Don’t let sleep overtake you; the world’s awake within you.
— Vasko Popa
Finding hope and inspired resistance in wholly unexpected places
Ari shares: Last week, I wrote a lot about resistance—the idea that anyone, whether in companies, countries, or any other construct they’re part of, can push back in meaningful ways when they feel that what’s happening around them is ethically misaligned with their values. Resistance is not, of course, a one-time action. On the contrary, for it to truly make an impact, resistance requires creativity, clarity of vision, patience, and a great deal of persistence.
Choosing resistance can be especially challenging in times like these, when the world comes at us in ways we weren’t ready for. Understandably, when a plethora of unexpected obstacles pop up—often all at once—we can feel completely off balance. Our rhythms are disrupted. Plans are postponed. Contingency plans, for those who had them, are quickly pulled from file cabinets. For me, fear rises. My instinct is to flee. Instead, I stay put, breathe deeply, and get centered. When I get my wits around me, I seek sources of insight and inspiration. Often, that search takes me to wholly unexpected places. I’ve learned that if I keep looking, something significant will almost certainly show up.
Learning to do this, I’ve come to see, is a skill we can actually work on developing. In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, writer Rebecca Solnit says,
It seems to be an art of recognizing the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.
What follows is a glimpse of that belief in action—a collaboration with chance that led me to discover inspiring acts of resistance in a part of the world I had never expected to explore.
In the spirit of what I wrote a few weeks ago about the idea that “nothin’ good ever happens in a hurry,” Serbian-born NBA superstar Vlade Divac once observed, “To build a friendship takes so much time and so many years. To ruin it, just seconds.”
I have seen exactly what Divac describes unfold. I’ve also witnessed it, more metaphorically, in companies. I know far too many stories of remarkable organizations built over decades, only to be sold off to much larger companies with cash to buy them. A couple years later, what was once thriving has almost completely collapsed. So much patient, long-term effort to build something extraordinary, only for the products, economics, and culture that made it special to unravel in what feels like a chronological heartbeat.
The same thing that happens in companionship and companies, it seems increasingly clear from watching the news right now, can also happen in countries. For me, at least, it’s painful to be a part of. Trying to lead a positive organization through so many unexpected obstacles is anything but easy. It can be exhausting. Confusing. Confounding.
The uncertainty it creates isn’t, I’ve come to see, just a byproduct of the times—it’s a tactic. Autocratic leaders create instability on purpose. The more off-balance people are, the less likely they are to resist. As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes, autocrats “are impulsive, and love ‘shock events’ … What is fine today may be grounds for persecution tomorrow, and all bets are off if a state of emergency is declared.” Regardless of where this kind of leadership is at play, the goal is the same: to increase fear and diminish hope.
Healthy organizations, by contrast, thrive when they can create the opposite—low fear and high hope. Hope, as I wrote in Secrets #44 and #45, comes naturally to humans. It’s also something that we can actively encourage and enhance, both in ourselves and those around us as well. As Rebecca Solnit says, “Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.” Hope is always essential, and all the more so in times of pain, grief, uncertainty, and loss.
Like many people I know (and perhaps much of our country), I’m living with some of that grief and loss right now. Last week, friend, philosopher, teacher, mentor, psychologist, insightful advisor, and author Sam Keen passed away at his home in Sonoma. He was 94.
Sam was an amazingly thoughtful human being whose philosophy had a formative impact on my understanding of both myself and the world. Fire in the Belly, Hymns to an Unknown God, and To Love and Be Loved were especially important for me, but I can happily and wholeheartedly recommend all of his many books. I quote Sam extensively in all four volumes of the Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading series. Many years after his writing had already begun to influence me in meaningful ways, Sam and I finally met in person. I feel fortunate to have gotten to know him face-to-face—often at his home in Sonoma and at the Deli when he visited Ann Arbor to see his mother.
A few days after I’d heard that Sam had died, I took some time to work my way back through many years of our old email exchanges. It’s a ritual I’ve taken to doing when anyone I know passes away—something of an intellectual photo album that calls up great memories that have otherwise long since left my mind. I almost always come across some unexpected insight, an observation, or an idea that I’d completely forgotten about. Sure enough, in a short email Sam sent me on the 15th of January, 2015, I found a surprise:
Look up “apricity.”
