RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 357 Cynicism Meets Activism Strategy Wins
Episode 357 of RevolutionZ presents chapter six of The Wind Cries Freedom plus some personal discussion of publishing priorities and reader/listener choices. From the oral history, Andre Goldman describes his path from academic to organizer and in doing so reveals how a campus boycott became a disciplined, scalable movement. His story has no lone hero; it’s built on strategy, solidarity, and a culture that turned participation into a mark of maturity rather than a fringe stance.
Along the way Andre refers to lessons he took from reading about the 1960s without romanticizing them: expand with intention, consolidate gains, and keep your organizing transparent if you want participatory democracy to be more than a slogan. Miguel draws out his take on how students in their time exposed militarized research, how campus workers reshaped demands toward shared governance, and how inter-campus coordination converted isolated protests into a coherent force. When administrators leaned on repression, “safety” threats, and prestige, the movement focused on raising the real costs of such behavior—documenting abuses, repeatedly returning stronger, and persistently building sympathy beyond the campus.
The biggest obstacle, Andre reports, was not tactical but psychological. Potential allies often agreed on facts and ethics but clung to the belief that victory was impossible or irrelevant. So, to dissent was pointless. Andre uses his experiences to describe the origins of that learned powerlessness and to show how movements undid it by linking small wins to a bigger strategy,, asking questions that stir conscience, and modeling a vision others want to join. Does Andre's discussion of a future struggle as part of this oral history provide provocative, useful insights for campus organizing, anti-militarism, democratic governance, and beating cynicism in our time? Does it reveal what concrete steps, courage, and discipline can accomplish together? If so, I think Miguel and Andre would say okay, in that case refine the insights, adapt them to your many varied situations, beat Trump and militarism. If not, I think Miguel and Andre would say, okay, generate your own more useful insights.
If Andre's stories and the lessons he took resonate for you, or even more important, if you think it would resonate for others, perhaps share the episode with a friend who thinks “nothing ever changes,” and perhaps even attach a comment with a lesson you feel you can take into your next action, or a proposed lesson which you instead think is confused or mistaken and needs to be improved or replaced. In other words listen, but then engage.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. You may be aware that I am interspersing in our flow of episodes a sequence based on a book I have prepared, but which does not yet have a publisher. The book, titled The Wind Cries Freedom, is an oral history of an ex American Revolution. It hopes to inspire belief in the possibility of fundamental, worthy, viable change, revolution, and to convey thoughts and lessons that may prove helpful for attaining such changes, here in our time and place, though communicated in this oral history by others from another time and place. Now this is a controversial undertaking. Some are telling me it is a fool's errand. No one will publish it. For that matter, if it somehow does get out there, no one, or very nearly no one, will read it. Why do my friends feel as they do? They tell me it is a work of fiction, a novel, and they are right that an oral history of a possible future channeled into our time is certainly fictional, even if it means to read like nonfiction. And they say that as a novel, the Wind Cries Freedom has to have characters who undergo personal travail and conflict through the whole work. They tell me that it is what people pick up a novel for. It is what people expect. Novels have to focus on one or maybe two or even three leading characters who they bring to life page after page. Novels have to emphasize characters, a plot, doubt, mystery, conflict, something really dramatic, that runs from page first to page final, and that holds the reader. The reader has to care about the characters. For a novel to mainly try to communicate information, ideas, strategy, and vision as its core purpose, without various usual typical novel esque features, well, no one will want to read that. The Wind Cry's Freedom so breaks that mold, friends tell me, and more than one publisher too, that it is doomed before one reads a word. People will tell the book by its cover, or maybe by a few pages, and then they will move on. And I admit that I understand what people are telling me, but I don't get why they believe it. I think we agree that there is a huge and daily growing constituency of people moving toward or already engaged in fighting against right wing onslaught. I think we also agree that a good many of them or more, if they believed to win a better world is possible, that such a victory could happen, and they believed they could contribute to it, well, then over time, they might want to and in fact would very much want to participate in that. But if that is so, then why isn't a report of how such change could happen in the form of an oral history of how it did happen in an imagined future right up their alley? Put