Activity Groups And Movement Groups

What commonly causes the bonds of a social group to fly apart like a shattering flywheel? What causes a project's efforts to stagnate in rigidity and obsolescence?

 

I.

 

I will pick a bicycling group as a random example of an activity group, although I have not been in that one specifically. Bike riders can be good and bad or have good or bad politics; and yet I live out my own specific values when organizing the group.

 

Some of them will say, "stop politicizing bicycle outings". And I respond that the personal is political, so it's always political anyway. Our bike group is daily life, and if I'm not going to practice right and wrong in daily life, then where should I? I decline to form a group in which the title contains "[The Name Of My Faction] Bicycling". I will universalize it as a "Bicycle Outing" group, because I normalize my ethics as applying to the whole world, and bicycling is part of the world.

 

The short-term payoff is going on bicycling outings, or whatever else the group is about. The long-term payoff is making the world have virtue and good politics. That happens one group at a time.

 

II.

 

There is a second type of group, centered around how to live. It is not centered around an activity, but only a movement. Nothing else provides the day-to-day motivation to show up.

 

But here's the thing about that form of social organization. All groups have an activity (a short-term payoff) or they dissipate. In a local branch of a movement, the participants will mostly get the short-term payoff of looking a certain way when the other group members are looking, and the short-term payoff of preaching to the choir and "gotcha-ing" each other. The only ones you can influence today, and feel good about it, are the ones who are already part of the movement and listening to you.

 

We will quickly lose all of the people willing to tolerate that environment. Those who continue showing up, consistently tend to make it look like this:

• The doctrine of Original Sin: your badness is permanent and intrinsic because of your birth, not because of what you have done.
• This leads to the owing of a debt to the group, which can never be repaid. Goodness must be constantly proved to the group, but can never be settled.
• Living in a fishbowl. Performances attract audiences, and audiences attract performers.
• Following certain rules, to demonstrate membership in the group, instead of following rules because of the benefits or harms that result from the rule.
• Helping each other is re-framed as an obligation, which is depleting, where if it had been framed as an opportunity, it would have been replenishing.
• Constant distrustful fault-finding. A fixation on our own (and each other's) problems, flaws, insufficiency, inadequacy.
• Doctrinal purity enforced through vocabulary.
• Intense shame.
• Comparison and competition.
• This leads to a stance of suspicion toward each other.
• This instills and cultivates social anxiety in a feedback loop.
• As a result, discussions contain less and less nuance or subtlety.
• Using the word "unsafe" to mean "uncomfortable". Whatever you want is never more important than another person's "safety", and therefore, your confinement is less important than another's comfort.

This is why you see "church splits" in religious organizations-- a church is a movement group. It's why the Social Media wing of activism turns into a knife fight even more than other approaches to activism.

 

It is not inevitable for these tendencies to take hold in a movement, and many of them mostly succeed in resisting the pull. What I have found, is that whatever the goals of a group, the above tendencies will inhibit the creativity and experimentation crucial to radical social change. And the main way to accomplish experimental or creative goals-- whatever they may be-- is to resist the above tendencies.

 

For more reading on this, see "Joyful Militancy: The Stifling Air Of Rigid Radicalism", by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery.