Why Even Try?
Stories of Philosophy, Neuroscience, and Opposition.
A friend asked me recently whether to stop trying to change anything and simply let things happen. The question was not flippant. My friend was tired of having his heart broken, felt he was accomplishing nothing, and could not tell whether ten years of effort had made any difference to anyone. My friend also wanted to know whether continuing was a moral obligation or a bad habit.
I have written elsewhere about how political change occurs in populations, using the physics of particles and the properties of metals. This question is about the person deciding whether to act.
Success rates for campaigns of mass civil resistance have declined since 2010. Erica Chenoweth is a political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School who has spent two decades compiling a database of mass uprisings against governments since 1900, recording whether each achieved its stated goal. In the 1990s, roughly 65 percent of those campaigns succeeded. Since 2010, fewer than 34 percent have, as Harvard Magazine reports of Chenoweth’s updated data.
But here is something I want you to consider, does trying to change something then change the person who tries?
In 1967, the American psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier discovered learned helplessness by administering electric shocks that dogs could not escape. In 2016, the same two researchers published Learned Helplessness at Fifty in Psychological Review, writing that “the original theory got it backward.” Passivity, they now say, is the default. It is what a nervous system produces on its own, without being taught, when aversive (painful or threatening) events continue for a long time, and serotonin activity in the dorsal raphe nucleus, a small structure in the brainstem, produces it. What gets learned afterward is control. The medial prefrontal cortex, the region behind the forehead, detects when a behavior can change an outcome, and it then inhibits (reduces the activity of) the dorsal raphe nucleus.
Agency has to be learned, and it is learned only one way, by acting. Trying is how the brain finds out that it is capable of acting at all.
What does activism do to the people who do it? In 2009, the psychologists Malte Klar and Tim Kasser tried to find out, in Some Benefits of Being an Activist. Activists reported more pleasure, more sense of purpose, and closer social ties than people who were not active. But one part of the study does not hold up: when non-activists tried a single activist behavior just once, their well-being did not change, so the study cannot prove that activism caused the difference rather than simply describing people who already felt good. The developmental psychologist Parissa Ballard asked a narrower version of the same question in 2020. She and her colleagues published Political Engagement and Wellbeing Among College Students, focused on college students specifically. Ordinary political behavior, like voting or joining a group, was weakly linked to feeling better. Public protest and loud political expression were weakly linked to feeling worse.
People who produce measurable political effects usually cannot detect them.
Fifty-six canvassers knocked on doors in South Florida in 2016, asking voters to consider the experience of transgender people. The political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla ran the study and published the results as Durably Reducing Transphobia in Science. A single conversation of about ten minutes produced measurable reductions in prejudice that lasted at least three months. The size of the reduction was comparable to the decrease in prejudice against gay and lesbian people that took the country more than a decade to achieve.
At that door, the canvasser saw no sign that the conversation had worked. The voter did not announce a change of mind, did not write afterward, and in most cases probably did not know their own opinion had changed. The effect existed only because researchers surveyed those households for months. Organizers working in their own city usually do not have researchers surveying their neighbors. The economist Timur Kuran described the same problem for whole countries in his 1995 book Private Truths, Public Lies. Kuran’s own summary of the idea is precise: “absent preference falsification, public opinion would always mirror private opinion.” Since it does not, people conceal their real convictions until enough others have spoken, which is why authoritarian regimes appear stable up to the week they are overthrown.
Many writers described this pattern before it was measured experimentally. None of them were researchers, and they were not colleagues of one another.
While Germany occupied France in 1942, the French Algerian novelist Albert Camus published The Myth of Sisyphus, retelling the Greek myth of a man condemned by the gods to push a boulder uphill forever, only to watch it roll back down. Many activists have described the same feeling to me in cruder terms: pissing into the wind. The essay ends with five words: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Camus wrote for Combat, an underground resistance newspaper, throughout the occupation, and became its editor in chief in August 1944, the month Paris was freed. His position was that no guarantee of victory is required for refusal to be worth performing. The absurdity of the situation does not justify despair, and it does not justify nihilism (the belief that nothing matters) either. Refusal remains available and remains worth doing.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, made the first extended argument in English that women are rational beings entitled to education and legal standing. Its author, Mary Wollstonecraft, is usually remembered as a theorist who reasoned about rights in the abstract, without personal risk, and separately as a scandal. The year after she died in 1797, her husband William Godwin published a memoir describing her love affairs, her daughter born outside marriage, and her two suicide attempts, and for the next century her ideas were dismissed by association with her private life. Both reputations are false. Wollstonecraft was living in Paris during the Terror, and she wrote her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution in 1794 while the revolution she had defended was executing people she knew. She continued to defend its principles, arguing that the crimes committed in its name did not refute (disprove) them.
From a prison cell in Breslau, Rosa Luxemburg wrote letters in 1917 and 1918 describing genuine pleasure in birds and plants. She was a Polish-born Marxist theorist, imprisoned in Germany for organizing against the First World War. Paramilitary troops murdered her in January 1919, months after the last of those letters.
