Interview Only w/ Gal Beckerman - How To Be A Dissident

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I get a lot from various people frustrated by the current political system, and this comes from folks throughout the spectrum is what do I do? What can I do? Versus I need to do more referring to me and or media, et cetera. And my answer is always the same. Well, ultimately, my vote is the same as your vote. You've got to just everybody has a role here, but he's got to do something well. The conversation I want to have today is about it's it's a new book that's out

called How to Be a Dissident. It's by Gal Beckerman. That's my guest. Gal's here now. But the real point is it's sort of like, when you're living in a fairly free society and you feel as if you're not being represented, what do you do and what is it? What did others do? And are there is there inspiration to take from others who lived in less free societies. And obviously when you hear the words dissident, it immediately

invokes people fighting less free societies. But the current situation we're all in, I think there's this feeling that we

when you feel unrepresented or underrepresented, do you start? Is it good to start to think like a dissident? So this is a question that we're going to simply ask, and Gal's going to give us the answer. Gal, welcome to the podcast.

little bit of communications, it's it's a little bit of a lot of things. But you must have had a motivation. What was it?

about those experiences? Because to my mind, being a dissonant is saying no, experiencing a reality that somehow violates your sense of what is normal, what the normal conditions for a sort of free human life should be, and refusing to go along with it. Now, in authoritarian systems, that can take on a pretty extreme form. You know, you're not allowed to say whatever you want to say, You're

not allowed to read whatever you want to read. You're not allowed to wear your hair in the way that you want to wear your hair or leave it covered or uncovered. You're not allowed to gather with other people. But there are ways that I began to feel that those sort of conditions for a quote unquote normal life were beginning to be impeded upon even here in the United States, and in ways that I had never really

I had never really experienced them, certainly in my lifetime. And you know, to take an example that's just fairly recent, if you think about Minneapolis, when that happened, when people responded, when citizens in Minneapolis responded the way that they did, I saw dissidents.

somebody was watching the little things you do, right.

of a free Czechoslovakia. He had a concept, he said that dissidents starts with the pre political It's not these aren't These aren't sort of motivations which say, oh, here's this one leader in charge. I want to put my guy in charge. It's about those conditions of life. It's about saying how do I think my neighbors should be treated,

and then seeing that being violated and saying I have a choice. I have a moral choice. I can put my head down and do nothing, which is actually very hardwired in human beings right to do nothing in those circumstances, to just conform, or I can say no, I can refuse and do something about it. And I think that's it's out of that. It's at that crossroads that the dissident is born.

circumstance to just conform. And she came to an interesting conclusion. She said, these weren't people who just like you know, had a strong kind of set of moral precepts and and and those were the things that guided them. In fact, a lot of the people with moral precepts were able to switch from thou shalt kill to thou shalt not kill, you know, as soon as somebody sort of switched them

from one side to the other. She said. The people who refused were the like perpetual sort of doubters and skeptics who took everything, everything that they experienced and it's at face value, and tried to answer it with one single question. Can I live with myself? Can I live with myself if I don't do anything in this situation?

Can I live with myself if I go along with something that I may ask to go along with and she said those people. For them, it was quite quite simple. It's they didn't want to live with themselves because who they would be would be murderers. So they didn't want to live with a murderer. So it's it's this sort of very essential question of conscience, of kind of of

your gut in a way. I know it can sound a little bit sort of vague when when you talk about it that way, but I think we all know like those moments where we have I call it in the book moral nausea, you know, where you open the newspaper and you see something and you just you just don't it doesn't feel right to you. But then you have this next moment where you think, well, I've got to go on with my day, like I'm not gonna you know, and so I I you know, and we

can't all be dissidents, you know. I mean, I think that's one of the takeaways that I have from this experience of spending time with Dissonance. It's in some ways it's a very extreme position, you know, to always be the one at the front line of that particular moral quandary. But what I learned is that like, I need to understand that I do have choices. There is moral choice.

Even when I look in the newspaper and I see something that really bothers me, that gives me that kind of nausea, I can choose to do something about it. I can all so choose not to do something, which

is also a choice. But it's the accepting the idea that there is a choice, that I have some agency as a human being in these circumstances.

