“We’ll Never Win”

• Lucinda J. Garthwaite

“We’ll never win, not completely.”

That was a friend of mine the other day. She was talking about social justice. Specifically, she was talking about the news of the day, legislators aiming budget cuts at schools in generationally low-income communities, corporations pulling resources from already diminished native land.

“We’ll never win,” she said. But she wasn’t being fatalistic.  She wasn’t accepting the status quo. She was accepting that change never stops. “We’ll never win.” in that context, is not a reason to lose hope, or to lose sight of joy, the glorious light in most human beings, or powerful advances in human rights and freedoms.  It might not even be all bad.

It’s become an important practice for me to remind myself that humans are ever changing, and vulnerable to fear and greed and errors in thinking, leaving us open to all kinds of misbehavior and worse.  It’s always been so, and it likely always will. The essayist and novelist Zadie Smith recently said she believes people will continue to find new ways to repress one another, that working against that will never be done.[1]

Again, though, that’s not cause for despair, because while that may be so, it is just as true —I think reliably truer — that people never stop changing. As individuals we change every day from birth to death.  So do the systems we create. Change is inevitable, and people can affect the character of change. 

Does that mean some people will find paths to change that are repressive? Unfortunately, probably so.  It also means many others will find paths to change defined by more people thriving in ever more peace.

Which brings me to why it might not be all bad that that work will never be done, why it’s probably good that no particular “we” will ever totally win. Because who decides which we gets that prize? Which set of ideas will completely drive the law of the land? And if one ideology rules, how will it protect itself from new ideas that grow out of the ever-changing experience of being human?

Inside the answers to those questions, violence resides. And there’s the real reason it’s probably good that no particular “we” can completely hold sway.

The temptation to violence, from social cancellation to physical violence unto murder, has always been strong in the face of relentless systemic and targeted oppression. It’s logical  to want to do-away with people who want to do-away with you, or with people you care about, or with their capacity to thrive.  But it doesn’t work well most of the time. Political scientist Erica Chenoweth was skeptical that this is so, writing that she shared a commonly held assumption that “people turn to violence because it works.”[2]  But then she and her colleagues looked at the long-term results of campaigns of resistance —to repressive regimes, to territorial occupation, and to established socio-political systems such as apartheid — between 1900 and 2019. What they found, overwhelmingly, is that “nonviolent resistance has had the monopoly on success.”[3]

For Chenoweth and her colleagues, nonviolent resistance means seeking change without using violence or the threat of violence. In their work, violence means physical harm, but the threat of violence can be implied in other ways, including — to bring the point right to the current moment — with strategies like doxing[4] (which could make me unsafe in my home) or cancelling (which could make me lose my livelihood).  Deriding social and cultural identity, arguably, threatens violence.  

None of that works in regime change, and it doesn’t work in systems change either. Moreover, as many spiritual traditions teach, and as has borne out in human history, violence begets more violence, and that’s simply antithetical to the goal of change defined as more people thriving in ever more peace.  And, since I have accepted that I never can, nor should I, get my way absolutely and forever, I turn my life toward that goal.

Everyone who wants to be part of this change finds their own way to do that. Because it’s what I know, I turn my attention to systems like organizations, communities, and schools, finding  - I guess I could say - small-scale equivalents of nonviolent resistance.

            That’s at the core of our work in schools, our new work in organizations, and emerging work in communities. (Please do take a moment to read about all that below). It’s at the core of my own writing.  Thank you for opening this newsletter, for providing a space for us at the ILI to think aloud about new strategies for change, and for joining us in that thinking.

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[1] “Zadie Smith on The Fraud”. Fresh Air Podcast. September 5, 2023.

[2] Chenoweth, Erica. (2021) Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford University Press.

[3] Chenowith, Erica, and Maria J. Stephen. (2011) Why Civil Resistance Works. Columbia University Press.

[4] Doxing is the “action or process of searching for and publishing private or identifying information about a particular individual on the internet, typically with Malicious intent”.  (Oxford Languages)