It is a spiritual condition that Camus writes about in The Stranger—the experience of being surprised by Spring in the middle of Winter. I am sure you know the experience …
Stay warm and full of hope …
Sam
I would imagine that, at the time I saw the email, I spent a minute or two reflecting on Sam’s instruction, but then, with my usual nine million things going on, forgot all about it. The good news, I suppose, is that, a little over a decade later, I now have Sam’s insightful statement to reflect on further. Last weekend, I did as he had directed. According to Merriam-Webster, apricity is a 17th-century word that, as Sam suggested, is all about “the warmth of the sun in winter.”
Sam was right: I do know that feeling. I love Ann Arbor, but the surfeit of sun we have in the winter is not my favorite part of it. For those from places like Arizona or LA, where sunshine is the daily norm, it might be hard to grasp just how impactful apricity can be. But here in Ann Arbor, it’s a wonderful thing. After weeks of cold, grayer-than-gray days, the sudden appearance of a sliver of blue sky feels like a gift—happy and heartening. I, for one, appreciate apricity enormously. When it happens, my whole mood can change in an instant!
For me, the most uplifting experiences of apricity are those that I hadn’t at all expected. The weather forecast for any given day in the winter—of which we get many around here—is gray. And then, completely out of the blue, the clouds part, and some sun suddenly shines through. It nearly always brings a smile to my face. Almost instantly, I feel calmer, more centered, and far more hopeful.
Like many of you who are reading this, I have found myself feeling down in the gray and gloomy national “weather” that we’ve had in recent weeks. Watching what’s happening in the news, seeing the ending of nonprofit programs which are so aligned with our values, watching the sudden firing of people from their jobs without the due process or compassion with which we are so committed to working with here, seeing the gutting of programs that support things I care deeply about like the arts, the preservation of the planet, history, education, and more … has been painful.
Staying hopeful in tough emotional times isn’t easy. I remind myself though of what I had written a few weeks ago about Russian dissident poet Irina Ratushinskaya and her aptly-titled prison memoir, Grey is the Colour of Hope. I keep working and waiting for the unforeseen to appear. And then, sure enough, last weekend, an unexpected burst of apricity—both literal and metaphorical—pulled me out of a darkening mood. Like the winter sun in Ann Arbor, hope had been there all along, just hidden behind cloud cover. When the clouds cleared, I smiled the same way I do when I feel the warmth of the sun on what had been a wholly cloudy day. My hope increased. Inspiration kicked in. Determination followed.
This bit of apricity in question came, much to my surprise, from the small Balkan country of Serbia. There, I found an exceptionally inspiring example of what resistance by people who have no particular power but are both passionate about their principles and willing to put in the work, can make possible! One recent news report on the Serbian situation, put out by ZNetwork, an alternative source for news, titled the talk, “Europe’s Biggest Protest Movement You Haven’t Heard Of.” The lack of mainstream press attention, though, is not an indicator of the movement’s importance. What’s happening in Serbia seems significant. Big changes can, as I said, come from wholly unexpected places. And as Serbian journalist Stephanie Fenkart says, “Something quite extraordinary is happening right now in … the Western Balkans.”
I, for one, have paid very little (if any) attention to anything to do with Serbia in recent years. It’s time to get started, though. In a period of American history in which autocracy seems to be imposing itself on our society, in Serbia, an inspiring, grassroots, student-led movement has been going in the opposite direction! A recent headline in Jacobin speaks to me: “Serbia’s Student Movement Offers Hope in Dark Times.”
The sudden rise of resistance to authoritarian rule in Serbia over the past five months has been remarkable. “Serbian students,” journalist Filip Balnunovic writes, “are defying … expectations.” What the students—and the many people from all walks of Serbian life who have joined them—have accomplished in fewer than 150 days has blown my mind. They are creatively challenging the arbitrary, often cruel rule of their country’s president through sustained, peaceful protest. Perhaps what caught my metaphorical sun-starved attention most was the radically democratic, dignity-centered, and non-hierarchical approach to managing their own activities—impressively effective and refreshingly down-to-earth. A touch of anarchistic apricity to inspire me to keep pushing ahead.
Back at the turn of the 20th century, pacifist and mystically inclined German anarchist Gustav Landauer—who I referenced regularly in a recent piece on Jewish mysticism and its surprising role in Zingerman’s history—wrote what seems to reflect the current state of Serbian student-led resistance:
During revolution, people are filled by spirit and differ completely from those without spirit. During revolution, everyone is filled with the spirit that is otherwise reserved for exemplary individuals; everyone is courageous, wild and fanatic and caring and loving at the same time.
