The Plan for Action #9: Out-grow the opposition

    First, you need a vision of where you are going. This is both the easiest and hardest thing to do, but on the "easy" side it means taking your vision, writing it down, then taking the goals needed to get there, and writing those down. The goals and vision are going to be the thing you are repeating over and over to yourself, your team, and everyone you meet, and it's going to be something that child tyrants repeat in a stressful voice every time they think of you.

    Something I've learned firsthand is how quickly you exhaust yourself when acting alone. Having additional people help you is absolutely necessary. First, because many hands make light work, and second, because more people means specialization, so that the team overall is more effective. For yourself, this does mean that you need to start reading on the topic of leadership, and I would recommend "The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership" to start.

    Also, in addition to a team, you will also need relationships. These are people who are not always actively involved in your cause, but are people who can help you, such as journalists, educators, people who provide infrastructure you will need, and so on. The goal here is not "using people who are useful," so much as developing the discipline of building relationships wherever you can.

    A successful project is going to require infrastructure, which are tools and resources needed to effectively execute a project. For an open source project, at minimum this means a website, marketing services to get interested people to your website, a helpdesk to help new people engage with you, and so on. I have never been part of a successful political, educational, or open source project that did not have robust infrastructure to help people go from interested to being an active contributor.

    It can be fun to fantasize about a "people's revolution," but in truth, a truly disorganized mob does not last very long. At the very minimum, a shared narrative and a means of communication are necessary. If you cannot think of anything else to do for your cause, start with these.

    From our first step in the Plan for Action, one piece of "negative knowledge" to unlearn is the pathological hatred of money. Hating money is like hating a hammer, and then wondering why you can't nail two boards together. The truth is, in order to effectively organize, draw people in who can support you full time,  have robust infrastructure, and so on, you need money to pay for those things. This means either developing your own ability to earn, or it means learning to get very good at fundraising. In reality, it means both.

    We aren't talking George Soros levels of money necessarily. Instead, we're talking about understanding the importance of getting and using money as a part of the overall plan, and squeezing out the maximum value of what money we have.

An Example

    Let me illustrate with a real life example: Once I was an activist for Ron Paul and his pro-piece vision, and we had a goal to gain delegates in our state Republican party so as to try to flip the state party's positions to pro-peace and pro-liberty. I was called upon to set up infrastructure in the form of a call center, and in terms of money, I was given $50. Using a relationship with a friend of mine, I was able to borrow a room his club used for meeting, and we bought pizza for the people who volunteered. It was February and the room wasn't heated, but again, because we shared the pro-peace vision.

    The result was that our Liberty group was indeed able to flip the state GOP to our leadership for a couple of years (we even got ending the drug war as a plank in our party platform), and the infrastructure of experienced people and training material we wrote down from our experience is continuing to put people in office, and on some fronts we did indeed make progress in increasing liberty.

Out-growing Opposition

    When it comes to opposition, you will absolutely make enemies as you become significant. Some enemies are people who are merely envious, others will have a contrary vision. Something you must avoid doing is defining your movement in terms of said enemies. Otherwise, you come to depend on having that enemy, and even if you "win," you have to invent a new enemy. For example, the social justice crowd talking about being against "oppression," but since most of the most egregious oppression was already solved in the West, the need to invent new kinds of oppression was necessary. This is how you get, for example, crazed feminists saying that a man who is relaxing with his feet apart is "oppressive," as if this is part of a plan to deny women the right to own property. This kind of thinking will make you lose, even if you "win."

    With this in mind, developing a sound, strong vision, and taking concrete steps to get to that vision, will help you see opponents not as the enemy that defines you, but merely as an obstacle that can be overcome, and swiftly forgotten as your vision is realized. And given my own pro-peace stance, I would argue that this kind of view is also a fundamentally more peaceful form of activism, as you do not necessarily have to destroy every perceived enemy in order to achieve your vision. Indeed, in this kind of activism you might even introduce such people to the anarchocapitalist vision of "lets each do what we want on our own property, and leave each other alone when we can't agree."

Thanks for reading.