1.
- I keep reading about companies working on ways to revive the publishing industry.
- No. They talk about collecting personal information, then sending out personalized products.
- How would that solve the problem?
- The publishers would stop producing the cheapest, crudest products that people could be persuaded to accept.
- Wouldn't they still be producing cheap and crude products within the separate categories?
- How?
- Say I've been observed listening to rock and classical music, and the internet publisher sends me rock music and classical, and maybe them together in the same piece of music. I'm not being exposed to kinds of things I don't already know I like. And like before, the publishers will look for the best sellers within each category to economize on expense and maximize profits.
- But at least people can now get known in those sub-categories. They couldn't before the music and publishing businesses disintegrated.
- Each sub category is enclosed in its own bubble. And will begin to enclose us within the bubbles too.
- You have to explain that.
- When we write music, paint a picture, we start with our usual ways of stringing notes and sweeping the brush, habits we've developed in our individual experience. If the results are good, we let ourselves continue going the same way, when not, we see what happens when other ways, other habits we've developed are given a chance. When we do science, we experiment with what happens with the habits the world has of doing things, we try to discover laws, which means discover what happens when one habit of the world is put into relation with another. Ok?
- Yes.
- In our own lives, the habits we give a chance to are put into relation to all our other habits, in some degree or another. While I speak to you now, choosing my words, I am going on with all my other habits without reconsideration, how I'm talking, what I expect from talking, how much effort I'll invest, everything including the habits of unconscious basic continuous maintenance of my body. When we do science, we can choose any two habits of the world and try to put them in relation. We don't take our past habits with us into the new experiment.
- Physicists do, don't they? When they try to take all past science with them and discover how to unify gravitation and electromagnetism and strong and weak forces and the rest of them.
- Rest of them is right. No matter how much of the world you put into relation to itself, each part will be like one of our habits in relation to the others. We have no knowledge of what goes on within us, how our habits affect each other, and we have no knowledge of how in nature one law affects another. All we can do is pile up laws one on top of the other.
- And?
- And in our personal lives we do the piling on the basis of our own experience, testing each new choice by the result it has on the progress of our lives. In science there is no fixed path. We could choose to begin anywhere, we look at this habit of the world, then that. The beginnings are arbitrary, and then we see what works best in establishing more relations. The more tightly connected the laws the better, the fewer the laws the better, because fewer laws means fewer to be put in relation to each other. But in our personal lives neither reduction is an absolute advantage. It depends on circumstances whether we'll be better off loose with our habits, or able to call upon a large range of habits.
- Actually, I see where you are going with this.
- Then take over.
- The internet publishers give you your rock and classical music, gives other people their jazz and rock and roll, everybody together gets everything in the world, laws on top of laws.
- And remember, there are no communications between our habits, brush stroke does not know word choice.
- Our rock 'n' roller doesn't know our punk rocker.
- Being fed specialized content, produced and selected for our feeding by a scientific corporation: this is different from individuals with different habits developing new habits in doing things with each other.
- Because both the rockers bring to their meeting their whole lives of habits.
- Yes. Their own personal history accounts for the habits they have now, the new shared history accounts for the new development. Nothing is arbitrary.
- So giving everyone what the internet can discover they already like is literally science: the simplest possible laws of relation will be discovered between all those so identified, and a product produced that satisfies most efficiently those requirements, like the simplest most elegant theory of how nature works.
- And that is where we started, the garbage we are getting now from our publishers.
- What do we do about it?
- We either start over with small communities or we change the technology.
- Change the technology how?
- At the moment the technology feeds us more of what we are. When we meet others fed on a different diet, we perform an experiment, pile law upon law, see if any relation is discovered. If there is, it is because the over- and under-developed parts of themselves produced by unbalanced feeding complement each other. But keep in mind, there is no real connection between laws, between habits. Human beings caught up in such a system remain strangers to each other, and become strangers to themselves, because they are allowed to express only those specialized habits that complement other people's specialized habits.