Soviet Union was pretty terrible. They couldn't really like have any kind of Jewish identity, but they were also actually there was also actually a lot of a lot of prejudice against them. Schools that they couldn't universities you couldn't go to, professions you couldn't go to. But at the same time they couldn't leave. So the Soviet Union had almost like this, you know, it was they were yeah, yeah, and and and so they made a cause out of

this desire to leave. And here again just to point, you know, to go back to something earlier, I said, what made their cause powerful was that they were drawing on I think what is a very human impulse, which is that we want to be able to live where we want to live. So the idea that they were actually imprisoned in the Soviet Union once they were able

to dramatize that to the world, and they did in all kinds of ways over a long period of time. That's the other thing we can talk about is dissidence takes time. It takes time to sort of incubate in a way. These were small communities of people. They built loyalty amongst themselves. They were outcasts within their own societies. As soon as they asked to leave, they were thrown out of their jobs, out of their sometimes out of

the department buildings. So they really formed these tight communities of people and they appealed to the world, the United States in particular, which then put pressure back on the Soviet Union, used it as a leverage in negotiations. You know. The benefit I think they had was that that was a world in which shame, the kind of shame that was being worked, it still worked. The idea of human rights was still had currency and not something that you know,

an American president could sort of just like, you know, laugh off. So those are all powerful levers that they could use against the Soviet Union.

like all of a sudden. You don't think it's ever going to end, and then it ends immediately.

the fall of Orbon, which people didn't think was going to happen, you know, or happened quite as dramatically and you know, as it did, and as totally as it did. You know, two thirds of the country voted against him. But I learned that there was something you know, incubating, percolating over the last two years in the Hungarian countryside,

in rural areas which were strongholds of Orbon. This is where most of just where it came from, where for people who lived there, it seemed almost impossible to imagine that they would ever be a different leader than Orbon. There began to be these small groups they called them islands. Actually Tisa Tisa, which is the political party that won. They call them Tisa islands. And this was like civic organizations, you know, in places where civil society had really almost

disappeared under Orbon. So you have like the local entrepreneur

and the doctor and maybe like a you know, a farmer, and they start meeting to discuss things like a local factory that's causing pollution. They organized to do clean up, like cleaning up later in the village or having like a movie night or something. And these were happening in hundreds and hundreds of rural areas. People weren't they were not directly connected to the party that but they were

sort of affiliated with the idea of some kind of change. But what it did was it built up this kind of like citizen muscle, and it made people less scared. It made them I mean I heard today what people told me is that it got people out of this spiral of fear and of silence that there could ever be anybody but orbone, because otherwise people understood that things were not great and hungary. The economy was not good, you know, there was the education system is not good.

There was all kinds of ways that they wanted to change, but they needed to take this kind of step of both recognizing there were other people who felt like they did, to do activities that were not at first risky, and have those sort of slowly ramb up to the then bigger task of voting against the man who they had voted for for the last sixteen years. So it's I mean, it's a kind of a perfect example of how dissonance needs to grow. I'll give you another example, if you

want from here, is the No Kings Day rallies. You know, people witness those and they say, well, on one hand, like what's the immediate effect? We always want to know, like is this going to translate into midterm election wins? But I think that's a really wrong way of thinking about it. I think these organizers have really been smart about how they've ramped up these rallies or these demonstrations,

which have been totally decentralized. They have happened in I think the first one had like two thousand and the last one had like four thousand. They're local, people can come with whatever cause they care most about under the umbrella of creeping authoritarianism, and they are seeing each other.

They're seeing each other in real life. They're saying, Okay, I'm not alone in this feeling right, doing things like being irreverent or jokey about the president, which you know, doesn't sound like it should be important, but it actually is.

laugh at the King, to see him naked is the first step towards imagining him gone, you know, so that they are sort of sights where people can reinforce these feelings and one another and build towards something bigger.

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part of the loyal opposition for twenty years, but in fact had been You know, I and I wonder, how is that is that a model? Are the best dissidents the ones that used to be a part of the system, Are they the most effective dissidence? What's Is there a pattern that you feel like you've uncovered.

So for her to take on, for Pens to take on the sort of Maga world and the culture that is Maga would demand building an alternative, you know, an alternative that has its own distinct value system.

doesn't now, but you sort of see it as it doesn't matter you're historic era.

makes a dissident in some ways? You know, like what what sort of what the essential aspects of a dissident has to be? You know, so something like a certain kind of aloneness, a certain ability to step away from conformity,

which is such a strong I mean, in that chapter, I looked at what a strong human impulse that actually is. We we are hardwired to conform. Yeah, it's survival, It's it's allowed our species to exist. As long as that we have these sort of we can create social bonds and and we are loyal to one another in this way that you know, it's very hard to break away from.

