What is activism for?

breaking free from socially-imposed limitations

The eras of activism can be defined by singular questions. Lenin’s “What is to be done?” Martin Luther King’s “How Long?” Occupy’s “What Is Our One Demand?” So what is the the question that defines today’s activism?

I believe that question ought to be: “What is activism for?”

The reason I believe that “What is activism for?” is the most important question that today’s activists ought to be pursuing is because it forces us to judge whether we are using activism for its highest purpose.

The last few decades have made it clear that activism can be used for many things. Activism can sell products and lifestyles. It can mobilize voters. It can spread memes, truths and lies. It can create insurrections and movements. It can be a career for a few, an unpaid volunteership for many. There are, in fact, countless things that activism can be.

But if activism can be many things then what is the one thing—the true and highest purpose—that it ought to be?

Typically this question is answered from an ideological perspective: activism should be used to give power to the people, support the left, wage class war, change the world, etc. These answers, however, miss something fundamental about activism.

Strip away the ideological filter and look at activism as a purely social phenomena… what do you see? I see something remarkably unique: the capacity of individuals to create ideas that motivate thousands, and sometimes millions, of strangers to break the patterns of their lives and do new, risky collective behaviors.

The fact that activists have repeatedly, since the French and American Revolutions, sparked mass movements that seemingly come out of nowhere, burn hot and dissipate only to return again is a significant clue as to the true and highest purpose of activism.

In simple terms, activism is the most cost effective and efficient way of mobilizing people that is known to humanity.

In poetic terms, activism releases the suppressed collective creativity of humanity and allows for sudden leaps towards alternate futures.

The insight here is that these alternate futures don’t need to be constrained by politics. While activism can be used to elect candidates and topple governments, that is only the political aspect of its capacities.

Activism’s highest purpose is collective mobilization that breaks humanity free from its socially-imposed limitations. Those limitations might be moral, political, empathic, or something else entirely. Most often it is a limitation of imagination.