- Yes, yes, I know that story. Alienation, specialization of labor. What can be done about it?
- Putting people into class, describing them by laws, sending everyone in the same class all the same products keeps people alienated and specialized. Right now the internet delivers things and information. It instead could send people to each other for the purpose of making things with each other. We change out of our specializations when we do things together. When we look for new ways of doing things we can use our whole selves. We call upon our individual experience, we lose our sense of most of ourselves being wasted. Let's say I want to build a school. The internet site sends people to me who it determines, on the basis of the personal information already collected, might want to work with me, it delivers documents, case studies to me that may be useful in building my school.
- I'm thinking about what you said earlier. We're being trained to show ourselves to each other like we're different physical laws, and through experiment the relations between different laws are discovered, and people put in contact with each other. All of us are collected together in society like Einstein's one great unified field theory. For what purpose? Science is beautiful for its own sake, and it gives us technology. This is ugly. We're people, not laws. We're alienated from others, from ourselves.
- But what the publishing companies are doing also has its technology, economic technology that makes money.
- We don't have to be ruled by money.*
Further Reading:
Noam Chomsky & Mental Things
2.
- Monopoly. It seems almost mystical in its power. Where does it come from? Publishers already had established their monopolies before the internet. The difference is now the internet has got us all competing to become monopolists too.
- And publishers profit both by our failures and success at the game of monopoly.
- How do they profit from failure?
- The most popular Youtube video manages to form a crowd of people transmitting one to the other the message, "take a look at this", popularity increasing popularity. Only the producer of the most popular video makes money, like only the writer of the best seller makes money. Youtube is a marketplace for would be monopolists. But people don't use Facebook to establish monopolies, rather to make the best of their lives as failures to become monopolists. Facebook is a research tool used to come up with the laws relating all the different kinds of lives people have forced themselves into in the competition for monopoly.
- We try to form monopolies, for however short a time, dig a channel of communication, get everyone talking about us and buy what we have to sell. When we fail we, the collection of failures, organize ourselves to feel more comfortable.
- Exactly.
- And the internet publishers now profit from the failures as they already profited from the successes. They collect information about the categories, those bits and pieces of crowd coalescence people trap themselves within by their failed attempts to become monopolists. Products are made specially for members of those categories, and the publishers sell to advertisers information about and access to the self-categorizing failed monopolists. But the social networks are not crowds.
- They are bodies of complementary parts.
- And this happens spontaneously, through everyone trying to win the game of monopoly?
- Through everyone trying to profit from the movement of a crowd.
- Complex organized society results from numbers of individuals trying to profit from crowd behavior. Some succeed in forming monopolies, the rest try to recover from their failure to form monopolies. And the publishers who used to profit only by the successful monopolists now profit from both the successful and failed monopolists.
- Yes.
- How did they figure it out?
- You mean, how did they get everyone to want to become monopolists?
- Yes. How did they manage it?
- By making it impossible to live any other way.
- How?
- Progressively, as a crowd is formed. One person pushes another who inadvertently pushes another who inadvertently passes on the movement to another.... People specialized by their attempts at monopoly, or by their attempts to form relations with other failed specialized monopoly seekers, push hard against those who want to live lives as individuals. The surviving individuals can't easily find friends or make a living, they are attracted by a way out offered by the chance of winning the lottery, being the successful monopolist, or as losers in the game of monopoly being able to at least to get along and stay alive.
Further Reading:
Eve In The Garden Of Eden
How To Read Plato's Republic
3.
- There's one more thing we have to say about monopoly.
- What?
- Monopoly is the product of a crowd. For us to have monopolies first we have to be a crowd. Do you know how crowds are made?
- How?
- By frightening people.
- Fear creates crowds, crowds lead to monopolies.
- A monopoly gets control of what the crowd wants. Predicts and profits from its flight.
- Then monopolies will deliberately create fear. That's why they buy up means of communication.
- They monopolize communication, and use communication monopolies to create more monopolies.
