our own selves. With our sense of purpose, our reciprocal relationship with each other, and the aliveness of the planet.
These times demand that we become people who can burst forth with a creative energy that is broad and daring in its scope.
People who are, at the most practical of levels, able to generously share resources and open the doors of our hearts and our homes.
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