The Serbian students are, in fact, equally energetic, idealistic, and impressively effective, all at the same time! In the process they are modeling an approach that any of us can learn from.
History is full of moments when global impact emerged from the most unexpected places. Political scientist Noel Parker of the University of Copenhagen offers what he calls the “positive theory of marginality”—the idea that those on the margins often hold more power than we assume. Revolutions, he argues, don’t start in the mainstream; they begin at the edges. Serbia itself has played an outsized role in world history before. In the summer of 1914, a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, setting off a chain of events that led to World War I. One hundred and eleven years later, I’d like to believe Serbian students might help spark a very different kind of global shift—a much-needed democratic revolution around the world. After all, as Rebecca Solnit reminds us in her writing, “Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.” That certainly applies in this situation.
The story of the Serbian students started in sadness, loss, and confusion. Unexpectedly, at eight minutes before noon on Friday, the first of November, a canopy at a recently renovated train station in Novy Sad, Serbia’s second largest city, suddenly collapsed. Fifteen people, many of them students, were killed. The tragedy was the result of the sort of shoddy work that people in Serbia had grown accustomed to in an autocratic setting. It’s a common story. In an organization—a company, a nonprofit, or a country—where those in charge are out to line their own pockets at the expense of the safety of others, where ethical standards and agreed upon codes of conduct (or in this case, construction), have either been cut out or ignored, where the bank accounts of bosses are believed to be far more important than the health and welfare of those who “work for them,” things like the situation with the Novy Sad train station are almost certain to happen. Outrage ensued, reaction gradually increased, and peaceful demonstrations came about.
Three weeks after the collapse of the canopy, on the 21st of November, in an online post reminiscent of some of what we are seeing right now in the U.S., an upper-level official in the Serbian government verbally attacked and defamed the demonstrators: “We must fight against anarcho-terrorists … the pseudo-elite that is ravaging Serbia with anti-Serbian attitudes. It is time to stop this social scum.” Instead of running away, though, the students grew determined to resist further. The government then decided to intimidate them with physical force. The following day, on the 22nd of November, while sitting in silent vigil to remember the victims, a group of students was suddenly attacked by government-sponsored thugs. Designed to discourage resistance and get the students to start fleeing in fear, the bullying begot the opposite: resistance grew stronger by the day. Large-scale demonstrations in Novy Sad soon followed and then steadily spread across the rest of the country.
While many such examples of resistance fade relatively quickly, in Serbia, more and more people—from all walks of life—joined the fight. Two weeks ago, on March 15, our 43rd anniversary at Zingerman’s, somewhere in the vicinity of a million people came together on the streets of Belgrade, the capital city of Serbia, to demonstrate! This, for context, is in a country of under 7,000,000. Six months after the initial tragedy, demonstrations and marches have taken place in over 400 Serbian cities. And, every day at 11:52, many thousands of Serbians stop whatever it is that they’re doing and stand in silent tribute to the victims.
What’s especially inspiring about the student-led resistance is, as I wrote last week, that it’s not just reactive. Instead of complaining, they created something special. They have come up with collaborative ways to work, approaches that are remarkably aligned with many of the dignity-based, compassionate, kind, non-hierarchical (aka, anarchistic) approaches we have been working hard to make happen here for so many years. Their meetings are all open and thoughtfully facilitated. Agendas are followed. Notes are taken and then made available to everyone. Subgroups are authorized to take action in areas that need quicker response times. They have determinedly avoided having any of their members in the spotlight to keep their work egalitarian and steer clear of the usual (and generally unhelpful) “heroic leader” model of history.
The student movement in Serbia, in that sense, is all about inclusion—they have brought the diverse perspectives of students and faculty, farmers and artists, auto workers and anarchists, poets and professors, senior citizens and high school seniors together into one connected conversation. They are creating effectiveness, not by cutting everything out, but by bringing everyone up. They have been impressively peaceful throughout their protests. They are devoted to dignity and to going the extra mile. After a demonstration, they practice Mutual Aid by staying to clean up after themselves and then spending additional time tidying up the rest of the neighborhood as well. Where in this country institutions of higher learning are under attack, their entire approach has emerged from them. In fact, the demonstrations were begun by a handful of graduate students from the philosophy faculty at the University in Novi Sad. And where authoritarians use fear to consolidate power, the students have raised hope.
