Your Life is the Resistance

Trust yourself. This is when psychology is everything.

Following the election and my response piece, several people sent me an essay called “10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won” by Daniel Hunter. It’s an excellent piece that I’ve returned to many times since. I was immediately struck by his understanding of the psychological ground on which all resistance work rests.

The first principle of Hunter’s list is: “1. Trust yourself.”

Trust-building starts with your own self. It includes trusting your own eyes and gut, as well as building protection from the ways the crazy-making can become internalized.

The second way to be prepared?

“2. Find others who you trust.”

I promise I’ll head towards practical resistance strategies. But the emotional landscape matters a great deal. Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” explored how destructive ideologies like fascism and autocracy grow. She used the word verlassenheit — often translated as loneliness — as a central ingredient. As she meant it, loneliness isn’t a feeling but a kind of social isolation of the mind. Your thinking becomes closed off to the world and a sense of being abandoned to each other.

I want to dive into every line of this, open up and explore each one of these ideas: the importance of the “emotional landscape” as authoritarianism infects a culture; the importance of organizing against loneliness as an antidote to the terror of meaninglessness and hopelessness that unhealthy societies promote.

Another writer whose name is appropriately everywhere in the wake of the election is Timothy Snyder, a specialist in the history of the Soviet Union and the Holocaust and the author of On Tyranny: twenty lessons from the twentieth century. Snyder’s lessons begin with a phrase that has been quoted a great deal lately: “1. Do not obey in advance.”

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Anticipating the threat, anticipating the isolation, we cower before we are threatened.

The importance of not obeying in advance to authoritarian rule has been cited as commentary on Jeff Bezos’s choice to pull The Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris; the hosts of “Morning Joe” visiting Mar-a-Lago to normalize relations despite viewing Trump clearly as a fascist; and the GOP members of the House Ethics Committee’s vote against releasing the report on Matt Gaetz’s sex with minors (also just known as rape), despite their participation in the drafting of the same report.

All of them are obeying in advance. Many of them have been obeying in advance for years, teaching abusive authoritarians just how easily they will spinelessly submit and collaborate.

Like Hunter’s list, Syder’s lessons are psychological in their foundation: the ability to trust your own senses, to discern reality from propaganda, and to find the courage—independent of any orders—to protect others under threat.

Point 10: Believe in truth.

Point 12: Make eye contact and small talk.

Point 18: Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.

Point 20: Be as courageous as you can.

These twenty lessons should be read in the morning like a prayer book, the worship of a civil society, the poetry of democracy. Each lesson is spiritual in its profundity and in their collective ability to bring us back to groundedness when we become swept-up in the hurricane of nonsense, debased appointments, and non-stop hypocrisy.

Hilma af Klint drawing, 1903. The Guggenheim,

Carole Cadwalladr, an investigative journalist, was working on her own list of lessons when she received a synchronistic phone call from Timothy Snyder. In her article, How to Survive the Broligarchy: twenty lessons for the post-truth world, she includes a profound twenty-first lesson from Synder.

In a great stroke of luck, he rang me while I was writing it and, after thinking for a moment, told me that he would enlarge that, now, to ‘Know who you are.’ Know what your values are, what you believe in….

‘Know what you stand for and what you think is good.’

Know who you are.

Know who you are.

Know who you are.

This is the drum I’ve been beating for many years now, trying to convey how critical genuine self-knowledge is for a healthy society. Before we can be citizens, we have to become individuals.

In the face of abusive power and a racist, misogynistic, dehumanizing culture, how does a person maintain an awareness that all of this is wrong?

When everything models divisiveness, entitlement, and hatred, how does a person believe that another way is possible?

I’ve been deeply moved by these various lessons lately. They do feel holy to me, an affirmation that something quite profound exists if we can maintain taproots down, rooted down into a Truth and reality far beyond that which swirls above ground.

War begins with fear, isolation, projection, and mass-mindedness. Resistance is a psychological act.

How are you doing these days? What have you been mulling on lately?

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I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, and co-host of a podcast on Jung’s Red Book. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, Literary Hub, The Tamron Hall Show, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast. All links can be found here.