differently, if we had a true, real oral history written by real people describing an actual real world revolutionary process that starts from current circumstances, conveys its own lessons, and shows how people could rise to the tasks, why wouldn't people read that? Why wouldn't we read that in hopes of benefiting the hoped for transformation? We might be convinced by it, inspired by it, aided by it, or we might not, of course. But wouldn't we hope to be? And with that hope, wouldn't we read it? And if we did read it, wouldn't we think about the relayed experiences and lessons and either dismiss them, then, or try to assess them and refine them or augment them to then apply them? For that matter, I also wonder why wouldn't we care about the fictitious people describing how they did it? At least as much as we would care about fictitious people in other novels, warding off killers or winning court cases, or navigating family chaos. Why would we need some lone star or stars to focus on? Why wouldn't we care about everyone who is trying in such an oral history to win a new world? That is my thinking and preparing an odd sort of novel, as against the grain to as to do so apparently is. That and also that this form can more easily and potentially compellingly not only delve into issues of vision and strategy in realistic context, but also into the personal motives and difficulties of the people involved. Okay, but why convey it in a chapter at a time in Revolution Z episodes? A few reasons. At least this audience will encounter it even if it is never published. And maybe one of you will even turn out to aid it getting published, or some of you will have reactions and convey them helping me make it better. Seems worth a shot along with other episodes seeking effective resistance now. Hmm. I think those two things are quite connected, but that's another issue. So what do you think? In this episode, or the prior ones where we presented some excerpts, does what the oral history is conveying seem possible? Does it seem plausible? Are the interviewees' experiences of a sort to provide ideas about our own efforts? They certainly have different inclinations than many of us do. What do you think is missing? Keeping in mind there will be twenty five more chapters to come. What do you think is unnecessary? Will you let me know? Will you append a comment on Patreon, perhaps? Or perhaps you will post in the ZNetwork.org Discord system. Or you could even just write me directly by email at Sisop S O P at ZMag.org. It isn't just that I would appreciate feedback. It is that your feedback will help inform further work on the book. How do I say this? Isn't that what a writer should seek and what readers should be eager to engage with? Okay, enough of that. In this excerpt, in this chapter, for this episode, Andre Goldman, the book's one academic, continues to describe his journey toward strategic involvement. I am thinking I may perhaps have too much of him. We'll see. To start, Miguel Guivera asks, Andre, what are some other factors or insights affecting your early activist choices and the lessons you took? Historical memory played a role. We had been hearing about earlier activism at MIT, particularly during the late nineteen sixties. That era, often romanticized for its size and even more for its boldness, was an obvious reference point. They were, in a way, ourselves in earlier garb, but their campaigns, despite their intensity and reach, didn't fundamentally reshape society. They didn't prevent the later emergence of authoritarian politics, of Trumpism, or of the entrenched inequalities that have persisted for decades. So the question naturally arose, would we follow that same arc? Would our initial momentum give way to exhaustion, repression, or co optation? Would our gains dissipate within a generation or two? Looking back from fifty years hence, what would remain? That concern became one of our central motivations. If prior waves of activism hadn't been enough, the task wasn't to dismiss them, but to learn about their limits. We needed to identify not only the external barriers they faced, but also their internal contradictions, their strategic and organizational weaknesses, their misjudgments in coalition building, their blind spots in analysis. That process of turning a critical lens on one's own efforts is difficult, but it's essential, and it became a defining habit of what would later be RPS. The logic was simple enough. If you believe in collective self management, you can't exempt your own movement from self-correction. If you advocate institutional transparency and participatory democracy, then your own organizing process has to model that same ethos. Otherwise, the outcome may look different in form, but not in substance. Miguel asks, so okay, how are your efforts different from earlier ones? There were, as one would expect, periods of significant difficulty during the boycott. That's inherent and serious political engagement. But the trajectory was clear. The campaign expanded rapidly, from local to national scope. Initially focused on manufacturers selling assault rifles to the public, it soon evolved into a broader campus based movement. MIT was the starting point, but soon Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Michigan State adopted similar frameworks. These weren't minor campuses, they were institutions with substantial ties to the military