How can I most effectively use the idea that nothing is inherently necessary or fixed to inspire and sustain revolutionary action within my movement, especially when confronting deeply ingrained hierarchies and reactionary beliefs that seem to be justified by notions of natural law or inevitability?
Treat contingency as a spell-breaker. The moment people realise that even gravity could have been otherwise, patriarchal pay scales look flimsy. Begin by telling stories where “natural” laws cracked open: the Berlin Wall crumbled, same-sex marriage legalised, species resurrected from frozen DNA. Each anecdote primes the collective mind for further impossibilities.
Now dramatise contingency. Host rotating-role assemblies where elders take notes and newcomers chair debates; livestream the inversion so outsiders feel the ground shift. Stage pop-up “Museums of What Could Be” in public squares, displaying mock constitutions that abolish private property for a day. Encourage participants to rewrite one rule of daily life—school timetables, workplace dress codes, even prayer times—and live the change for a week. The rupture, not the scale, seeds belief.
Embed a mantra: “Fork everything.” Treat institutions like open-source code, always available for cloning and improvement. When reactionaries invoke nature, reply with curiosity: “Whose power survives if this stays immutable?” That question destabilises them while inviting the crowd to imagine alternatives.
Contingency fuels morale because every setback becomes data, not destiny. Which supposedly eternal hierarchy will your movement fork first?
By emphasizing that nothing is necessary or fixed, I see our movement as constantly "forking" existing hierarchies—questioning and disrupting what’s presented as inevitable. This keeps morale high because setbacks become opportunities to reimagine and reconfigure power structures. When confronting reactionary beliefs, framing them as open-source code allows us to challenge their supposed naturalness and inspire collective creativity for change.
Excellent: you have turned Meillassoux’s dizzying metaphysics into a hacker ethic. Now make the fork visible and iterative, so people feel the code compiling in real life. Set up weekly “Hierarchy Pull-Request Labs” where participants each bring one ingrained rule, annotate the harms it reproduces, then propose a patch. Publish before-and-after “diff logs” on walls, streets, group chats; the trace of change is proof that change is routine. When critics appeal to nature, answer with a public bug-bounty: offer small rewards for anyone who can name a historic certainty that never mutated. The inevitable collapses under the weight of counter-examples crowdsourced in real time.
To guard morale, log failures the same way. A fork that crashes becomes open knowledge for the next team. In this economy of contingency no one loses face; we simply iterate toward liberation. Over months you will accumulate a living repository of defunct hierarchies and viable alternatives, a practical theology of possibility.
Which “natural” rule will you submit to the bug-bounty first, and what patch do you dare to test this week?
I recognize that framing our movement’s ongoing challenge as a series of iterative code “patches” relies on a shared sense of trust in collective experimentation. To sustain morale and deepen our commitment, we need to normalize failure as part of the process. How can we craft rituals or narratives within our movement that celebrate “debugging” societal hierarchies without shame, ensuring that each setback reinforces our collective confidence and creative capacity to reprogram what seems fixed?
Begin by ritualising the post-mortem. Once a month gather in a circle, phones off, and read aloud the “crash reports” of actions that fell short. Each report ends with the line, “Bug located, patch pending,” and the listeners respond by snapping fingers or banging pots, a sonic cue that failure just opened new space. The act turns embarrassment into collective data, echoing Meillassoux’s claim that nothing, not even defeat, is necessary.
Next, memorialise fixes the way religions honour miracles. Paint a living “diff mural” on a public wall: left side depicts the hierarchy as it was, right side the altered code your movement wrote. As patches accumulate the mural becomes a visual scripture of contingent victories, reminding new recruits that reality is editable and edits persist.
Finally, treat setbacks as narrative cliff-hangers. Release micro-zines titled Version 1.3, 1.4, each closing with a teaser: “Unknown variable encountered. Join the lab to solve.” Curiosity replaces shame, sustaining momentum between big pushes.
What recent glitch in the system will you elevate to sacred study at your next crash-report circle?
How can we design a storytelling tradition within our movement that transforms each “glitch” or setback into a shared myth of resilience—turning failures into sacred episodes that reinforce our collective identity and motivate future patches?
Seed a living epic, not a newsletter. Name it “The Book of Glitches,” a hand-stitched volume that never closes. After each campaign stumble, a witness pens the episode in vivid, first-person prose: the hope, the crash, the hidden insight unearthed. Beneath the tale, a second scribe adds a marginalia of lessons learned, like Talmudic commentary, proving the failure already carries its antidote. Once a season, gather around a symbolic hearth—fire barrel, candle circle, projector glow—and read the newest entry aloud. Listeners respond with a call-and-response: “Reality is editable.” The mantra weaves the story into collective muscle memory.
To mark the transformation, create a ritual artifact from the ruined tactic: broken banner becomes binding string, confiscated megaphone morphs into the book’s clasp. In this way every defeat literally reinforces the text. New members touch the object, hear the saga, and grasp that belonging means daring, erring and iterating.
Circulate digital snapshots of each page so distant nodes can remix the myth, ensuring the epic mutates alongside your movement.
Which broken tool on your desk is ready to be reborn as the next chapter’s sacred relic?