The revolution occurs when the victims cease to cooperate.
Interpretation
Revolutions happen when oppressed individuals refuse to comply with their oppressors.
The quote by Karl Hess emphasizes the power of non-cooperation in the face of oppression. When individuals who are wronged or victimized choose to stop supporting or complying with systems that exploit or harm them, it can lead to significant societal change and even revolutionary movements. This highlights the importance of individual agency and solidarity in challenging unjust systems.
In practice
In a speech advocating for social change, one might say, 'As Karl Hess stated, the revolution occurs when the victims cease to cooperate.'
It is curious to note that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty. But there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing. Apparently, the state takes money more seriously than life.
We have the illusion of freedom only because so few ever try to exercise it. Try it sometime. Try to save your home from the highway crowd, or to work a trade without the approval of the goons, or to open a little business without a permit, or to grow a crop without a quota, or to educate your child the way you want to, or to not have a child. We all have the freedom of a balloon floating in a pin factory.
They [anarchists] spring from a single seed, no matter the flowering of their ideas. The seed is liberty. And that is all it is. It is not a socialist seed. It is not a capitalist seed. It is not a mystical seed. It is not a determinist seed. It is simply a statement. We can be free. After that itβs all choice and chance.
Our goal is to have a country that's not divided by race.
It's very, very difficult to reinvent yourself when you're 40 or 50, whether you are a taxi driver who now needs to become a web designer, or anything else. It just becomes more difficult and more scary.
I don't know how to change the world but I know if I keep talking about how dirty it is out here, somebody gon clean it up.
By nature, men love newfangledness.
It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.
That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.