industrial complex. That expansion early on already marked a fundamental extension from earlier efforts. It's important to emphasize that the underlying anger was intense and deeply felt, just as it had been in the late 1960s. But the strategic posture was different. Our generation had absorbed lessons sometimes painfully learned about how momentum can dissipate if it's not carefully cultivated. Our organizers didn't sprint ahead and leave the rest of the population behind. Our focus was consistently on consolidation. How do we bring the largest number of people with us? How do we elevate understanding? And how do we sustain involvement? We reached out systematically, not just to usual allies, but deliberately to students who had been historically ignored in organizing, athletes, members of fraternities, students in technical programs, international students, others with different political and cultural orientations. And beyond MIT, we linked up with students on other campuses, not to lecture, but to share insights, refine tactics, and reinforce commitments. We consciously avoided the trap of grand gestures that alienate more than they galvanize. Instead, we prioritized careful, intelligent escalation. Our criteria for success weren't flashiness or defiance for its own sake. We measured impact in terms of growing our base, deepening our own understanding, and fostering reciprocal solidarity. It wasn't just about winning particular concessions, though those were vital. It was also about reconstructing the culture of activism, about turning participation into a mark of seriousness, thoughtfulness, and responsibility. And that shift in cultural meaning was critical. Becoming involved wasn't framed as radicalism in the pejorative sense. It became normative. Being part of the boycott became, in many settings, synonymous with being engaged, thoughtful, mature. It was no longer the rebels and dissenters versus the silent majority. Instead, dissent itself had begun to define the moral center. That didn't mean we resorted to shaming or moralizing, quite the opposite. The ethos was constructive. The movement welcomed newcomers, elevated them, helped them grow politically. The transition wasn't punitive, it was aspirational. We weren't simply denouncing militarism and weapons production. We were advancing a vision rooted in peace, cooperation, and democratic governance. Another notable element was the involvement of campus workers, custodial staff, food service workers, maintenance teams, many of whom were among the most exploited members of the campus community began to take leadership roles. They brought not only credibility, but a different lens. The demands shifted, not just end this or that specific contract, but change who makes decisions. Why should administration and corporate trustees alone determine policy? Why shouldn't faculty, students, and campus workers have a voice, indeed, a decisive voice? That broader vision of participatory democracy began to take root, and it became especially visible when movements across campuses began to coordinate, sharing strategies, holding joint rallies, and sending delegates to support one another. It was no longer campus A doing X and campus B doing Y. It was a coherent movement. In Boston, for instance, three years into the campaign, and by then I was no longer even a student, we held a rally and sit in at MIT that drew over fifty thousand participants. That wasn't mere symbolism, that was collective power, and it was follied only weeks later by a rally and sit in at Harvard that surpassed even that. None of this was spontaneous, though the scale made it look that way. The organizing was deliberate. People traveled to less active schools, listened, assisted, and helped build infrastructure. In short, we didn't wait for the movement to spontaneously grow, we nurtured it. The political momentum had become irreversible, not because our opponents gave in, but because we refused to let the movement implode. Our cohesion, our capacity for mutual aid, and our strategic discipline made reactionary containment almost impossible. At that point, the only thing that could derail us was ourselves, and we knew it, but we also knew the activism needed organizational connection to other activism. That would be RPS. Miguel asks, Can you tell us, Andre, about some of the difficult moments? Yes, I remember them quite vividly. One of the more immediate and significant challenges was discovering and then exposing the nature of MIT's war related research. The problem, of course, was not only logistical. Contracts were confidential, projects compartmentalized, and the whole apparatus was carefully shrouded in bureaucratic opacity. Students, juggling full academic loans, had little access to institutional records, and what existed was deliberately shielded not only from the public, but even from those ostensibly involved in related academic fields. In response, a few particularly bold students decided to take direct action. They snuck into restricted areas, photographed classified material, and obtained internal documents that revealed the truth. These are the source of acts often dismissed as reckless, but in context they were both courageous and necessary. Sometimes political activism means enduring hours of monotonous meetings. Other times it entails real personal risk. In this case, the risks paid off. What those documents revealed