Paper was evidence during Stalin’s terror, so Nadezhda Mandelstam memorized her husband’s poems instead of writing them down. Osip Mandelstam, the Russian poet whose work she was protecting, died in a Soviet transit camp in 1938. To her deepest core she lived the truism: “Science tells us how we live; art tells us why we live.”
Fannie Lou Hamer sang from inside a jail cell in Winona, Mississippi, in 1963, after police ordered her beaten there, and the other prisoners sang with her. She was a sharecropper who had become a voting rights organizer. For the rest of her life, she answered questions about why she kept going with the same ten words: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” It is carved on her tombstone.
Detained without trial in Kenya in 1977, the novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote the novel Devil on the Cross on prison toilet paper at Kamiti.
These people did not share a philosophy and were not allies. Camus argued against revolutionary violence in The Rebel, and Luxemburg organized it. Camus and the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, once close friends, ended their friendship permanently in 1952 over the same book. What they share is a behavior. Each of them continued to act, and each of them found something to enjoy, while a state was working to make them stop. Luxemburg felt joy while she was imprisoned. Hamer sang while she was jailed for registering voters. Ngũgĩ kept writing after writing had been made a crime.
None of them knew they would win. Luxemburg did not win. Hamer was not seated at the 1964 Democratic convention. Some of what sustained them is close to what Maier and Seligman later found in brain tissue: a nervous system trained, through repetition, to keep acting. But that mechanism requires something to repeat, some measure of control to practice. It does not explain Nadezhda Mandelstam memorizing poems with nothing left to control but her own memory.
Viktor Frankl explains that part. Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist deported to Nazi concentration camps in 1942, where his parents, brother, and wife all died. He spent two and a half years in four camps, including Auschwitz, with no control over his circumstances and no repeated successful action available to learn from. Shortly after his liberation in 1945, he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in nine days, and it was published the following year, developing logotherapy: the argument that what sustains a person is neither pleasure nor power but meaning. He observed that prisoners who lost every sense of purpose declined and died quickly, while those who held onto some reason, a person to survive for, work left unfinished, endured far longer. Some critics, including the psychologist Rollo May, have argued that logotherapy risks a therapist telling a patient what their life should mean, instead of helping the patient discover it themselves. The criticism is fair, and it does not undo the observation Frankl made under conditions few people have ever had to survive: meaning sustained people who had no other resource left.
I read the same argument in a different person when I was twelve, in Christopher Reeve’s memoir Still Me. Reeve broke his neck in a riding accident in 1995, was left paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breathe without a ventilator, and wrote the book three years later. In the hospital, before he agreed to the surgery that kept him alive, he mouthed to his wife Dana, “Maybe we should let me go.” She told him, “You’re still you. And I love you.” He had the surgery. Reeve did not believe the accident had happened for a reason. What he came to believe was that a person can make an event have had a reason, afterward, through how they respond to it. That is the same argument Frankl made, believed by a man who was not conventionally religious, and who said that although he did not personally believe in God, he tried to live as though he were being watched anyway.
Reeve spent the rest of his life lobbying for spinal cord injury research and for embryonic stem cell research specifically, work he continued from a wheelchair and a ventilator until his death in 2004. The organization that grew out of that work, now called the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, still funds spinal cord injury research and supports people living with paralysis.
For most people asking whether to keep trying, repetition is the mechanism actually available to them. Because it is the mechanism, the dose matters.
Exercise physiology describes training with three variables: frequency, intensity, and duration. How often, how hard, how long. Political work responds to the same three variables, because the nervous system learns control the way it learns anything else, through repetition at a sufficient dose. A person who attends one march a year has not trained. A person who makes one phone call every week for four years has.
Every training model in physiology also includes a failure state, which is overtraining. Cher Weixia Chen and Paul Gorski published Burnout in Social Justice and Human Rights Activists in the Journal of Human Rights Practice in 2015. They interviewed activists who had experienced burnout, and 77 percent attributed physical illness to it, including two who attributed their cancer to the stress of the work. Gorski identified a culture of martyrdom inside movements as a principal cause, in which activists treat their own wellbeing as a betrayal of the cause. His conclusion is that self-care is insufficient and that movements need community care, so that exhaustion is treated as a collective problem rather than an individual failing. Rest is a component of the training rather than a reward for completing it.
The same organizing principle applies to institutions and to individuals.
Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for documenting how ordinary communities govern shared resources, such as fisheries, irrigation systems, and forests, without either private ownership or state control. She identified eight design principles common to the arrangements that lasted for centuries. The eighth is nested enterprises: in systems that endure, governance is organized as small local units, with larger units composed of those smaller ones, as described in the Policy Studies Journal. Systems organized as a single unit, whether local or national, rarely last.
No child exists in only one setting. That was the central argument of Urie Bronfenbrenner, an American developmental psychologist who spent the 1970s studying how children grow up. A child belongs to a family, which sits inside a neighborhood, which sits inside an institution such as a school or a workplace, which sits inside a whole culture, and every one of those levels shapes the child and needs tending in its own right.
