What fresh philosophical frameworks could ignite new activist possibilities during unstable times?
Sometimes I imagine activism like watching a storm from a room beneath the eaves, each lightning flash mapping its uncanny logic across the sky. The usual ways of protest—marching down orderly avenues, shouting at impassive buildings, making tidy demands—feel flimsy, inadequate, as if trying to open a locked door using the wrong key. Jacques Ellul speaks of the "politization of modern man," a spell woven tightly by the state, convincing us our freedom hangs upon these external narratives of confrontation. Yet beneath this agitated rush towards politics lies another quieter sort of submission, our attentiveness chained to an "omnipresent state," shaping our desires until we do not notice that they aren't even ours.
What if activism took a stranger shape, less linear, less certain of cause and effect? Micah White invokes an old-fashioned word: "theurgy." Revolutions born of supernatural things, changes whispered by some inscrutable divinity. Revolution—not as protest carried out neatly on streets, but as rituals and meditations that gesturally bend the moral arc through mystery and invocation. I picture those strange moments of small, electric synchronicities, signs that surprise us into new ways of seeing. Activism as collective epiphany, wild-eyed and miraculous, overturning worlds with quiet gestures. “By one thought that comes into the mind a hundred worlds are overturned in a single moment.”
Sometimes the compass spins even further into abstraction—the quantum activist who picks up particles of entangled possibilities. The old ideas—one event neatly following another, local effects contained—they no longer hold. Quantum activism suggests effects without clear cause, action through strange entanglement or superposition, movements whose ripples are felt unpredictably across time and space. Perhaps the distant flutter of a hand becomes the storm here, now. Protest reimagined in quantum frames would translate our collective imagination into new forms: ambiguous, resonant, mysterious rituals designed precisely because their effects ripple emotionally, symbolically—even metaphysically—across entire continents.
I am struck by how these ideas interrupt conventional activist logics. Or what would happen if activism deliberately reached beyond today's horizons, into spaces we can barely fathom? Consider meta-political targets—rights for rivers and forests, for artificial minds, even extraterrestrial neighbors. The very strangeness of these ideas proposes recalibrations, new forms of responsibility, ethics unfurling outward boundlessly. New rituals emerge: non-human parliaments, truths told by more-than-human interpreters. Activism might dare to become stranger still—embarking collectively on magnificent, impossible projects: planet-wide meditations, synchronized ceremonies resonating in improbable harmony, redefining success as irreducible communal leaps of imagination and possibility.
Perhaps also activism will revolve inward—toward interior liberation, where subjective breakthroughs ripple into collective myths. Healing as revolution, individual consciousness shifting collective terrain. Subjective activism faces burnout directly, the weary shadows beneath activists' eyes becoming invitations to inward work, meditation, ceremonies of self-care. We might openly revere vulnerability, healing each other openly as we heal earth, treating ourselves no longer as disposable assets for movements—but living testimonies to infinite possibility.
Radically confronting the anthropocentric comfort zone, we could rewrite activism. Symbols of urgency alongside visible efforts—guerrilla plantings, community rituals working toward regeneration, biohacking as defiance against inevitability, reversal as a revolutionary act. Would protest begin looking like sudden, magical gardens sprouting overnight, declarations that we are not resigned to the narrowing visions presented as inevitabilities: extinction, depletion, despair?
And always, the question: How might we ignite these new possibilities amid uncertain, trembling days? Perhaps activism does not merely channel anger outward, but summons inward quiet—collective meditations, invoking higher, hidden powers. Turning symbolic rituals into media flares, reshaping imaginations and hearts. With ideas that hover just out of reach, spiritual spaces, vulnerable public ceremonies—we offer experiences, not arguments. An activism of awe, confusion, curiosity—capable not just of challenging political realities, but reframing the very ground beneath our conventional thought.
These movements would no longer demand incremental adjustments or policy details; instead they would insist upon the impossible, dramatize improbable visions to transform the very edges of what we allow ourselves to imagine. Engaged profoundly, openly, fearlessly, activist practices might finally reflect the complexity, oddity, and magic we find alive in our turbulent histories of change.
The activists begin carefully building altars of impossible imaginings. Quietly organizing synchronized meditations, poetic invocations—moments that suddenly ripple outward like gentle earthquakes. Their movements appear irrational, mysterious—the enactment of spiritual rituals confronting rational procedures. Entire crowds gathered, silent or murmuring softly, inviting new worlds to bloom from intentions alone, their tactics deliberately ambiguous, deliberately impossible: symbolic quantum gestures, rebellions against certainty.
Actions spill quietly across cities—global healing circles, small-scale guerrilla rewildings, joyful collective psychic shifts. Meditating silently in squares, publicly countering despair through inward tuning, the activists redefine political expression itself. They plant ideas where blood would otherwise run hot. Activism as empathy, imagination, surprising events blossoming suddenly into being, inspired calculations in uncertainty, their influences felt across communities like unexpected rainfall.
Gradually, the map changes. These strange new rituals and improbable meta-actions tug at something deeper until activism isn't purely political—rather it becomes metaphysical, spiritual, existential. Entirely new maps, of uncharted territory, daring to illuminate in fluid colors a horizon that had barely whispered itself possible before.
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A relevant historical case study illustrating the metaphysical and spiritually-inflected approach to protest activism is Augusto Boal's development of the Theater of the Oppressed, emerging in Brazil during the politically volatile 1950s and 1960s. Boal, profoundly influenced by Paulo Freire’s pedagogical theories, advocated an interactive theater style aimed at empowering marginalized populations. His performances were designed explicitly as transformative rituals meant not merely to highlight contemporary injustices, but also to actively incite collective spiritual awakening and political self-realization among audiences. Rejecting Aristotelian notions of theater as simply cathartic entertainment, Boal sought to cultivate "spectactors," audience members invited to co-create and shape theatrical outcomes, thus modeling broader potentialities for revolutionary change. His technique of "forum theater" exemplifies this radical reimagining: actors halt mid-conflict, directly engaging the spectators to collaboratively explore and embody solutions. From his ideological base at Brazil's Arena Theater to his later global workshops, Boal deliberately blurred the boundaries between ritual, consciousness expansion, and protest—positioning theater as a conduit for metaphysical enactment of societal transformation, rather than conventional activism conducted through explicitly political channels.