was decisive. It became incontrovertibly clear that MIT was not, as some defenders like to claim, merely producing neutral, pure scientific knowledge that might coincidentally be used by the military. No, MIT was an integral part of the U.S. war making apparatus, intentionally designing drone systems, surveillance technologies, robotic weapons platforms, and other tools of repression used against both foreign populations and domestic dissent. Once our example became public, students at other campuses began to follow suit. Some replicated our tactics, and in many cases uncovered equally egregious ties between their universities and militarized research. These revelations formed the empirical basis for demanding transparency and divestment. You may know Walt Whitman's famous line about seeing the universe in a grain of sand. A similar point was once made by a physicist who remarked that nature weaves with threads so long that even a tiny fragment reveals the whole tapestry. That insight applies here. What we began to grasp, what many campaigns eventually realize, is that each discrete struggle is part of a larger systemic pattern. And so our campaign against militarism, as seemingly narrow as it might have appeared, actually held lessons that were broadly generalizable across all radical efforts. I hope that comes through in this recounting. Miguel asks, I'm sure it will. But do you remember how MIT tried to stop the movement? Absolutely. The hypocrisy was stunning and very instructive. Campus administrators, many of them self-identified liberals, engaged in elaborate intellectual contortions to justify their involvement in policies that, if you strip away the euphemisms, amounted to systematic murder. And not just them, much of the faculty followed suit. Here were highly educated, often very intelligent, sometimes even publicly concerned individuals, sweeping aside all inconvenient facts to preserve institutional alignments with state violence. This was an important education for us, not about drone technology or budget appropriations, but about the psychology of complicity. These were people with framed degrees and refined rhetoric, but the real markers of integrity, honesty, critical reflection, moral courage were largely absent. Instead, we saw rationalization, cowardice, and the prioritization of institutional prestige over human life. There's a sort of social catch twenty two embedded in elite systems. Access to resources, labs, libraries, platforms, comes with implicit obligations. To gain entry you must learn not to notice injustice, or at least not to oppose it. Worse still, you must often become its apologist, and under Trump it got ludicrous. You had to take a knee to extol what you reviled. Yes, there were exceptions, a handful of faculty and a few administrators did oppose the dominant paradigm. They did so at great personal cost, ostracism, career damage, even termination. But until the movement had the strength to defend its own, these courageous outliers were the exception, not the rule. Interestingly, the overt reactionaries on campus, those who were openly and sincerely supportive of the military industrial ties, were in some ways easier to engage. At least their motives were transparent. The most difficult figures were the self declared progressives who would express sympathy in private, but then oppose us in every substantive action. It was reminiscent of what civil rights activists used to say about liberal mayors in the nineteen sixties South. They'd say the right words, then deploy the police. As our campaigns escalated, we forced increasing repression, surveillance, disciplinary threats, police interventions. That was expected. But there was also a subtler form of psychological warfare. Administrators would circulate rumors, unsubstantiated and cynical, about violent right wing countermobilizations being planned. The administrators would claim they were just trying to protect us, asking us to end an occupation or demonstration for our own safety. It was manipulation, but it was calculated to play on our sense of responsibility and a desire to avoid unnecessary conflict. In contrast, their threats to bring in police were not subtle at all. They were real and escalating, and it was the same pattern across campus after campus. Miguel asks, okay, but how did you deal with the repression? You had numbers, ethics, and understanding, but they had nights, water cannons, guns and jails. Yes, that asymmetry of force was never in question. No one doubted they had the means to physically suppress us. The question was whether they could do so without paying a cost they were unwilling to bear. We understood that our strength didn't lie in confrontation for its own sake. It lay in exposing contradictions between what the institution claimed to represent and what it actually did. Our task was to make these contradictions visible. So when they sent in police to evict peaceful students, we made sure it was documented, broadcast, and understood. When they invoked safety while enabling violence abroad, we made their hypocrisy evident. We weren't naive about the dangers. People were hurt, people were arrested, some paid a steep price, but our strategy was always to raise the cost of repression, not by provoking it carelessly, but by organizing in ways that would render repression politically and socially untenable for them to use. Our ethics, our