How to Be a Dissident

An irresistible guide to fighting back--part philosophy, part history, and part manual for living with integrity in an age of conformity and authoritarian drift How do we push back in a world where political leaders wield fear and intimidation? Where digital technology dehumanizes and flattens us? We need role models, and in this engaging book, acclaimed writer Gal Beckerman goes looking for them. Drawing on the stories of dissidents from around the globe and across time, from Socrates to Ai Weiwei, and thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Iris Murdoch, Beckerman reveals the defining characteristics these extraordinary figures share, a set of attributes and practices for anyone navigating the pressures of modern tyranny. Structured around ten qualities--among them, Be Pessimistic , Be Funny , Be Reckless , and Be Immortal --this illuminating, surprising book blends intellectual history, biography, and cultural criticism. It charts a dissident’s journey from the solitary moment of recognizing the truth, through the risks of speaking it, to the legacy that can outlast a life. What makes dissidents tick? And how might Urgent and inspiring, Beckerman’s book shows that dissidence is a human capacity we can all cultivate, a refusal to betray one’s inner voice, no matter the cost. In a polarized America and a world sliding toward authoritarianism, we need dissidents--not only the jailed and martyred, but also those of us who face small daily compromises of conscience. <How to Be a Dissident< lights the way.

Autorentext

Gal Beckerman

Klappentext

An invigorating guide to fighting back—part philosophy, part history, and part manual for living with integrity in an age of conformity and authoritarian drift

How do we push back in a world where political leaders wield fear and intimidation? Where digital technology dehumanizes and flattens us? We need role models, and in this engaging book, acclaimed writer Gal Beckerman goes looking for them. Drawing on the stories of dissidents from around the globe and across time, from Socrates to Ai Weiwei, and thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Iris Murdoch, Beckerman reveals the defining characteristics these extraordinary figures share, a set of attributes and practices for anyone navigating the pressures of modern tyranny.

Structured around ten qualities—among them, Be Pessimistic, Be Funny, Be Reckless, and Be Immortal—this illuminating, surprising book blends intellectual history, biography, and cultural criticism. It charts a dissident’s journey from the solitary moment of recognizing the truth, through the risks of speaking it, to the legacy that can outlast a life. What makes dissidents tick? And how might we change when we encounter them?

Urgent and inspiring, Beckerman’s book shows that dissidence is a human capacity we can all cultivate, a refusal to betray one’s inner voice, no matter the cost. In a polarized America and a world sliding toward authoritarianism, we need dissidents—not only the jailed and martyred, but also those of us who face small daily compromises of conscience. How to Be a Dissident lights the way.

Leseprobe
Chapter 1

Be Alone

Face the discomfort and fear.

1

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn could easily be the patron saint of dissidents. The Soviet writer was a prisoner of the Gulag for nearly a decade until Stalin’s death in 1953. After he was released, he eventually published a two-­thousand-­page tome that exposed not just the vast penal system he had known but every aspect of his society that was endemically deceitful, corrupt, and cruel. In his prophetic prime, with his long wispy beard and mournful eyes, each word he uttered clanged with total moral certainty. He was austere and demanding. His parting advice to his fellow Soviet citizens when he was exiled in 1974 was as simple as it was impossible to follow: Don’t ever lie.

So I was surprised to discover that this same man was once considered a candidate for recruitment by the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB. He had no desire to sit apart. In his twenties, he rose to the rank of captain in the Red Army and led troops into battle in World War II. “We loved marches,” he wrote. When he entered the army as an officer, he felt the “happiness of simplification,” of being “a military man and not having to think things through; the happiness of being immersed in the life everyone else lived.”

What he’s expressing is shocking to hear only because it’s coming from one of the twentieth century’s most famous and uncompromising dissidents: He wanted to conform and was happy when he was able to. This is where we need to start.

2

This desire to conform sits deep in the psyche. Just how deep can be seen in the troubled sleep of liberal-­minded Germans in the 1930s. A journalist named Charlotte Beradt wrote down the dreams of her friends and neighbors in Berlin as the Nazis consolidated power, and if I thought my own nightmare was alarming, it is child’s play compared to these surreal visions. A bedside lamp listens in on conversations. A stove speaks, disclosing secrets. A man holds a Hitler salute until his spine literally snaps.

But the most telling of the dreams in her collection are those that express not so much the pressures of the new, oppressive reality as the comfort that could come from bending to it. These were fantasies of conformity.

A business school student dreams she’s on a train where a group of passengers are singing political songs. Annoyed, she keeps moving seats. But then she has a thought: “Maybe if you’re singing along it isn’t so silly, so I sang along.” An older man dreams he is at the movies when Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-­in-­command, shows up wearing a brown leather vest and firing arrows from a crossbow. At first, the man laughs at the ridiculous get-­up. But then he looks down and sees he’s wearing the same outfit. A housewife dreams that she is kicked out of her friend’s home for criticizing people who perform the Hitler salute. When she boards a bus to leave, she faces the silently staring passengers, extends her arm, and says, “Heil Hitler!”

One of Beradt’s subjects offered just a single sentence: “I dreamed I said: ‘I don’t have to always say No anymore.’ ”

These people are not Nazi supporters. Even in their sleep they start off mocking the salutes, the songs, the uniforms, all of it. But a deeper wish reveals itself, to be released from responsibility. Analyzing these dreams led Beradt to one, unsettling conclusion: “Freedom is a burden, unfreedom comes as a relief.”

3

The question of why the chanting, goose-­stepping, flag-­waving crowd exerted so great a pull on millions of Germans became a kind of obsession for the intellectual class in the two decades that immediately followed World War II. The philosophers of the Frankfurt School even developed what they called an “F-scale” to measure a person’s fascistic tendencies, as if this could be determined as easily as sticking a thermometer in someone’s mouth. In 1961, a now-­famous experiment got people to deliver electric shocks to strangers just by ordering them to do so. Ten years later, another study turned college students into sadistic prison guards overnight.

Much of this postwar theorizing about human nature was, unsurprisingly, carried out by European Jews like Hannah Arendt, who, having just barely escaped with their lives, were desperate to understand what the hell had happened to their societies. But after all the experiments and the thinking, could it actually all boil down to what Bera…