- If this is right, then our social networks should be creating fear, and then calming fear with fewer but more pervasive monopolizing products.
- Do you see that happening?
- Yes. But we don't seem to be acting like a crowd.
- Because we're all trying to be monopolists.
- Which the monopolists...
- ... the successful monopolists**
- ... are frightening us
- ... the failures
- ... into doing.
- We're a crowd of monopolists.
4.
- Can you give me an example of how monopolies create fear?
- A New Yorker article published this week argues that empathy is unreliable and shouldn't be the basis of our decision making: We care more about one little child suffering from a hurt finger next door than one million dying of starvation on another continent. Do you see the problem?
- Not really.
- It's assumed that empathy must operate like the corporate monopoly owned New Yorker itself, a social network, or Youtube celebrity. If empathy really is good it should be extendable indefinitely and comprehensively like a monopoly.
- And that's wrong?
- Absolutely! We empathize with those we know, who are usually those close to us.
- Still the article seems to be right, we don't care equally about everyone.
- The only reason we think we should is the habit of thinking in monopolistic terms. Individuals in their own worlds act with sympathy. Do you know what really is scary about the article?
- What?
- It tells us our monopolies - the interest groups which bribe the government, the monopolies of communication, the monopolies of business, all have the same simple logic, and the logic excludes sympathy. The message is, give up hope the tyranny of monopoly will ever be softened. It's only going to get worse.
further reading:
The Game Against The Game
5.
- Professor Chomsky? He talks about the corruption of government and news media by money. The economic and political situation has worsened in the half century of his lecturing and writing, now more people are listening. A popular movement is developing, he says, made up the privileged who float above the sea of propaganda. That is his phrase, by the way. The rest still believe what the government and news media tell them. When someone in the audience asks him what should we do, his answer is, a lot of things. It's up to you.**
- You don't like that he's not a man of action?
- You talk about a lot of same things.
- And don't do anything about them either.
- Why don't you?
- Social movements work upon people's anger and fear.
- And that's not what you guys do. Chomsky communicates information. You seem more interested in models. Are models useful to popular movements?
- Chomsky describes how wars are fought and violence spread in the interests of groups of people who use their wealth to control the government, how they are using their influence to make the rest poorer and themselves richer. They use violence, they take money. That makes people angry and afraid. What advantages would there be to describing the same class of wealthy in terms of how they play games and create monopolies?
- I'm asking.
- They want to play their game, make money. They don't want to change the world, except in order to make more money. They don't have what's called ideology. They have rules, but they pick them up and abandon them as time shows whether they make money. The government, in their control, is populated by members of their class. But as a separate sub-group, they have somewhat different interests: to protect the nation of money making as a whole they might wage wars that weaken the country economically but warn off economic competition. Even in the government there is no fixed program: rules are found and tried. Neither in government nor business does any one believe in free markets or monopoly capitalism. They would monopolize media of information, but don't have any interest in imposing particular ideas. They only want to go on playing the game.
- And win.
- And win. They are playing against the rest of us. Now what difference would it make to people to know their adversaries play games and only play games, and not simply be angry at and afraid of them?
- What?
- They might be able to see how they are different.
- If they are!
- They aren't when they depend on anger and fear to make their popular revolution. Passions are the material of monopoly and propaganda. The opposite to playing a game for its own sake, winning by any means including violence, is to try calmly whatever works, not for winning the game itself, but watching whether your life gets better or worse as a result.
- You'd rather popular movements make us into philosophers.
- Just a little.
Frighten people who frighten each other and convey to each other the same supplied message that is able to be understood by someone frightened: monopoly of opinion.
Profit by creating and manipulating market panics and using that profit to influence government to policies that eliminate competition: marketplace monopoly
6.
- Reading Chomsky again?
- Yes.
- What's the fascination?
- I think he's right and also not right. Right about politicians using techniques of persuasion to get people's support. Right that politicians are hypocrites, that they successfully convince they are one thing, and show in their actions they are another.
- Where is he wrong then?