understanding, our solidarity, all of that helped. But so did our preparation, our flexibility, and our insistence on tying each local battle to broader social dynamics. That's what turned isolated acts of protest into a movement that couldn't be easily silenced. So our challenge was strategic and also psychological. We had to organize and resist in ways that would systematically shift the balance of power. That meant building our capacities while undermining theirs. It required holding meetings, distributing literature, canvassing dorms and classrooms, developing digital media, and cultivating new alliances. But it also required something else, an approach to public confrontation that did not offer our opponents the conditions they most desired. We had to avoid the trap of either becoming invisible or becoming easy targets. That is, we couldn't allow ourselves to be dismissed as irrelevant, but neither could we present ourselves as conveniently repressible. So when we rallied, when we occupied offices or established encampments, we did so with conscious awareness that our actions had to raise the costs of elite indifference, while minimizing the vulnerabilities that repression could exploit. This is not an abstract point. It's essential. The goal was to make repression ineffective. If they cracked down, we had to return, not weeks later, but days later, and each time we had to return with added support. Our response had to expose their violence as excessive, unprovoked, and politically motivated, as well as ineffective. That visibility, that clarity could then be used to reach a broader public, off campus in local communities, and even among some media, making people ask, who are these students being beaten and jailed? And why? In that way, repression, which is usually a turn a tool to demobilize, would instead become a recruiting mechanism for our side, an amplifier of public sympathy, and a catalyst for wider involvement. Miguel asks, weren't you afraid? Why didn't fear stop you? That was their aim. Why didn't it work? It is the night before an event, and you know they are surely going to repress. Are we afraid? Well, firefighters look at a burning home, but they rush in to help someone escape. Are they afraid? Why doesn't their even more dangerous situation stop them? I don't know how the brain processes it. I would guess for us the crucial factor was belief in what you were doing and what you are about to do. What is too important to quit? So we acted. Look, the truth is, in the early years of Trump too, his threats and bullying did almost work. For a time it even did slow people, even stop people, cause them to be isolated, thinking of self, not collective, thinking of altogether. But then some of us, and then more, got to the point where the aim was too important. If the firefighter can run into a building to save people the fire would otherwise kill, well, we were trying to save ourselves and others from a system that was killing on a far, far greater scale. So we rushed in too. I honestly don't know what else to say. It wasn't macho nonsense. It was that after a time with sufficient cause, with sufficient clarity, with sufficient hope and reason, fear gives way to what feels like necessity. Fear gives way to desire. What I know is it happened. Miguel asks, what were some other key lessons of the boycotts regarding organizing? There were quite a few, but one that might sound trivial, and yet proved central was this. It's not enough to be right. That is, simply having sound analysis and accurate data doesn't alone move people. If that were all that mattered, society would have been just and peaceful long ago. The truth, unfortunately, doesn't organize itself. You have to communicate in ways that people not already on your side can actually hear. That means not only presenting logical and well supported arguments, but also approaching others with dignity and empathy. Too often, activists presume that having the truth is sufficient, and then react with frustration when others don't immediately accept it. But a condescending or abraze or abrasive tone doesn't invite reflection, it invites dismissal. In practical terms, this meant speaking with people, not at them, and listening as much as or more than we spoke. It meant taking seriously the emotional and moral terrain of our peers, and avoiding language or posture that implied superiority. Information, yes, but also connection. Repression, of course, was a central issue throughout, and we learned something very simple, but frequently forgotten. You can't resist repression by moral appeal alone. You can't say to the system, please don't hurt us, it's wrong. That's like pleading with a hurricane to change direction. The only effective response is to organize so that the costs of repression exceed its benefits for those deploying it. If the administration understood that using police or invoking punitive measures would spark wider mobilization, provoke media scrutiny, alienate some donors, and galvanize faculty resistance, they would hesitate. The calculus with repressors had to be political and structural, not moralistic. That's a hard lesson for young activists, especially those raised in relatively liberal environments, but it's essential. There was another lesson, perhaps more sociological, that I think became clearer with hindsight. It had to do with how students who resisted joining the boycott