Read 02.
I am four years late to read On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. I was prompted by his recent interview, focusing on the Events At Our Nation's Capitol, on MSNBC.
And it is a very quick, readable, and sobering book. It pairs well with my (relatively) recent reading of Hitler's American Model and the report published by the Transition Integrity Project. Where “pairing well” means they reflected on each other in ways that helped me get at my own thinking,
And it's tempting to think with Biden's election the moment for tyranny in the U.S. has passed. This is not true. We may have a small pause where we can put in place more resilience — which ultimately is a practice — to help us respond to future outbreaks.
What does this mean in practice? I don't pretend to know but this little book and it's to do list approach did make me begin a list of my own:
- Provide more on ramps for civil society. This isn't just the tradition of donations or volunteerism. Nor the kind of professional capacity building I do daily. It is about prioritizing more ability to help a wide variety of actors and to create meaningful collaborations between the traditional NGO world and other groups.
- Think about the ethics of civil society. I don't know that this has been written about much. And so often we seem more concerned with the behavior that preserves our status. Anticipatory obedience. Very different from accountability to the concepts of free association and democracy.
- Be increasingly generous with our platform and build for that. I have a very direct influence over that at work. And as a user of platforms. The trick will be to create as a value. As an image that we aspire towards.
In the book, Snyder derides — it feels to me that he derides — the internet. But really I think it is what we have optimized the internet for — monetization and consumerism — that is the issue. How we can we start to optimize for resiliency and collaboration? What's required for that? That to me is very connected to the items above because civil society helps provide the space for civic discourse.
The book also left me with a list of Eastern Europeans to read.
This post contains affiliate links.