As for values, humility seems important. Shane Claiborne talks about a movement becoming smaller and smaller until it takes over the world in his book The Irresistible Revolution.
He may have over-worked that paradox, but what he wrote reminds me of how implicit in the thinking of various organizers, including myself, is the desire to do something great.
If we’re not careful, that desire is a matter of self-aggrandizement. This reminds me of the self-righteousness and pushiness I’ve seen, after the fact, in my own behavior over the years, and in others.’
I noticed this at some of the national gatherings such as the OWS 2 year reunion. It’s good to be driven, but some organizers there and at other events seemed, in my opinion, too full of themselves.
At least regarding my own egotism, it’s maybe wise to be careful about wanting to ‘do something great.’ Mother Teresa said, “If you can’t do great things, do small things with great love.” I don’t rule out doing great things, but the goal should be to do loving things, and from there making them as big as we can get them without losing the love.
Most of us won’t make a big splash whereby a lot of people know our names and faces and tell us how “awesome” or brilliant we are. If we care about that, then we are likely to do the right things for the wrong reasons, which T.S. Elliot calls the “highest treason” in Murder in the Cathedral.
People who end up being great probably don’t seek it out, but instead seek to respond to a need in their communities or in the world in general. King was asked to lead the Montgomery boycott, and he didn’t immediately say yes, if I’m not mistaken.
Someone can have ambitious drive to be great but not achieve it even if they have a big impact. For example, Adolf Hitler was driven by his notions of German or Aryan greatness. But his instigation of mass murder was big, but not great. It is a reminder that it’s better to do very small good things than very big bad things.
The motivation to do something big for its own sake might cause a lot of evil. That’s why I’m wary of it, within myself and within others who, for example, exhibit a mentality regarding ‘revolution’ that raises the following question.
Are some of us talking revolution because we are upset that power is being abused; or are we interested in revolution because we are disturbed that we ourselves do not possess that degree of power?
I don’t want to be judgmental or cynical, but most, if not all of the talk about violent revolution I have encountered has seemed to come from people who are relatively privileged in terms of race, class, and ethnicity.
I am not sure why that is. Maybe it’s because part of white privilege is feeling that we can spout off about revolution without making authorities as uncomfortable as they’d be if it were a nonwhite person doing it.
I’m just speculating, but maybe, another reason is that it’s the relatively privileged who have the notion of being among those with some degree of power in fighting for and winning a revolution and helping to govern in the aftermath (assuming winning even makes any sense anymore in this day and age of uber-technological power nation-states have over their populations; and assuming society would be governable in the wake of a revolution.)
A lack of humility involves a type of power envy I had thought just existed among the right wing militia types , and Tea Party types who seem intensely focused on their own perceived threatened status and not so much by a concern for the common good or for people and other beings that are oppressed. But power-envy seems evident among some on the far left too.
Erich Fromm in the Anatomy of Human Destructiveness describes the ‘revolutionary character’ as someone (to paraphrase) who is neither covetous of, nor cowed by, power.
Similarly, during a visit to Columbus three years ago, food sovereignty writer and activist Eric Holt-Gimenez said a campesino told him revolution, in its true sense, is not about seizing power for ourselves by taking it away from those who currently have it, but that it is instead a matter of changing our relationship with and attitude toward power.
But back to the power envy mentality, it’s an attitude toward revolution that can lead to the new order of leaders being just as bad or worse than the one’s replaced. Strategic nonviolence writers such as George Lakey, Erica Chenoweth, Maria J. Stephan, and maybe also David Swanson have talked about this.
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