framed their decisions. On the surface, they offered various rationales. Some said the weapons were defensive, some argued they wouldn't actually be used, others claimed the presence of weapons was necessary for deterrence, or even that their eventual use might provoke outrage and limit future escalations. What was striking wasn't just the diversity of these claims, but their sequence. When one rationale was addressed and shown to be weak or incoherent, another would emerge to replace it. The students tried to maintain distance from the movement without admitting moral or intellectual complicity with the status quo. In this context, their rationales were less arguments and more psychological defense mechanisms, ways to preserve a sense of moral decency while doing nothing. That's not unusual. It's a fairly standard pattern in societies with deep systemic contradictions. People want to see themselves as good, but also don't want to pay the price of dissent. So they construct elaborate cognitive frameworks to reconcile inaction with virtue. Understanding that dynamic helped us change our approach. Rather than trying to win every argument point by point, we started focusing on the emotional and existential stakes. We would ask, how does it feel to know this? What does it mean to be part of this institution? To know what it does. Those questions opened space for introspection, and from there change. I recall quite vividly my initial response to such rationalizations as students gave. Not for offense? Preserve peace? Are you blind or simply indifferent? That's how I reacted early on, confrontational, accusatory, dismissive. Predictably, the result was too often not dialogue but impasse. Communication collapsed. Over time, I learned that if we wanted to persuade, we had to exercise more patience. We had to go beyond rhetorical challenge. We began working through the layers, dissecting each justification, presenting factual evidence about how the weapons were used, the immense civilian toll, the geopolitical distortions, the perpetuation of authoritarianism. And we coupled all that logic with appeals to basic values, empathy, reciprocity, a desire for decency. We also pointed out the historical pattern. When opposition focused solely on the misuse of weapons after the fact, the structural mechanisms that enable their creation remained intact. Waiting until the weapons are used is always too late. Prevention is the only viable option. And prevention means questioning and dismantling the production apparatus itself. That, of course, makes you an enemy to powerful interests. Still, in discussions that took place across dormitories and classrooms, from campus to campus, what we consistently found was that if we persisted respectfully, thoroughly, eventually students would acknowledge our points. Okay, okay, they'd say. You're right on the facts, you're right on the ethics, but I'm still not joining. What's the point of being right if the whole thing is a lost cause? That became over time, the glue beneath all the surface level arguments. When we reached that bedrock of resistance again and again, we found not disagreement with our logic or data, but a pessimistic, pervasive despair about the possibility of success. Miguel asks, how did you deal with that? We tried to show step by step that successful resistance was not some abstraction, but a concrete possibility. We argued that when a critical mass of people became sufficiently informed, committed, and organized, they could apply enough pressure that even entrenched institutions had to yield. Eventually, many of those same skeptical students would concede the point. Sure, they'd say if most of the campus supports the boycott, the administration would have to reconsider. They couldn't sustain normal functioning otherwise. That was an important shift, recognizing that power could be contested, that it was not immovable. But then, often enough, a deeper objection would emerge. Something more existential. Quote, even if we win here, they'd say, it won't matter. The research will just shift to another campus. The contacts will go elsewhere, maybe to private firms. The system absorbs these things. You can't stop it. Even if you're right in principle, you're still wrong in practice. That was the crux. Beneath the surface of rational debate was a form of resignation. It wasn't even specific to war or weapons, it was a worldview. Quote People are greedy, people are violent, inequality is inevitable. You may move its location a little, but you can't win. You're being naive. And then came the coup de gra. You're on a fool's errand. That makes you a fool. Miguel asks, looking back, it seems so sad, as if the young folks were jaded and beaten old folks. Some were morbidly old before their time, morbidly old while still in fucking college. Yes, it was a kind of learned powerlessness, internalized long before these students had ever entered the workforce, raised children, or engaged with the world in a sustained way. They had absorbed ideas culturally, institutionally, most often subconsciously, that large scale change was not only improbable, but fundamentally impossible. Look, it could have been true. It wasn't patently idiotic, but it wasn't the case, so why was it so tenacious? It wasn't just ideological, it was psychological. Students had been taught that realism dictates surrender. Any attempt to challenge deep structures