Sustained refusal comes from clarity and commitment, not fear or anger

Evidence

This “schizoid” collective brain cannot act, only react blindly and in misaligned ways to a barrage of stimuli, mostly out of fear and anger. That’s bad news for sustained refusal. While it may seem at first like refusal is a reaction, the decision to actually refuse—not once, not twice, but perpetually until things have changed—means the development of and adherence to individual and collective commitments from which our actions proceed. In the history of activism, even things that seemed like reactions were often planned actions. For example, as William T. Martin Riches reminds us in his accounting of the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks was “acting, not reacting” when she refused to get up from her seat. She was already involved with activist organizations, having been trained at the Highlander Folk School, which produced many important figures in the movement. The actual play-by-play of the bus boycott is a reminder that meaningful acts of refusal have come not directly from fear, anger, and hysteria, but rather from the clarity and attention that makes organizing possible. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 298

This “schizoid” collective brain cannot act, only react blindly and in misaligned ways to a barrage of stimuli, mostly out of fear and anger. That’s bad news for sustained refusal. While it may seem at first like refusal is a reaction, the decision to actually refuse—not once, not twice, but perpetually until things have changed—means the development of and adherence to individual and collective commitments from which our actions proceed. … For example, as William T. Martin Riches reminds us in his accounting of the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks was “acting, not reacting” when she refused to get up from her seat. She was already involved with activist organizations, having been trained at the Highlander Folk School, which produced many important figures in the movement. The actual play-by-play of the bus boycott is a reminder that meaningful acts of refusal have come not directly from fear, anger, and hysteria, but rather from the clarity and attention that makes organizing possible. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 298

Categorization

• XREF: Rosa Parks ‘acting, not reacting’ parallels the reader’s craft-and-method notes on Deep Listening and prepared improvisation. — connects to: Islamic refusal to dispute likely stemmed from caution, not fear of reason; Freire sought sufficient certainty to act without losing openness to challenge — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 899; Incapacity can function as political refusal when it retains genuine desire — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2461
• QUESTION: Worth chasing Riches’s fuller account: what proportion of ‘spontaneous’ boycotts actually trace to pre-trained organizers?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 298