- Wrong in thinking that this is enough.
- Why isn't it?
- He collects opinion polls showing the people don't support the actual policies, and also don't support most of the politicians. The people both believe and don't believe in the politicians they elect.
- How do you explain that? That they think the politicians are good guys and the institutions lead them astray?
- Chomsky has said some presidents appear to be nice guys, and that institutional pressures seem to be involved.
- Do you agree?
- I'm more interested in the people's response to the politicians. If people are both persuaded and not persuaded, what good is the phenomenally good job Chomsky is doing using the statements of politicians against themselves to prove they are liars?
- You mean people don't seem to care that politicians are lying to them?
- That is exactly what I mean.
- They don't care because they don't think they can do anything about the lying.
- Chomsky argues they don't have confidence because they don't know that the majority think the same way as they do, and in that knowledge of majority is power to change.
- If we elect a new government chances are it will be like the old. The institutional pressures have to be dealt with.
- And people don't know how to do it.
- What does Chomsky say?
- He believes another way is possible, but doesn't like to go into details, present pressing problems have to be dealt with first.
- And you think that without seeing a way out people will continue to do nothing, no matter how clear they see they are being lied to and tricked?
- It looks that way. You know, I'm interested in Chomsky's position on Israel. He describes Israel as a puppet of the U.S., a military machine serving the same money interests.
- Do you disagree?
- No. But I think also the victims of Israel's imperialism, unlike the victims of American imperialism, are operating their own power machine, and have been since the beginning of the wars.
- What does Chomsky say?
- He's a one principle man.
- Surprising.
- It is. In the case of American politics, I think we have to look at other things than the power of money, and the successful use of propaganda. The people know they are being lied to and don't do anything about it.
- But that is because, as Chomsky says, they don't know they have the power that comes from thinking the same.
- Well, I like Chomsky's way of arguing, turning words against words. It is sure. Looking at history isn't. It seems to me at least that people can know the government is against them and they are in agreement and still not know what to do about it.
- Chomsky let's others, movement organizers take on that job.
- Still, something is wrong here.
- What?
- I guess it is the "nice guy" thesis. The politicians are just like us. They're in a good position, and like we would do, they take advantage of their good fortune. But then, what about these institutional pressures that produce this mass lying and mass murder? We have on one side nice guy politicians who make murderous wars, and on the other side the people who appear to be willingly deceived about what is happening. What do you think?
- It's human nature.
- I don't know about you, but it doesn't inspire me with hope for change.
- And that is why you focus on trying to understand human nature.
- Chomsky doesn't go beyond the golden rule, do as you'd like to be done by.
- And the governmental industrial financial complex breaks that rule.
- And so do the people.
- Where does it leave us? If you are right that our country isn't the only one playing this game, and we can't expect the people to get outraged at their politicians for being as hypocritical as they are themselves.
- We need to know ourselves better. Chomsky isn't helping here. On one side, his golden rule, us and them, we all should be doing the same thing in the same circumstances. On the other side, his institutional pressures that pit the rich against the poor. Us and them again. Conflict between groups.
- Rather than conflict within the individual. "Know yourself". That's what you're going to say. Without better self knowledge we won't solve our political problems.
7.
- Most people sometimes, in some part of themselves, still believe the government has their best interests at heart. What can we do?
- We can try to discredit the particular actions of the government, or we can try to discredit the government officials.
- Discrediting the government seems to be doing something. There are more and more people who understand the truth.
- What do they understand?
- The government is working for the sake of the rich.
- Do they understand why the government is doing this?
- No, I don't think they do.
- Do you?
- Money making is their game, they like playing it, and they are winning.
- Why do people want to play a game?
- We are a country of game players.
- Why do our leaders want to play a game for its own sake? Play at the cost of other parts of life?
- I don't know.
- Our government says they are acting on moral, religious principles. That they are themselves moral and religious people.
- That's their game. Playing with words. Saying anything that works. Propaganda.
- The words work, but consider whether also our leaders really are what they say they are.