So uh so there is this sort of a weirdness around you know, the dissident who's willing to just say I'm going to just like you know, the world has to stop I can't go on, you know, living the way that I'm living as long as this thing is happening in the world. I looked at pessimism.

was the simple way to do it. Is that the thesis here.

is a space of action, right because like if if you think that things are going to get worse, but there is a possibility that they won't, then you're really motivated to act. If you think things are probably going to get better, then yeah, you could be passive. The arc of justice is going to bend in the direction. Why get off my ass to do something? You know, if I know that one way or another, climate change will be solved.

species will survive one way or the other. But if you are a pessimist, you think humanity is probably going to be wiped out. Uh, your motivation is a little bit higher. It doesn't mean that it will be wiped out. You're a pessimist.

is is this idea that things will probably get worse, but that you need to you need to find hope within that, within that sort of bubble that opens up, you know, in that word, probably you know that like he needs to do the good things.

to save humanity, because like that's a question that you can't answer in any case. But you know that, like right now there's something that you can do. And that to me is is that that's what hopeful passimism is.

satirists are different than comedians. Satirists sometimes don't make you laugh right right, you know, but they're going to point, they're going to do something so absurd that you're like, it takes it back, right, And the south Park boys, I've always thought, capture that spirit of satire that is uncomfortable.

so over the top sometimes, right, I mean talk about South Park.

to create like such absurd it's a carnivalesque. You know, it's the it's the one day a year you know in the Middle Ages where men with dress as women, women as men, poor people as rich feal richual as poor people, you know, throwing the world into disarray in a way that that makes you actually question the taken for granted, you say, well, would do things have to be this way? Do we have to have these crazy uh,

you know contracts that we sign, Like what is that about? Like it's these things that you don't actually think about that you just assume our a natural part of our world. That what humor does, is it it defloes that it says, you know, it says, let's look at it from this

totally other angle. And uh, I mean, you know, there was even I was reading in the in the seventeenth century, there were these like posters when when printing press became more popular, there were posters of like, you know, the world in which uh, you know, cats were chasing mice or like ox were butchering the butchers, and you know, the authorities would confiscate these because they saw it as threatening the idea that people would do, Yeah, that they

would have this almost like revolutionary sense of things don't have to be in the current order, they can be different.

actually the hardest for me to write because I just felt like I needed to wrestle with this idea of you know, if we're going to take we're going to take this to its ultimate conclusion, that dissonance often you know, put their bodies on the line, put their lives on the line in order to make in order to make the injustice that they're trying to illustrate perfectly clear.

Behind the scenes, King was tormented about this. He said, what do you mean put six year olds in front of you know, dogs and water cannons, even though he knew that what it would do would illustrate, you know, his point, He would illustrate the brutality of segregation in that city in a way that nobody could dispute. Nobody with a heart who was watching it could dispute. On the other hand, I mean, they were lucky nobody got hurt, but somebody could have very well been hurt. So how

do you what is the calculus there? How do you understand when it makes sense and when it doesn't make sense?

one would argue if it's strategic, it's no longer reckless.

way to that that it's sort of outward focused. Actually, the fact that there is a strategy is I would say a good aspect of recklessness, because you know, there aren't people who just become so enmeshed in the moral purpose that they feel that they're pursuing they lose they lose track of strategy and they actually just want to and they set themselves on fire. Right, they would do something like that to prove their point. I don't think that that's always the right thing to do, or maybe

ever the right thing to do. But you know, another complicated example from that chapter one that I really actually touched me in a real way. It was Navalny, who he's mentioned before. You know, he had already been poisoned once by Putin, so nearly killed, was saved when to Germany, and then had to make a decision was he going to go back to Russia. Now, think about how hard

that decision is. You know, he, on the one hand, if he's going to be true to his cause and actually if he's going to set the example that he wants to set for his people, for Russians. He kind of has to go back, but he knows that he's going to die to death. Yeah, Putin's not going to let him live. He'll let him you know, the best case scenario, he's in prison for the next for the rest of his you know, of Putin's reign. And uh. And this is a guy who has kids, he has

young kids, he's got a wife. You know, he's a guy full of life. I don't know if you've.

do what.

