Don't Argue with Daddy, or Cultivating Better Activist Fantasies
Why and how activists should embrace fantasy and sometimes refuse it
Many of us, these days, feel like we’re living in a fantasy land… unfortunately, it’s someone else's… and that person is a sadistic fascist techbro billionaire…
In the latest episode of What Do We Want?, our podcast about what brings movements together and drives them apart, we do a deep dive into fantasy. What’s the role of utopian dreams? Why are so many people living in a fantasyland? What can we do to liberate them (or should we)? What animates our own fantasies about being an “activist” or radical? And who do we really have in our minds' eye when we think about changing someone else’s mind?
On this episode, we’re joined by movement organizer and educator Sharmeen Khan, and just a note that, as she explains in the episode, she is one of eleven Toronto activists facing draconian charges related to protesting for Palestinian human rights. You can read Naomi Klein’s summary of the case. Please consider donating to their legal defence and/or sending a letter to the relevant authorities demanding the charges be dropped.
It’s important to begin by saying that while obviously it’s dangerous to live in the grips of an unrealistic fantasy, it’s also pretty normal. Humans are, perhaps uniquely, fantastical creatures: we project our minds into parallel futures and alternate realities all the time. It’s a natural, beautiful and sexy part of our cognition. We’re always fantasizing, and not just about alluring potential romances or about feeding sadistic fascist techbro billionaires to sandworms, but also in small ways, like what we’re going to make for dinner or how we’re going to make rent this month. Moreover, none of us would bother to get out of bed in the morning if somewhere deep down we didn’t cling to the fantasy things would get better, maybe on this earth, maybe only for our children’s children, maybe only in heaven.
In other words, fantasy is an essential part of who we are and, furthermore, it’s a core part of how we see and think about the world, so we shouldn’t be too smug about making a clear distinction between personal fantasy and hard reality: the reality we perceive shapes our fantasies; our fantasies shape how we perceive reality. We shouldn’t attempt to live without fantasy, but maybe we can have better fantasies?
They all ideology (and so can we)
One of the most important tools we have for understanding how we’re ruled by fantasies is ideology. It’s very important for activists and people who care about social movements to understand how it works. Unfortunately, the common use of the term is misleading. Most people use it to describe a comprehensive worldview, usually one that the person saying the word “ideology” disapproves of. This is very limiting.
In the briefest possible terms, ideology refers to the way a person comes to think other people’s thoughts, but to imagine that these thoughts are their own. Nobody believes they have been indoctrinated. We believe that what we think is common sense, or that we came up with our ideas on our own. But chances are, most of what any individual believes about the world has been shaped by the people around them, or by dominant social institutions like schools, the media, religion and so on. In this sense, most ideology works to normalize and justify dominant power relations and institutions in society.
For example, most people assume police are necessary and societies have always had them and that if we didn’t, there would be utter anarchy. But the police are a modern institution, and one that was invented to keep private property rather than people safe. In debates about the police, the assumption they are necessary is rarely a position anyone questions. It becomes the assumed shared framework or basis for the discussion. That’s the magic of ideology.
An important thing to remember about ideology is that it’s not, as we have often been led to believe, a coherent or comprehensive set of ideas. Ideology typically takes the form of a chaotic and contradictory mess of ideas, hearsay, information and arguments we’ve heard and internalized over our lives.
This is why it can often be so infuriating to argue with someone deep in the grips of ideology: their expression of their position often doesn’t make sense, when pushed. Immigrants, our asshole uncle tells us, are at once lazy benefits scroungers and also taking our jobs (he’s done the research!). Hard work and playing by the rules are the key to success and everyone knows you have to cheat to win. Patriarchy expects women to be both sexually alluring to men and also modest and chaste.
Part of the reason ideology can be so contradictory is that it’s not, as we like to imagine, some kind of carefully bug-tested software installed in the brain. Rather, ideology is typically concocted by individuals in the moment, where our feelings, intuitions and sense of self intersect with our society and are shaped by our world.
Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about trans athletes, but many quickly generate a strong (often stupid and offensive) opinion when the issue of women’s sports arises because it contradicts their ideology of gender, an ideology generally shaped not by careful research or systematic thought but by, typically, habit, convention and a life lived among rigid gender norms.
And here we come to another important point about ideology: it’s not really so much based on what we think; ideology emerges from what we do, how we live our lives, and our perception of our self-interest.