- They are hypocrites. Their rules apply to other people's conduct, not their own.
- There is a fundamental religious practice just like that.
- Doing the opposite to what we say?
- Doing which is in opposition to saying, yes. A ritual begins out of fear. Repeated practice of the same actions produces reassurance through the calm gained in the repetition itself. The state of the world which provided the fear at the beginning the ritual is disregarded, any future disconcerting state of the world can be disregarded by return to ritual practice.
- Then the people who most insist on the practice of rules are the people most likely to disobey them.
- When the rules are the product of ritual.
- So you want people to understand that government officials are not merely hypocrites. But in fact they believe in their rules, their lies.
- Believe in the sense they know personally, in their own lives, that doing these things calms their fears and reassures them.
- But they don't believe their lies?
- They believe it is true that lying, in the practice of ritual, is positively good. That what they say is good they know through their own personal experience.
- We call our leaders ritualists. Where does that get us?
- Their ritual is making money. Would you agree?
- Yes.
- Would most people in the country agree?
- More and more.
- If our leaders are practicing the ritual of making money, and it makes them happy, we can't reasonably expect them to care about those who don't practice the same rituals?
- No.
- We can't reasonably expect them to tell the truth?
- Not unless they make a ritual out of telling the truth.
- Do they?
- Of course not.
- Have we gotten anywhere then?
- People think the government really is on their side. They buy into what the government is saying, they are persuaded, they are the victims of propaganda. Propaganda works with crowd behavior. Crowd behavior is set in motion by leaders, who use the focus of attention on them by large numbers to set the crowd in motion. The problem is, it is difficult to convince people their leaders are hypocrites. They don't appear to be.
- Yes.
- You would like to shift attention of the people away from particular words which express how the leaders relate to them, and towards what the leaders are doing among themselves: practicing the ritual of money making. The leaders aren't monsters betraying the people who have put their trust in them.
- No.
- And then what? Would people understand that their leaders' ritual of money making was hurting them now and would hurt them even more in the future?
8.
- Let's say most people know the government is not on their side. But they are game players too. Why shouldn't the government play for its own side, use what advantage it has to win?
- It's not fair.
- Does a stronger team weaken itself before the game to make it fair?
- No. But it obeys the rules.
- What rules are those, if you play the game for its own sake, make money for the sake of making more money? Do you mean love, sympathy, friendship, kindness?
- So if we want the government to stop playing a game against us, we ourselves will have to stop playing the game for itself.
- That won't stop the government from doing anything. But when we do our jobs, ply our trades, not for their own sake, but for the sake of for love, sympathy, friendship, kindness, we'll know that what the government's doing is bad.
- And knowing, we'll be able to do something about it.
9.
- The President went on TV yesterday to complain that the time had come when something should be done about the institution of presidents personally ordering killings. He didn't seem to notice that he was the president who was personally ordering the killings. Apparently no one watching noticed either.
- There are more than a billion members of the Catholic Church.
- Yes. The President is a ritualist like a billion and more others in the world. The President, a former professor of constitutional law forgets there are supposed to be judges and juries that decide who gets killed.
- The President and the billion and more don't know what they are doing is wrong and can't understand why we believe they are wrong. We think they are wrong because they play the game for the sake of playing the game. But, correct me if I am wrong, when we play with them, play the game of "us against them", can we expect them ever to act in a way we can love, like, or sympathize with? And if we can't, our relation to them is like their relation to us? Only a game?
- It's not as bad as that. People we can only play games with are strangers. We each have one body and occupy one bit of space and have one mind to think about what's going on around that body and place. Some people and places are known, some aren't. We need only keep in mind that we don't want to give strangers the job of organizing our lives for us.
10.
- The first appearance of the golden rule in relation to democracy is in Thucydides, Pericles' Funeral Oration. Athenians love to be generous without expectation of return, because the idea of being in debt offends them. In The Melian Dialog the golden rule is argued to apply only between equals in power. Those without power must submit to inequality.