Carl Jung made a related but different argument about what happens inside a single person, and it applies directly to the choice this piece is about. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who founded one of the major schools of modern psychology, called the neglected, unacceptable, or inconvenient parts of a person the shadow. He argued that a shadow denied attention does not disappear. It returns, usually in a worse form than if it had been faced directly, sometimes as a breakdown, sometimes projected onto other people instead.
A person is two things at once: a self with individual needs, examined the way a microscope examines something, up close and in detail, and a member of a larger body politic, examined the way a telescope examines something, at a distance, as part of a much larger whole. Both views are of the same life. Refusing to look through the telescope, disengaging from the community and the body politic entirely, builds a shadow out of the part of a person that already recognizes political engagement matters. Not everyone has that part. But if you are reading this, some part of you does. Refusing to look through the microscope instead, fixating on politics until the individual self and its needs go unmet, builds the same shadow from the other direction. Jung called the alternative, the lifelong work of integrating what a person finds through both instruments rather than suppressing either one, individuation.
The Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture roughly two thousand years old, calls a person’s particular responsibility their dharma. It teaches that a person does better performing their own duty imperfectly than performing someone else’s duty well. The teaching responds to a specific worry that comes with this kind of work: that your own contribution is too small, and that you would be more useful doing whatever task currently looks largest or most urgent. The Gita’s answer is no. The imperfect version of your own actual work still counts. Someone else’s job, done partway by you, does not replace it.
The work of caring for yourself. The work of loving the people in your house. The work of friendship. The work of art. The work of a garden, or of any ongoing relationship with a living thing that will die if you stop. The work of a neighborhood. The work of democracy. The work of stopping fascism. A person cannot serve the largest of these obligations by giving up all the others for it. The activists Gorski interviewed prove this. The ones who set aside self-care, family, and rest to serve only the cause did not serve the cause longer. They served it for less time. Giving up the smaller obligations produced the burnout that ended the largest one too.
A person will not observe most of what they cause. The canvasser in Florida changed a stranger’s mind for at least three months and went home believing the evening had been wasted. Luxemburg died before anything she worked for existed, and much of it exists now.
Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker, published one of the country’s first anti-slavery newspapers starting in 1821, and recruited a young William Lloyd Garrison to work alongside him. Lundy died in 1839, twenty-six years before the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, in debt, with little of his own written record surviving. Garrison led the movement for those same twenty-six years and said, when Lundy died, that he owed him “all that I am as a friend of the slave.” The labor movement and the civil rights movement both took longer than any single organizer’s working life to succeed, and most of the people who built each movement died before it did. The Bhagavad Gita distilled the same point into its most famous verse, roughly two thousand years earlier: “you have a right to your actions, never to the fruits of your actions.”
You might be one of those people. Not necessarily a name any textbook remembers, though you might be that too. What you do now might still be necessary for whatever this movement eventually achieves, whether or not you live to see it.
Exhaustion doing this work has a specific, ordinary cause. It comes from doing the work without the three things that make it survivable: regular doses at a sustainable size, scheduled rest, and other people who cover the work when one person needs a break. A person feeling this exhaustion has not reached some hidden limit, and the work has not become pointless. Something specific is missing, and it can be restored.
Despair here is the same physiological state described earlier: produced by a threat that continues for a long time. It responds to acting rather than to winning. The feeling itself is not evidence about whether trying is worthwhile.
The question my friend asked, whether to stop, has a specific answer. If he stops, he becomes the person he is afraid of becoming: someone who no longer cares. That change might not feel like a loss to him when it happens. It might feel like relief instead.
Right now, though, he still feels heartbroken. That heartbreak is evidence. A person who had already lost the capacity to care would feel no heartbreak at all and thank goodness he has not become that person.
Thank you for not becoming that person. Love the world, let your heartbreak for the needless suffering of others, and keep showing up when you can, where you can, how you can. Take the time when you need. The world’s problems will still probably be here, and so will the folks trying to make things better.
Subscribe if you can, don’t let it be the reason you miss a meal or skip rent, feel free to have some free downloads or grab physical products from our shop and store, all listed below.
All educational materials available for free download in the shop at BuyMeACoffee.com/TheER
You can buy the ER Team a cup of coffee by clicking this sentence.
Democracy merch, Oppositional Federalism booklets at TheExistentialistRepublic.com
You can get a free PDF of the book in the BMAC shop for $0.00 by clicking on this sentence.
Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download
Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download
Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download
Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download
Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download
Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative
More Free downloads:
Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass
All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills
The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare
Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure
I’m glad you sent this. It’s serious, clear, and deeply felt without ever tipping into melodrama or easy reassurance. I was especially struck by the argument that despair isn’t evidence that trying is useless, and by the emphasis on rest and shared responsibility as part of the work rather than a retreat from it. It stayed with me.
This is one of your best columns yet! Gives me a reason to keep plugging along. Thank you!