When I was recently asked, “How do
you join the resistance?” I had to interpret the question. What I think was
meant is, how do you join the resistance movement against the Trump administration?
While I have never been politically
active, I can relate to many of the issues raised by those who are extremely
uncomfortable with the actions of this president. His insistence on limiting
government controls on business, along with abandoning the public school system,
trashing the environment, cutting financial support for the poor, and pressing
for a “whites only” society in America are appalling to me. Plus I think he’s a
bully.
That being said, I am not a protest
marcher. Nor am I a big fan of Hillary Clinton, who is just too glib for me. And I‘m not convinced that
large gatherings do anything more than reassure the people who gather that they
aren’t alone. So from one perspective, I don’t really want join the political
resistance movement. The need to join the broader resistance against greedy
self-centeredness, however, seems pretty straightforward to me. I join the
resistance by being committed to a set of values. As Timothy McCarthy put
it, “Values are essential, not only to resistance,
but to social change. We need to be able to say what’s wrong and we also need
to be able to say what we would want to be right and how we might get there.”
What I want to be right is my
posture toward others – being unwilling to do things at their expense in order
to have an advantage over them for myself. Nor do I want to participate in or
applaud the actions of those who take that course. As to how we might get
there, it has to do with an awareness of one’s values and actions. And it would
be easy to get caught up in unimportant particulars. As Carlo Capolla wrote, “From
action or inaction each one of us derives a gain or a loss and at the same time
one causes a gain to someone else.” It’s impossible to keep an accounting of
everything we do and say. We probably get to social change by focusing on the
major things, not the insignificant ones. Capolla also wrote that “always and
inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in
circulation.” [1] Which is pretty much beside the point.
More to the point is that when one person
takes an action by which he makes a gain causing another person a loss, he has
acted as a bandit. The perfect bandit is one who robs you without causing you any
extra loss or harm. He steals $50 and you lose $50. But there are few perfect bandits. Imperfect
bandits are those whose gains result in fewer or more losses to others. A
leader who deports 100 innocent people so he can gain the power to deport
another hundred people, or so he or she can feel important, is an imperfect bandit. And then there are the
stupid people who insist on causing harm to other people without deriving any
gain. Drunk drivers who kill others are at the top of the list. I haven’t decided
whether many of our political leaders are bandits or just stupid, but I don’t
want to end up in either camp.
- Cipolla, Anthony, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. See http://www.mulino.it/ebook .
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