- What's your conclusion?
- Athenians, according to the funeral oration, thought of themselves like this:
Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft. We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about." "Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics—this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.- They are generous, but don't feel obligated to be fair.
- They are not hypocrites with each other. They tolerate each other with neither false acceptance nor with resentment. Their love of beautiful things and the things of the mind does not make them soft or extravagant with each other.
- So in some ways they are equals in power with each other? They are generous with each other only when they are equals in power? What is their power?
- Love of beauty, love of thought, attention to public life.
- That's strange.
- Why?
- Thinking, making something beautiful, paying attention to what our neighbors say all are examples of generosity without expectation of return, and the result is supposed to be the golden rule, that you return the good conduct you demand of others.
- That's right.
- And?
- It means that people are fair without hypocrisy when they are of the character the Athenians claimed for themselves. Athenians follow rules because that works. They tolerate each other out of an act of generosity, as a self conscious respect for the power each has over the other in a shared public life. Equal power comes from a rough equality of political knowledge and willingness to act on it. From that comes generosity without expectation of return, because you don't make deals with equals in power. And out of that generosity comes the fact that we treat each other as we like to be treated. That we want to obey the golden rule. Obedience actually is not to a rule but to our own conclusions.
- Then the hypocrisy of our politicians and of the people who know they are being lied to and don't seem to care results from our not wanting to obey, for our own reasons, the golden rule. We're the wrong kind of people.
- Look at the Israelis Chomsky is so much against. Like us, they are persuaded and not persuaded, are subject to the same governmental-industrial-financial complex. But for various reasons, they are further along than us in development.
- What kind of development?
- Call it anti-Athenian character. Not respecting others in public, without a controlled love of beauty, without thought of a kind that can be brought into public life.
- How are controlled love of beauty and thought brought into public life?
- The best way is what you and me are doing now. Conversation that we enjoy for its own sake as something beautiful, as one of the best things we can do in life, giving each other our thoughts without expectation of agreement, hardening ourselves to the idea our thoughts might well be disregarded.
- Israelis are famous for being disputatious.
- Yes. And for their rudeness, which is to say, public ugliness.
- So they don't respect each others power as members of the public, are not generous with each other in conversation or manners. They don't get along with each other then?
- They don't obey the golden rule, are hypocrites like us but more so. Last year, when I first arrived in Tel Aviv I stayed with a young Israeli, a self described radical protester, in his inherited million dollar (according to him) apartment. His father was in the business in exporting high technology security fences to places like Mexico, which wanted the technology to use against their people who had managed successfully to reestablish good conditions for public life.
- Did he know he was a hypocrite?
- Sure. He talked about leaving Israel.
- Talked.
- Yes. Typical Israeli. Ugly in manners. Disputatious. He took his handmade, deliberately ugly signs to protests, to the famous million person protests of a couple years ago.
- If million person protests don't work for the Israelis, why should we expect them to work for us? Don't answer. We have to bring "controlled love of beauty and thought into public life".
- Before making demands on the government we have to make demands on ourselves.
Further Reading:
Green Rain
* "Over the past 20 years, corporate profits have quadrupled while the corporate tax rate has dropped by half." (from: We’re Living In An Ayn Rand Economy)
"Conservatives believe that enriching individuals will eventually enrich society, and that government should not get in the way of the process. This is what happens as a result:
(1) The tax loss from one scheming businessman could have paid the salaries of 30,000 nurses. The lack of regulation in the financial industry allowed hedge fund manager John Paulson to conspire with Goldman Sachs in a plan to create packages of risky subprime mortgages and then short-sell (bet against) the sure-to-fail financial instruments. The ploy paid him $3.7 billion. Deregulation in the tax code allowed him to call his income “carried interest,” which is taxed at a 15% rate. More deregulation allowed him to defer his profits indefinitely.The lost taxes of $1.3 billion (35% of $3.7 billion) could have paid the salaries of 30,000 LPNs, 10 nurses for every county in the United States. Instead, one clever businessman took it all.