Like I made a promise to the Russian people, and if I have convictions, then I have to follow through my convictions. Otherwise who am I now? I don't know. We can all sort of like dream that we could have such you know, these have such a moral core. But but I think for him, when you ask how I would judge him, it's the question is more how he would judge himself. And I think that he really wouldn't be able to live with himself. To go back to that Hannah.

in the immortal than the idea of that be immortal.

I think it's because he you know, when you mentioned the immortal I think what I was trying to describe in that chapter is this sort of this this this duality that dissonants often have. I mean King had it too, which is that they they both are are are sort of operating at this at this higher level of principle and values you could call them. Sometimes those values are religious values. I mean they were for Navalney in some respect,

they were for King as well. Sometimes it's just like a sense of justice, like a deep, deep sense of justice. Sometimes it's a sense of you know, life, death and the cycles of just how the world works. But they're they're tuned into that, they're tuned into it in a deep way at the same time that their feet are sort of firmly grounded. So they're trying to do their

work here on earth. They're trying to actually I mean, if only you know, I had this great religious sort of virtuous feeling that he was he was being righteous and what he was doing, but he was also talking about the education system in Russia, the corruption. I mean, most of his work was about, you know, looking at how Putin and his circle were, you know, stealing money,

enriching themselves. I mean, these are very earthly things he was he was focused on on on the on the reality that he wanted to change, but he was also tapping into the sort of greater righteousness of doing that work. So and you know, these aren't unique individuals. I mean, I think I try to establish early on in the book that like I'm looking at them as almost like north stars. You know, these are people who live, but

will you know, have these qualities. And I'm not I'm not suggesting small significant person that I am that I could you know, wake up tomorrow and become a dissident and act like one. But it somehow felt like right to try to understand, like what are those qualities, like what actually what actually makes up that personality, because maybe that would give me and readers like a sense of, you know, things to strive for.

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code podcast for thirty percent off. And yes, I too, am a customer. So I want to bring this to sort of back to America. Yeah, please, because on one hand, look, we're not we're not anywhere in the situation that Russians are in. But we've had we've seen some co opting of institutions, right, whether it's media organizations, universities capitulating to the state. You know, maybe it's setting in a lawsuit, maybe it's trying to get government funding from being cut.

That's obviously not behaving as a dissipance, right if you work at it, Right, if you work at one of those organizations. But are they arms of the state or are they just simply making compromises under pressure that many a good person might make under the similar circumstances. I mean, that is what do I do with those folks?

ownership of media going forward for the foreseeable future. It put a stain on it that is going to be you know, it's look, it's turned into an opportunity for some of us that are now in the independent space, but it has made it where it's impossible to ever think about going back because you cannot find yourself being a journalist and feeling. And I wonder how many academics

feel this way. If you don't believe the institution you work for will fight for your right to do the job from the best of your abilities, then you'd rather be on your own.

are people that need to get their funds. There are people that you know, of course, there's the road that hell is paved with good intentions, right, and you know that's gonna say.

gonna have a ripple effect. Everyone has to find that

line in themselves. And I think that's everyone has to sort of. I think what made me want to think about this question is because I think those people weren't prepared. I think there's people weren't prepared to act in good conscience because We've never been faced with a situation like that.

we've learned something over the last year. I think when Ice entered Minneapolis, you know, Grants it a different context than being Bob Biger. But I think people were not political people, not lefties, not people. You know, we look at the people who sort of took a stand. They did feel like they had a choice they had to make, and I think that that is something, maybe something we've learned over the last year and a half, that that being a citizen in this country does sometimes demand a

hard choice.

going to almost have a forced democracy at some point. Uh, and then it didn't happen.

when I when I took about this book with dissidents in other countries or with people just people in other countries, they at laugh and they're like.

something happens to my to my neighbors? Am I going to do something about it? I haven't actually ever been forced into that position before, you know, So I think I think understanding it at the individual level is important

for people to well.

how how the government oppression works. When I saw kids coming home with bread to bring to mom and dad, to reinforce the nature that the state provided mom and dad doesn't provide, right, So you started to see and it was just sometimes you have to just as you know. It made me a better reporter to be around and

visually you understand these things. And I realized in our country we had become passive citizens. Yeah, right now, there is an upside to the Trump era. It's been the highest voter turnout we've had one hundred years.