was, by definition, futile. And once that belief takes hold, no amount of factual evidence or ethical argumentation will suffice. You have to reconstruct hope itself. Miguel continues, I have to admit, I remember being radical at first not so much to win, but to like myself, and to be liked by those around me. It wasn't that I expected to lose, exactly. It's more than I never fully entertained. I never it's more that I never truly entertained the possibility of winning, or seriously faced what winning would require, what it would look like. Doubt wasn't just something that plagued conservatives or older folks clinging to the past. Doubt was everywhere. It was a hard nut to crack. Exactly. Doubt wasn't limited to conservative or establishment thinkers. It was pervasive. Even many activists saw activism as a kind of moral performance rather than a strategy for material change. The goal wasn't to win, it was to be quote on the right side. But politics is not a spectator sport. It's not enough to protest injustice. You have to confront power in a way that transforms structures. Miguel comments. And so the challenge wasn't just to expose injustice, it was to cultivate the belief that we could do something about it. That's exactly right. And I should add, it wasn't irrational or even cowardly to doubt that. Quite the contrary, in many respects it was a perfectly logical response to the surrounding environment. While moral arguments were relatively straightforward to convey, the more deeply entrenched obstacle, the more insidious one was cynicism. It permeated everything. Being on a college campus often felt less like entering a space of intellectual discovery and more like walking through a well fortified training ground for resignation, or perhaps more accurately, like a carefully manicured factory for the production of future cynics. The institutions often resembled something closer to commercialized retirement homes for disillusion than free spaces for youthful possibility. Doubt became not only common, it became a posture, a badge of perceived wisdom. And if we were serious about any meaningful progress, we had to begin by contesting that terrain. We had to craft a compelling enough vision and a sufficiently grounded strategy that it could actually counteract the widespread conviction that nothing better was realistically attainable. When I looked back at the nineteen sixties, and indeed at various prior periods, it became clear that this was not a new phenomenon. Not at all. In fact, it was depressingly familiar. Take the countercultural current of that earlier time, hippies, for instance. They had stepped outside the mainstream, and that offered an important initial entry point for political radicalization. But it wasn't enough. Alienation from the system didn't automatically translate into coherent resistance. The same core obstacle was then, as now, deeply rooted despair, a conviction culturally cultivated and structurally reinforced that nothing fundamental could ever change. Ironically, that was even often a radical mantra. That's when I began to see something that would stay with me. To overcome cynicism wasn't just a secondary task. It was the essential prerequisite. You could talk to someone for hours about justice, exploitation, inequality. You could win every factual debate, but unless they believed there was some chance, however small, that something could actually be done, none of that mattered. I came to believe that whether or not people could overcome their cynicism was probably the single most reliable indicator of whether they would become radical, and perhaps even more tellingly of whether a movement would endure and deepen. It's true, of course, that people's inclination toward cynicism often correlated with how much they believed they had to lose. Those anticipating future comfort worried about losing future comfort, and so were more inclined to quote, play it safe, and thus to rationalize in action. For that, we had to cultivate solidarity, responsibility, morality. But the defeatist worldview also took root among those with little or nothing to protect. Cynicism became society's most effective prophylactic against rebellion, a kind of ideological immunization program administered from birth. We had to overcome despair and also cultivate desire for not just survival, but for valid, viable, and comprehensive fulfillment. And that ended this chapter of The Wind Cries Freedom, and also this episode of Revolution Z. So is it for you just a story, moderately amusing or interesting or diverting, but not more? Or is it for you something that speaks to conditions and possibilities? Does it invite assessment for how it differs from what you see going on or what you are involved with in a way that might inform changes to achieve better results? The Wind Cries Freedom isn't interested in entertaining per se, nor is it interested in understanding this or that situation per se. It is, however, interested in advancing change for the better and beyond the moment a movement for a better society. Can it contribute? Is spending time on it to refine and improve and spread its insights sensible? Or is spending time on it senseless because doing so cannot help the task of winning change and building a movement for a better society? You decide. Perhaps let me know. And that said, this is Michael Albert, signing off until next time for Revolution Z.