(2) The 10 richest Americans made enough money last year to feed every hungry person on earth for a year. The richest 10 Americans increased their wealth by over $50 billion in one year. That’s enough, according to 2008 estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the UN’s World Food Program, to feed the 870 million people in the world who are lacking sufficient food." (from 5 Ways Corporate Greed Is Bankrupting America)
** The most common management strategy for large companies is to increase the value of their stock by any means, and the result is the salaries of executives increase - they're tied to success in increasing stock price - and a steady decrease in productivity: now 1% or less "return on money invested" is normal, whereas businesses, small or large, operating for the purpose of making good products or providing good services have returns on investment of 20% or 30%. The corporate managers, making more money for themselves than at any time in history, know and are unconcerned. Their job is to establish monopolies and they are doing it: high stock price reflects confidence, confidence is based on monopoly status.
"If free enterprise becomes a proselytizing holy cause, it will be a sign that its workability and advantages have ceased to be self-evident."(Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951)
*** The Methods of Nonviolent Action
Gene Sharp: From Totalitarianism To Democracy
The methods of nonviolent
protest and persuasion
Formal statements
1. Public speeches
2. Letters of opposition or support
3. Declarations by organizations and institutions
4. Signed public statements
5. Declarations of indictment and intention
6. Group or mass petitions
communications with a wider audience
7. Slogans, caricatures, and symbols
8. Banners, posters, and displayed communications
9. Leaflets, pamphlets, and books
10. Newspapers and journals
11. Records, radio, and television
12. Skywriting and earthwriting
Group representations
13. Deputations
14. Mock awards
15. Group lobbying
16. Picketing
17. Mock elections
symbolic public acts
18. Display of flags and symbolic colors
19. Wearing of symbols
20. Prayer and worship
21. Delivering symbolic objects
22. Protest disrobings
23. Destruction of own property
24. Symbolic lights
25. Displays of portraits
26. Paint as protest
27. New signs and names
28. Symbolic sounds
29. Symbolic reclamations
30. Rude gestures
pressures on individuals
31. “Haunting” officials
32. Taunting officials
33. Fraternization
34. Vigils
Drama and music
35. Humorous skits and pranks
36. Performance of plays and music
37. Singing processions
38. Marches
39. Parades
40. Religious processions
41. Pilgrimages
42. Motorcades
honoring the dead
43. Political mourning
44. Mock funerals
45. Demonstrative funerals
46. Homage at burial places
public assemblies
47. Assemblies of protest or support
48. Protest meetings
49. Camouflaged meetings of protest
50. Teach-ins
Withdrawal and renunciation
51. Walk-outs
52. Silence
53. Renouncing honors
54. Turning one’s back
the methods of
social noncooperation
ostracism of persons
55. Social boycott
56. Selective social boycott
57. Lysistratic nonaction
58. Excommunication
59. Interdict
non cooperation with social events, customs, and institutions
60. Suspension of social and sports activities
61. Boycott of social affairs
62. Student strike
63. Social disobedience
64. Withdrawal from social institutions
Withdrawal from the social system
65. Stay-at-home
66. Total personal noncooperation
67. Flight of workers
68. Sanctuary
69. Collective disappearance
70. Protest emigration
(hijrat)
The methods of economic noncooperation (1)
economic boycotts
action by consumers
71. Consumers’ boycott
72. Nonconsumption of boycotted goods
73. Policy of austerity
74. Rent withholding
75. Refusal to rent
76. National consumers’ boycott
77. International consumers’ boycott
action by workers and producers
78. Workmen’s boycott
79. Producers’ boycott
action by middlemen
80. Suppliers’ and handlers’ boycott
action by owners and management
81. Traders’ boycott
82. Refusal to let or sell property
83. Lockout
84. Refusal of industrial assistance
85. Merchants’ “general strike”
Action by holders of financial resources
86. Withdrawal of bank deposits
87. Refusal to pay fees, dues, and assessments