In the podcast episode, Max shares his experience trying to do public education in Canada amidst a disruptive occupation reclamation of land by Indigenous people in a nearby suburb. The racist reactions he and his fellow activists encountered among white people who were angry about the protests was mostly based on vague rumours, false information and bad history. But the people were attracted to it because they were afraid that continued Indigenous protests would threaten the price of their houses , which was their store of family wealth and source of fundamental security in a neoliberal world. Also, anti-Indigenous racism had become so normal that if they stopped believing and participating in it they feared they would have a hard time interacting with friends, family and neighbours. Of course, no one said “I don’t agree Indigenous people should have rights because it threatens the selling price of my house and I don’t want to be uninvited from the barbeque,” but their inclination towards racist ideas stemmed from these and other very material and social interests. Max and his friend’s strong arguments and multi-page historical pamphlets didn’t really change people’s minds, or not for long because they ran counter to these interests..
We might think of ideology as a set of armor, cobbled together out of the ideas we find lying around, that helps us imagine we are worthy of being in the world, that our life (even if we don’t like it) is normal, acceptable and worthy.
This is why challenging ideology is so tricky. To question or critique it feels, to most people, not like an intellectual conversation but an existential threat. It’s actually fairly easy to point out the contradictions or inconsistencies in someone else’s unquestioned ideology. If they’re relatively open minded, it’s not even that hard to get them to accept that their position is inconsistent, problematic or at least under-examined. Sometimes, in such a conversation, they even have a revelation. But having those changes stick and last longer than a few days is quite another thing. Many of us have enjoyed the feeling of satisfaction of thinking we’ve convinced someone of something, only to be cruelly upset a few weeks later when it seems they're back on their, well, bullshit.
The reality is that most of what we think is what we imagine we ought to think. Our ideas stem largely from our everyday actions and what we imagine to be the expectations of people around us. There’s a lot of interesting research indicating that when people change their habits and encounter new people, they’re deeply-held beliefs change. This seems to be why people join protests, change their climate behaviours, accept homosexuality and even come to like social robots more. (For more on this, see Sarah’s upcoming book).
For this reason, those who want to challenge ideology should not focus on merely offering strong and convincing arguments and rebuttals. We also need to think about offering resources, stories and examples that allow people to live and relate to each other and the world differently. Many people’s ideology is wrapped up in their sense of safety and acceptability - we are, after all, a social species and we care immensely about what others think about us. We want to fit in. Sure, we all ought to build resilience to ideas that upset us and train our minds to be more flexible. But those of us who make it our business to change people’s minds also need to be more savvy.
Rather than asking “why does this person believe this thing that is clearly wrong or hurtful” we might better ask two different questions: “how does this wrong and hurtful belief serve the believer?” and “what, materially and intellectually, could we, as a movement, offer that person that might help them change their way of being in the world and, thereby, their mind?”
Don’t argue with big (br)other…
But let’s face it: that’s a much harder and more uncomfortable set of questions than simply assuming the other person is a hopeless delusional idiot. And here we need to ask ourselves some more tough questions.
How are we served by believing that the other person is a hopeless delusional idiot?
How is our ego and our sense of self reinforced?
And more broadly, why are we so invested in being right?
Why do we cling on to the fantasy that we could use our clever or passionate words to transform someone (even when we know that probably won’t work, or at least not for long)?
In our Sense & Solidarity workshops for activists, we often begin a session on changing hearts and minds by asking our participants: who is the fantastic “big other” that comes to your mind when you think about who you’d really like to convince in an argument?
Almost always, it’s a frustrating loved one, or someone (a boss, a parent, a teacher, a big brother) who has or once had power over them. We often hear painful stories about being belittled or shut down or ignored by this figure. Unfortunately, we shape our sense of “success” in convincing others based on this fantastical figure. This is normal, but it can be misleading.
First of all, it’s actually usually fruitless to argue with family, bosses, teachers and others with whom we have such relations. In such cases, we’re typically, just having a proxy fight about our power dynamics. We want to turn the tables, to gain esteem, to be accepted, to set the record straight, we want revenge or love. Unfortunately, these can rarely be obtained by talking about politics!
Second, to the extent we have this “big other” in mind, we end up being inclined towards imagining that “success” in changing hearts and minds means seeking out people in our immediate social network, or at least of a type we already know, and convincing them. We all have that friend who ends up, disastrously, dating people who are a lot like one of their awful parents… In fantasizing about “debate” it is kind of similar: we end up looking for a proxy for the argument we really want to have… with daddy.