And in the morning they came to me and and they were like in tears, and they were and and and I think the only thing that I could pull out of that was also because like you know, we'd come to think of Trump as this completely unanged character who you know, and for them, in their young minds, what would it mean to have somebody, you know, who was president who acted like the way that they had,

you know, come to understand he was acted? And I said, the metaphor, the only metaphor I could grab, although it's kind of a horrible metaphors, I said, you know, think

of it. We were like we were sitting in the backseat of a car and there was the president who was driving the car, and we kind of trusted that, like you know, maybe we didn't agree with him always, but that he would basically, you know, you know, do you know, keep keep keep his eyes on the road, you know, and get us there and get us to where we need to go. And we could kind of relax in the back seat and have conversations amongst ourselves. I was like, well, that's not the case. Now we

have to sit up in our seats. We have to watch the driver, we have to make sure that he's not hitting the potholes, and we have to I mean, it's kind of a terrifying metaphor.

if America were a vehicle, we'd be led by a drunk driver, right, which is like he kind of knows the direction to go, but he might swerve into crazy places or fall asleep, fall asleep at the wheel, you have no idea where we're headed. And it's sort of no, I've I've butchered that metaphor myself or analogy or whatever whatever is the correct form of that.

it's over. It's this notion that we need to build networks of of people who are engaged, involved doing like what those folks are doing in Hungary, you know, finding ways to connect and care about local issues. You know, I'm not saying this is happening perfectly, but I think that that is the path towards that more engaged citizenship. It's to sort of understand that it's a slow process of connecting way.

better in the next thirty years. But it's going to take time, and it maybe you have to start one state here, then maybe you get to hear and then maybe a party adopts it, or maybe there's this yeah, and is that how do you and there isn't a straight line to success. It is. It's plotting along. It's plotting along. It seems hopeless until it isn't right. And in fact, you may not live for when it happens. You may die before it happened.

It's almost like it's a bit, you know, and at some point the voter is going to say, well, wait a minute, we're now windshield wipers and neither one of you get it, and maybe we have to wear ourselves out. And you know, that's what happened in the mid nineteen century, and finally a third party came along named the Republican Party, and Lincoln and Loan behold here we are. You know,

maybe that's what I did. I don't know, but one of the things you preach in this book, but more so in your previous book, is that it takes time.

to do it deliberatively. You have to do it, you know, consciously, and it's but it's the the only thing that works, you know, otherwise you do get exactly what you're describing. It's sort of like sea sawing that appeals to our basest instincts. You know that we want the thing that we want right now, and then okay, we want the

opposite thing. And then you know, and what I see, I mean, I'm not saying anything that's that new, you know, but when when I see social media and the sort of what social media sort of biases us towards in

terms of the way we communicate, that's the thing that worries me the most because I feel like it robs us of that slow, deliberate process, which which we need to all get on the same page to figure out how to meet the bigger challenges. But yeah, that is I think that is the thing.

that I have. There's something that's going to hurt other people, or something that you know that that is going to make me feel like I have given up some essential agency that I think that I should have as a human being in this world. So live with that choice, still with the uncomfortableness, live with the choice, and then make a choice. And I say this, even if the choice is that you've decided not to do anything, understand

it as a choice. You understand way out. Okay, Well, on the one end, I have my family and my kids and my livelihood, and I really can't sacrifice that because it's going to be hurting them, and hurting them is you know I would I would rather not hurt them, you know, as opposed to sort of take a stand you know that I need to take.

That's hard, Like it's hard to say I'm going to act on behalf of let's say, climate change because it brought it up earlier, even though I think that probably the world is going to warm by two degrees and we're all gonna, you know, die, Like, I still need to do the thing that I think is the right

thing to do. So that that not being able, that that ability to tell yourself that you're acting because you know that it's the right thing to do and not because of the of you know what it will Tangibly, the tangible metrics is is something that's important to sort

of accept, but to just be positive about it. I also want to say that when I talk about those moral choices, they're burdens obviously, Like it's a burden to open the newspaper and to see a dying child and to say, oh shit, now I have to actually do something thing about it. Right. But and this I kind of took from Jean Paul sart Or, the French philosopher. He talks about moral choices as being creative acts. This is the substance from which our lives are made. Are

these acts? Are these choices, these decisions that we make about how we're going to live our life. You know, that mid level person who you're talking about, he's going to be you know, he's going to look back at his life in his eighties and he's going to remember. He's going to remember that moment where he was asked to, you know, to do a thing that just violated every sense of sort of conscience that he has, and it's not going to make him feel good about the kind of life that he lived.

That's true, that they were a choice. And I think the answer is no, none of them.