The crisis is when you come up against the wall of scale. The wall of scale is when you finally take on a project to help the world and after the blood, sweat and tears, realize that the amount of good that was actually done versus the amount of effort was definitely not in your favor. Actually it can come at a bunch of points. You realize that there is no known way to bring down a system, you realize that all the work you've been doing over the years blows, or you see a movie/music video or you read a book that explains in great detail how the world sucks or the amount of suffering that a number of people experience and it fucks you up to the point where you ask if it is possible to actually ever stop it. Maybe you just ask, what can I do? and don't know where to begin.
The effects of this are pretty standard. Burnout. Self-mutilation. 3 back to back sleepless nights. Give-up and get a job and revert into an addictive form of sub-culture (see raves, record collection, WarCraft). And my personal favorite: 'the wither away' syndrome, where instead of actually coming to some sort of mental consensus on this you push it away to the back of your mind and distract yourself with something else�
I think I understand why people feel this way and I think it comes from bad education. No necessarily bad, but I don't think anyone got a very good history lesson throughout time. Some movements for social change take a very long time. I think we want to see it happen in 1-10 years and if it doesn�t we can't look beyond that. I think this is a big mistake, I mean, yes sometimes it happens really lickity split where things change in a quick succession. But usually we forget that there was a large build-up and that the 'change' never really happened.
Women's equality. Protests and screams, debates in town halls and communities. Church revelation, burnings, crazy shit. Nothing. French revolution, democracy movements in 1840's nothing. Finally Finland women vote in 1906, then nothing. 70's in the states and Europe, civil rights movement to give women more access to government and jobs and protection against discrimination etc.
Today. The situation in the low-income countries is abysmal. Women on average make 72 cents on the dollar in the OECD (read high income) countries. This is not to say that it's never gonna get better. It could. This is to say that it's come a long way.
I think this is important when we talk about activism. I suppose an activist is someone that wants the best for everyone in the world. Not necessarily a world where everyone is the same, but a world where everyone dies of natural causes, where we don't worry about hunger, where the environment is stable, we all see each other as people, not tribes, genders and weirdo's. Keep in mind that a lot of people supporting free-trade and economic freedom believe that that is the way to do it. I think there version of history is pretty poor as is there understanding of anthropology and sociology, but then again, I've never been to up to date on economic theory. I digress�
We often demand immediate change. In the name of environmental theory this is understandable. In fact another friend of mine argues that this is left over from Christianity, a version of the apocalypse. Environmental collapse, nuclear or bio war, 1984 mass enslavement. If we don't do something now we will all die.
I do not subscribe to the possibility of 1984 being a completely authentic fear. Needless to say, I think that the book Tandia had a good page in it.
The sequel to the power of one was in my opinion a bit of a disaster. Long boring, idealistic and way to concentrated on boxing, the best page talked about how South Africans looked upon Apartied. They knew that it was not going to be a david and goliath sort of encounter where they would one day pull some ingenious maneuver out of the bag and institute a come-from-behind victory against oppression some day.
Sorry, this is not an Oliver Stone movie. No, what a variety of clans decided was that in order to fight this oppression they would have to fight together like a number of ants against a dung beetle Eventually they would be able over time to force it out of the ant hole and over the hill as it pushed back for days on end. This is not a battle that you can look upon as being won over night. If you decide that you want to be one of the privileged few that confront change in the world, you have to go in knowing that this will be a battle that you will probably never see won, and that things may actually get worse in your life time.
Hey, its not the worse thing that can happen. People give up all the time. People also never engage because of the drasticness of it all. I think if one looks at life in a sort of cost, benefit analysis, they have every reason to not become involved in changing the world because 999 times out of�there is absolutely no benefit and sometimes the cost can be your life. I personally deal with the fact that my entire engagement in activism may be useless with a sort of life defiance, though. This is to say that I define myself by what I do, or better yet, what I would do in a situation. I like to think that if I had the power to help someone or the power to change the world I could. So I feel that I do, and so I try. In other words, it does not matter if I succeed or not, but I feel that I must always fight against what I perceive as wrong because I think that others may benefit in the future, or maybe if I do it, others will fight on my behalf when I can no longer fight.
Although people will sometimes pin Ghandi down as being a little bit of a lightweight, for not fighting (after all, you can't really say that his peaceful engagement plan worked like a charm) I think he had a few good statements and a general good philosophy, namely being that you have to be the change that you want to see in the world.
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In other words if you do not know what to do to save the world, do something, anything. Fight, if you believe that people need to fight in order for the world to turn out OK. Or do nothing if you think we are doomed, or if you don't give a fuck or if you think everything is going to work out OK.
Although I'm not the greatest fan of the action oriented writings of Karl Marx, I think he too made some good points.
First, with regards to getting rid of state hierarchy, the state is not supposed to vanish over night in some violent revolution, but is instead supposed to whither away after the revolution.
More importantly: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways - the point is to change it."