Speak Up
Part 3 of how to resist the threats of democratic destruction
This is part 3 of how to resist the current threats of democratic destruction. After acknowledging the reality of what’s happening, and finding your own ways to take resistive action, the next step is to publicize your actions.
I’m not talking about performative activism, or slacktivism. Spreading the word through your social networks is a great thing to do, but becomes questionable when you share an instagram story and your participation stops there, or when you carelessly share content without properly fact-checking it. What I do mean is taking actions of resistance and then showing or talking to people about those actions you’re doing.
As someone raised Catholic, something in me immediately rejects this. I was undoubtedly influenced by a quote in the Bible warning against bragging about your good deeds. I was taught that your efforts to do good should be quiet, or else it must mean you’re seeking clout or approval from others, which is Not Virtuous. This idea of not sharing my efforts toward morality fit well with my inclination toward people-pleasing and a learned desire to not make waves. (My thought process: if you share about doing something and the moral reasons you do it, you might alienate other people who don’t do that thing - they might feel judged.)
But taking action in private is not the virtue it’s made out to be. It’s actually just bad strategy if you’re trying to further a resistance movement, or any other kind of movement for that matter.
The key
The key to a successful movement is to change the social norms. In Donella Meadows’ iceberg model for systemic thinking, it’s clear that mindsets are at the root of societal structures, trends and events. If mindsets change, the structures, patterns, and events can much more easily follow suit. When mindsets and social norms both change, the world we are living in can change, too. But to change social norms requires people speaking up. It requires harnessing the potency of social influence.
Social norms run the world because they influence a huge amount of our decisions. Something becomes a social norm when we do something because we believe other people in our community or people like us do it, or those who matter to us approve of it (UNICEF).
Thus, in order to change social norms, people have to perceive that change to be present among the people in their community and those whose approval they seek. Individual actions can change the world, but only when the individual actions become collective actions. People can’t join you and follow suit if they don’t know the actions you’re doing.
Social contagion
As much as we want to deny it, we are not individual, autonomous actors in the world. We are social beings through and through.
Other people help us make sense of the world
We base what we view as normal upon the reactions of others. We react to things according to how those around us are reacting to them. In the wake of World War II, psychologist Dr. Solomon Asch conducted a landmark study shedding light on the unbelievable power of social influence. The study, under the pretense of a vision test, had each participant put in a room with 6-8 actors pretending to also be subjects. Two cards were presented to the group: one with one vertical line, the other with 3 vertical lines of different lengths, one of which matched the length of the line in the first card. Each person had to state aloud which line from the second card matched the length of the first card line. The results of the experimental trials, which have been replicated consistently over decades and as recently as 2023, demonstrated that at least 75% of participants conformed to the actors’ clearly wrong answers at least once in 12 trials. A whopping 32% of participants on average conformed with the incorrect majority every time. Only 25% of participants stood their ground and never conformed. In stark contrast, less than 1% of the control group participants ever gave the wrong answer.
It’s not just that the pressure of a majority influences us to want to conform. It’s that we understand our reality through social eyes. We don’t go with the group to simply save face, but often because we use other people to help correct our individual biases. In 2005, neuroscientist Gregory Berns conducted a study to build on Asch’s, asking whether people conformed to avoid the pain of social divergence, or because their perception of reality actually changed. The team did this by scanning participants’ brains to detect which brain regions activated while they committed to their obviously wrong, group-conforming answers. What they found is that in these moments, activity increased in the area devoted to spatial awareness rather than the area devoted to conscious decision-making and planning. The latter would have been expected if people were going against their perceived truth to conform with the group, but what happened showed people actively seeing a new reality based on the majority’s opinions. Wow.
It turns out there are robust evolutionary reasons for this. In David McRaney’s book, How Minds Change, he uncovers the rich background and nuances of the psychology of how beliefs form and change. McRaney explains that out of necessity, humans evolved to make decisions in groups. Over time we learned we can’t reliably count on our own biased thoughts and perceptions, so we constantly crosscheck with our community. When everyone combines their narrow perspectives, theoretically the whole should provide a fuller picture of truth than any one person’s understanding. We understand the world around us this way. It’s impossible for us to individually rationalize every single decision, so we most often go along with our group as a shortcut, assuming the majority knows better than we could on our own. It’s a heuristic that, though imperfect, makes sense.
This reliance on others to help us make sense of the world only becomes more important when we undergo big societal shifts. Losing sense of reality happens gradually and sometimes imperceptibly until suddenly everything is different. If we rationalize the bizarreness - like that of the US’s current federal political landscape - it can begin to feel normal, especially if our communities signal that to us, explicitly or not. Things like Biden warmly ‘welcoming home’ 47 back into the White House with open arms and tea have an impact by normalizing what the current administration is doing to our country. Or, other people can help bind us to reality by shifting the social norms and resisting the tides of insanity. Politicians and cultural leaders speaking out with genuine urgency also have an impact by affirming that no, this is not something we should let happen while sitting idly by. Either way, it’s the power of social influence that determines most strongly how we perceive the world around us.
Action is contagious.
Just as social norms influence our perception, so do social norms influence our actions. This is easier to recognize than the contagion of thought, but we still are pretty good at hiding it from ourselves. That’s only because it’s happening subconsciously all of the time. When I turn my attention to this, I realize that having friends with great fashion sense inspires me to raise the bar for myself, seeing more people riding bikes on main roads subconsciously nudges me to want to join them, and when I drink I usually do so not because I enjoy it but because everyone around me is doing it. As another example, research shows people are more likely to protest if their friends are protesting, too.
When we see our people doing something, it becomes normalized and we feel much more comfortable doing it too. We also fear rejection if we don’t join in. That’s why it’s crucial to give our actions the ability to spread and catch on, by doing them out loud.
Define ‘speaking up’
No matter what your preferred method of taking action is, each of us has to start doing it publicly and out loud. When I say ‘speak up,’ that can be done in a variety of ways. Actions talk as much as words do, and often with greater impact. Speaking up simply means being up-front about the actions you are taking to resist and why. It just means not hiding or shying away from those topics when they come up and not gatekeeping your actions by keeping them private. Whether online or through real, face-to-face conversations, talk about it. Share what you’re doing, make and share art, share your thoughts, fears, opinions. Talking and writing accomplish the same thing. Do real, physical things in your community. People will see you and be influenced, even though they won’t realize it.
There’s a vulnerability that comes with speaking up, and while scary, vulnerability is what breeds connection and community. Those social bonds are the capital of a people-powered movement.
We have a much greater impact on other people than we think we do.
The media issue
Another reason to be more vocal is to counteract the desperately unbalanced media landscape. Marketers know very well the power of social influence. For a while now, the Right has been killing the marketing game. New data confirms and visualizes this:
Share the burden
In a society as individualistic as the US, it has become a social norm to atomize and internalize - especially in times of high stress. We become less vulnerable, and more closed off. And that’s the opposite of what this moment requires. To build and maintain a movement of resistance against the current regime, we must consciously fight the urge to isolate and wither away, instead opting to share the mental and emotional toll with others, in community. When we speak out loud about what’s happening, it becomes more real, but the burden also becomes less heavy because suddenly we realize we’re sharing it with others. We’re not alone. That realization is what provides the relief and motivation necessary to sustain a resistance movement. Doubly, when we share the actions we’re taking, it encourages others to join us.