Of course, every once in a while we manage to change someone’s mind, especially if we’re crafty or charming or convincing or simply lucky. But for people who take changing the world seriously, it’s a matter of priorities.
Sure, you could spend 200 hours slowly deradicalizing a nazi, showing them that love and acceptance and compassion are better than hate and intolerance and indifference. (Actually, it’s important to realize that most Nazis believe they are acting out of love, acceptance and compassion, but filtered through a completely deranged ideology). But if we’re honest and strategic, in the same span of time we’d be much better off spending 2 hours convincing 100 potential allies to join a movement. But for many of us the longer, slower work of actual organizing is less romantic: we’re nudging people a little way towards our position, rather than heroically rescuing them from the dark side.
Remember in Return of the Jedi when our hero Luke bets the entire future of the rebellion on getting himself captured in order to make a personal appeal to convince the evil warlord Darth Vader ( robo-daddy) to embrace The Force and betray the Emperor? In that great modern fairy tale it works and the rebels win, but in real life it’s among the stupidest strategies imaginable. Don’t do this!
…use this tool instead
In our workshops, we use the famous social movement tool the spectrum of allies to help us set better priorities when it comes to challenging ideology, overcoming fantasy and setting strategic priorities. It encourages us to think about a range of positions as they relate to our organization or struggle’s perspective.
On the far left (of this diagram), there are active supporters: those who not only agree with us but are in the fight. Then we have passive supporters, who generally agree but are not yet mobilized or organized. By far, the vast majority of people are in the middle - and remember that when it comes to ideology, these people are not simply apathetic, neutral or passive: they probably have a set of contradictory or confused beliefs, some that align with us, some that align with our opponents. To their right we have our passive opponents, who disagree with us generally but aren’t organized or mobilized, and then our active opponents (Darth Vader).
In general, this model encourages us to think about how we can move people to the left and keep our active allies engaged. It obviously has limits: the world is never so simple. But it is useful in helping us strategize about where we should put our energies when we’re trying to change hearts and minds.
The “big other” we usually fantasize about arguing with in our head is usually a passive or active opponent. But it’s almost always a poor use of time to focus on them - one is lucky if one moves anyone on the spectrum more than one segment to the left, and that process takes more time the farther to the right they begin. One is almost always better served by focusing on helping passive allies get activated, or convincing people in the middle to be a bit more supportive.
We all want to believe we will be the ones to make those in power listen. We all want to tell daddy he’s wrong and for him to accept it. We all want to be a hero who uses words, rather than force, to change the world. It’s a beautiful fantasy, but what changes the world is organized movements, and that means focusing on building and maintaining our active allies and cultivating passive allies based on a thoughtful and rigorously pursued plan.
Ecce homo fantasticus
We humans are fantastical creatures: we live, in part, through our imaginations. It’s important for social movements or those who care about them to take this seriously. We’ve heard a lot in recent years about how movements need to abandon their intellectual utopias of a better world and, instead, focus on winning concrete political power, or winning meaningful material gains for working people, or doing actions that oppose rising fascism or that meet people’s immediate needs for housing, food and care in a world of austerity and deprivation. All important, but we give up fantasy at our peril. Instead, we should think about how people can together imagine, in concrete and active ways, what it would mean to win a better world (and indeed, in our workshops, we also discuss how to organize and cultivate meaningful experiences for building the radical imagination.)
The German philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote extensively on the importance of utopianism and fantasy in everyday life. Our dreams of a better world are not just the stuff of speculative fiction - they are part of the fabric of the way we live together and relate to one another. We know another world is possible, free from greed, violence and oppression, because we (hopefully) live a reflection of it every day in our most meaningful relations with the people we love.
Yes, movements must focus on real strategy to win real gains. But we can and should also make time and space for fantasy, not only for the joy of it but for the way it builds solidarity.
Further, there is a risk that if we don’t cultivate the imagination and fantasy, our enemies will. Bloche theorized that fascism was not simply ideological nonsense, but a kind of perverted dream of freedom: it promises an easy route to utopia through submission to extreme authority and worship of the cleansed ingroup. Likewise, capitalism is a system that promises it can fulfill our fantasies, but only by shrinking our dreams to a norm organized around individualism, consumerism and conformity.
We can and should dream bigger and fantasize better, together.
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