88. Refusal to pay debts or interest
89. Severance of funds and credit
90. Revenue refusal
91. Refusal of a government’s money
action by governments
92. Domestic embargo
93. Blacklisting of traders
94. International sellers’ embargo
95. International buyers’ embargo
96. International trade embargo
the methods of
economic noncooperation
(2)
the strike
symbolic strikes
97. Protest strike
98. Quickie walkout (lightning strike)
agricultural strikes
99. Peasant strike
100. Farm workers’ strike
strikes by special groups
101. Refusal of impressed labor
102. Prisoners’ strike
103. Craft strike
104. Professional strike
ordinary industrial strikes
105. Establishment strike
106. Industry strike
107. Sympathetic strike
restricted strikes
108. Detailed strike
109. Bumper strike
110. Slowdown strike
111. Working-to-rule strike
112. Reporting “sick” (sick-in)
113. Strike by resignation
114. Limited strike
115. Selective strike
multi-industry strikes
116. Generalized strike
117. General strike
combinations of strikes and economic closures
118. Hartal
119. Economic shutdown
the methods of political noncooperation
rejection of authority
120. Withholding or withdrawal of allegiance
121. Refusal of public support
122. Literature and speeches advocating resistance
citizens’ noncooperation with government
123. Boycott of legislative bodies
124. Boycott of elections
125. Boycott of government employment and positions
126. Boycott of government departments, agencies and other bodies
127. Withdrawal from government educational institutions
128. Boycott of government-supported organizations
129. Refusal of assistance to enforcement agents
130. Removal of own signs and placemarks
131. Refusal to accept appointed officials
132. Refusal to dissolve existing institutions citizens’ alternatives to obedience
133. Reluctant and slow compliance
134. Nonobedience in absence of direct supervision
135. Popular nonobedience
136. Disguised disobedience
137. Refusal of an assemblage or meeting to disperse
138. Sitdown
139. Noncooperation with conscription and deportation
140. Hiding, escape and false identities
141. Civil disobedience of “illegitimate” laws action by government personnel
142. Selective refusal of assistance by government aides
143. Blocking of lines of command and information
144. Stalling and obstruction
145. General administrative noncooperation
146. Judicial noncooperation
147. Deliberate inefficiency and selective noncooperation by
enforcement agents
148. Mutiny Domestic governmental action
149. Quasi-legal evasions and delays
150. Noncooperation by constituent governmental units international governmental action
151. Changes in diplomatic and other representation
152. Delay and cancellation of diplomatic events
153. Withholding of diplomatic recognition
154. Severance of diplomatic relations
155. Withdrawal from international organizations
156. Refusal of membership in international bodies
157. Expulsion from international organizations
The methods of nonviolent intervention psychological intervention:
158. Self-exposure to the elements
159. The fast
(a) Fast of moral pressure
(b) Hunger strike
(c) Satyagrahic fast
160. Reverse trial
161. Nonviolent harassment
physical intervention
162. Sit-in
163. Stand-in
164. Ride-in
165. Wade-in
166. Mill-in
167. Pray-in
168. Nonviolent raids
169. Nonviolent air raids
170. Nonviolent invasion
171. Nonviolent interjection
172. Nonviolent obstruction
173. Nonviolent occupation
social intervention
174. Establishing new social patterns
175. Overloading of facilities
176. Stall-in
177. Speak-in
178. Guerrilla theater
179. Alternative social institutions
180. Alternative communication system
economic intervention
181. Reverse strike
182. Stay-in strike
183. Nonviolent land seizure
184. Defiance of blockades
185. Politically motivated counterfeiting
186. Preclusive purchasing
187. Seizure of assets
188. Dumping
189. Selective patronage
190. Alternative markets
191. Alternative transportation systems
192. Alternative economic institutions
political intervention
193. Overloading of administrative systems
194. Disclosing identities of secret agents
195. Seeking imprisonment
196. Civil disobedience of “neutral” laws
197. Work-on without collaboration
198. Dual sovereignty and parallel government
