‘Clever, classless and free’: The problem with compulsive activism

I remember a fellow student who was in his twenties and who had had made it his business to oppose everything the teacher said on Marxist economic terms. He was a recent convert to the Marxist vocabulary who merely was hell-bent on annoying the teacher and tiring the rest of us because he had nothing else to do. The motive was sheer boredom and attention-seeking behavior. I have no idea where he is these days but I’ve a strange feeling that he is a control freak trying to run the lives of those around him and is a flag-bearing marcher to the right-wing government. This is one generation ago back in the late 1980s or very early 1990s.

2014: A Space Odyssey: I see the same anguished sense of void and attention-seeking behavior in student activists who claim to be leftists or claim to represent the interests of some group or the other, articulating in grammatically correct English but with the same profound ignorance with regard to how things actually work in reality that I saw back then in the 1980s. One important difference though: then it was a freak case: we merely were amused by the behavior of the one student who thought that he was “clever, classless and free.” Thanks to the virtual spaces of the “social media” these days everyone has happily promoted themselves to being activists.

Doped with notions of sex, freedom as in narcissistic self-indulgence and the shallow “life-worlds” of the social media to which they are religiously attached, most of these students are indifferent to the plight of those who are the real victims of a cruel and relentless system. They don’t have the argument because they have not read except for clichéd phrases picked from mass media. In that sense they are not very different from their parents and teachers who probably told these students when they were kids that the stork brought the baby home. They figured out the baby part after a few existential struggles but the elusive stork like a fantasy is somewhere haunting them at the back of their minds.

I am not opposed to their activism which I think is merely compulsive self-important behavior. The self-esteem movement of the 1970s that George Carlin makes fun of is a global phenomenon these days, thanks to the Internet and every person who thinks he or she is an activist has convinced themselves into believing that they are the harbingers of a revolution in the making.

I am opposed to their stupidity, opportunism and the horrible tendency to take away the spaces of oppressed peoples for their own personal ends, thus making it impossible for the really oppressed to ever be able to speak for themselves. I am certain a generation later these very self-proclaimed activists will be supporters of unethical governments merely because they have not thought carefully or felt deeply enough about issues that matter. This is because they are not fighting for justice that will give rights but for power that will give them positions that they have neither earned nor deserved. And not out of a sense of powerlessness but simply because they have been told that they can have the cake and eat it too.

My reflections ought to be limited to the compulsive student protesters at a rather uneventful place called the English and Foreign Languages University where I see boys and girls habitually indulging in “activist” behavior without really being activists in any sense of the term. Their eagerness to run a parallel administration using rights and elections as excuse stems from the false sense of power derived from news-hungry print and visual media and from social networking websites where things could be sensationalized without any cost except a moral and a political one.

Roland Barthes famously says that: “the performance of a language system—is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.” That is the problem I have with the endemic student protesters. Their language is fascist because they don’t want any other voice to be heard except for their own. More importantly, they are repeating a language that they have passively acquired and internalized without reflecting on it. Thus, they speak compulsively like robots filling the spaces of Facebook and Twitter and winning imaginary battles without having any clue as to the implications of what they are saying.

To be educated in a way that will enable you to serve humanity is itself a form of activism and a noble one to say the least. That’s how the 19th century, one of the worst periods of oppression in human history, could produce men and women of character who came from humble backgrounds and despite that, their lives were filled with humility rather than bitterness. If they were patriotic it is only because they took pride in who they were and not in any exclusionary sense of the term.

Real activism begins at home, I mean literally. Oppose the prejudices and authoritarian behavior of your parents, relatives and neighbors. You cannot be supporting reactionary family rituals and then come to public spaces of the university and pretend to be a liberator of the masses. You are not a liberator because you are not one of the masses either. The masses know that as well. Defy the religion you have been taught as the one and only true one. You cannot be a sub-nationalist at home and an anti-nationalist outside. All nationalisms are evil, beginning with the one in which you have been raised.

Share whatever resources you have to the best possible extent to accommodate the have-nots of the world. Reject media attention completely if that is possible or at least to the maximum possible extent avoid the limelight that drains the imagination and turns you into a puppet sooner or later. If you are convinced you have a cause generate a discussion on street corners and walk with the masses to enlighten them on what you think is the right way. That’s what the founders of two great religions Buddhism and Christianity did: they argued for a case and a lifestyle that they believed to be the true one. They did not badger their followers through repeating empty slogans. They spoke in a way that the poor and the weak understood and took strength from the message.

That’s what real activism does. It persuades but not forces. It is intelligent without being snobbish or offensive. It is truthful like Socrates because it is knowledge that will admit to the possibility of ignorance. It is humble and humane because it is not about self-promotion but genuinely looks at others with the intent of understanding them for who they are and not for what you want them to be.

Prakash Kona is a writer, teacher and researcher who lives in Hyderabad, India. He is currently Associate Professor at the Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.

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