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The Science of Defeating an Authoritarian, Part 6 - Everyday Forms of Resistance [1]
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Date: 2025-02-26
This is the sixth installment in a series about using social science to save democracy. Previous diaries are here:
Take a look at these two screenshots from the National Park Service webpage for Stonewall. It's a page about two activists who would probably identify as trans today, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Both played a significant role at the Stonewall uprising. (At the time, terminology did not distinguish between transgender people and crossdressers.)
Somebody in the government removed the word transgender from the website in the last few weeks. However, either they were incompetent or they intentionally didn't work all that hard at it. They left the word "and" before where "transgender" used to be, making the absence clear. And they left the words trans, transvestite, and drag queen. They also left the whole page up, Sylvia, Marsha, and all.
Alt National Park Service said on Facebook that it was not an NPS employee who did this. In that case, my money is on the incompetence of Elon's JV team. But I do know (through a mutual friend) a federal employee in a different agency was tasked with the same job (trans erasure on federal websites) and they weren't working too hard at it. On purpose.
Intentional incompetence like this is something social scientists call "everyday forms of resistance." The term was coined by Yale political scientist and anthropologist James C Scott in his book Weapons of the Weak. Scott studied stateless peoples in Southeast Asia. Throughout history, the peoples he studied aimed to evade the state because states were repressive - they enslaved people, conscripted them, enlisted them in corvee labor, etc. Scott's body of work is about the cat-and-mouse game played between the state and the peoples who tried to evade it.
In Weapons of the Weak, Scott writes that people wrongly assume that when there is no overt, coordinated resistance to state oppression, there is no resistance at all. Scott found that when overt forms of resistance would be crushed, people resist in ways that won't result in repression like "foot dragging, evasion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, and sabotage." If you are inside a federal agency requiring your compliance to keep your job (or any other circumstance in which overt resistance is not possible), employ everyday forms of resistance.
Right now federal employees are passing around a declassified CIA Field Manual to Sabotaging Fascism from World War II. This recommends another everyday form of resistance: malicious compliance. Suggestions include:
“Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.”
“Make ‘speeches.’ Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate ‘patriotic’ comments.”
“Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.”
“Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.”
“‘Misunderstand’ orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.”
“In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines.”
“To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.”
“Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.”
“Multiply paperwork in plausible ways.”
“Make mistakes in quantities of material when you are copying orders. Confuse similar names. Use wrong addresses.”
“Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job”
“Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once. Or pretend that you are particularly anxious to do your work, and pester the foreman with unnecessary questions.”
“Snarl up administration in every possible way. Fill out forms illegibly so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms.”
I’ve observed federal employees brainstorming plans for after they are required to return to work. There won’t be enough office space for everyone. People need to get their offices equipped with supplies. They plan to flood the system with requests for all of their needs — offices, supplies, repairs, etc. That’s malicious compliance.
Last, know when it’s time to resign in protest or simply refuse an illegal or unethical order and get fired. It’s not OK to be Adolph Eichmann, following orders to keep your job. According to Hannah Arendt, Eichmann was horrified when he witnessed Jews being murdered. The one time Eichmann had a choice about what to do, he routed Jews to a place where they would not be killed immediately. His superiors told him he couldn’t do that again, and so he didn’t. He coordinated logistics to transport Jews to their deaths. There comes a time when everyday forms of resistance and malicious compliance are no longer enough. Only you can determine when that is.
Plan today for what your red line is. Make a list: What won’t you do? What will you resign over? What will you get fired over? Be ready with your list in advance so that you are clear with where your red line is. Then stick to your guns.
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