Also impressive to me is the work they do to govern themselves. To make decisions and plan actions, the students have established “plenums”—the equivalent of open book management huddles here in the ZCoB—that are open to everyone, operating in inclusive, consensus-focused ways. As many of the students explain, they are putting direct democracy into practice. Lura Pollozhani, researcher at the University of Graz, says,
The plenums embody democracy in a very basic essential way. The students meet every day. … There’s this desire to embody democracy from the ground up which is always an essential wakeup call to any country that wants to pursue a more democratic future. … They’re also doing it with the actions that they’ve chosen for example some might see it as whimsical that they’re using food or and dance and all of these ways of expressing their discontent that are perhaps not too serious but challenging a regime that is increasingly authoritarian with humor, which is perhaps the smartest thing you can do because you’re saying you don’t have the power to scare me! I can make fun of you!
An interviewer inquired, “How can you respond to government provocations really quickly?” (I’ve gotten the same questions many times), skeptically implying that working in this way would by definition be wholly ineffective and way too slow. One of the student leaders, Nina Petrov, answered calmly, “Mostly we just don’t respond. We have more important work to do.” Their work? As she says, it’s “an authentic demand for a decent Society, a Society where there’s basic rule of law.” Ivana, a psychology student from Novy Sad, echoed Petrov’s point: “My diploma doesn’t mean anything if the country doesn’t obey its laws.” And, she added, she’s been inspired by the coming together of so many people of different backgrounds: “It’s really cool, people from different walks of life are supporting us, especially teachers at elementary schools, high schools, some professors, farmers and young people, and people with small kids.”
For anyone who might have begun to believe that an inclusive, compassionate, dignity-based organization is an impossible pipe dream, what the Serbian students are making happen is inspiring. A long-time leader in democratic resistance in Serbia for far longer than most of the students have been alive, Ivan Vejvoda, puts it in context:
This is happening after twelve years of authoritarian rule, of a corrupt system in a setting in which prosecution is arbitrary, there is no separation of powers, no checks and balances. This was … very unexpected from a generation of students whom we all thought were, you know, Gen Z—apathetic, on Tik Tok, waiting to get a diploma and leave the country to find better jobs. But this generation explodes in the most positive way in demanding rule of law. … we want to come back to a somewhat normal society where laws and institutions govern, not one person.
…
This is a sort of cleansing of society. Let’s frankly enjoy the positive moment because we see here that Serbia is a healthy society and it has a great future through these young people who, I repeat, have decided to stay in the country and make a better life here rather than all leaving the country.One can compare it to the early days of the French Revolution or the Paris Commune. This is really … something grassroots authentic from below. It’s very thought through in democratic terms.
It’s also inspiring to me because of the Serbian students’ willingness to take action in such meaningful ways. Rather than nihilism and rock-throwing, they have dedicated themselves to dignity and down-to-earth applications of democratic practices. In the process, they are modeling for people like me—in our companies and/or our countries—what is possible when we’re willing to step forward and do real-world work. Nina Petrov says,
We want a government that listens, a government that acts in the interests of its people. The youth in Serbia are not just the leaders of tomorrow; we are leading today. Our generation is showing that it’s possible to challenge old systems and demand something better. Every chant, every sign, and every march is a step towards a brighter future. We won’t be silenced; our time is now.
Ukrainian writer Yaroslav Hrytsyak observes, “In Western Europe, nations are created by politicians. In Eastern Europe, nations are created by poets.” It’s a fitting perspective for Serbia, where literature and identity are deeply intertwined. One of those poets, Momo Kapor, captures this spirit: “Belgrade, in fact, is not a city—it’s a metaphor, a way of life, a way of thinking.”
The Serbian student movement in Kapor’s context is not just a movement; it is a way of thinking. A way of thinking that can inform what people like me—and maybe you—who live far from Novi Sad will do in the coming weeks and months. By working for the dignity-based communities and countries I want to be part of, they remind me that even in the face of autocracy and overwhelming odds, good work and effective resistance are still possible.
With the Serbian resistance now front of mind, I smiled on Sunday afternoon when I heard former Naval Intelligence officer Malcolm Nance remind Americans, “It’s all gonna stop when you people hit the streets.” A few days later, I heard historian Barbara K. Walter say pretty much the same: “Protest and peaceful resistance works.” Walter, who has studied the subject for decades, reminds us that speaking up and speaking out, grassroots resistance from folks like you or me, or some students in Serbia who are willing to peacefully put themselves out there for their principles, is where the power lies. As Walter reminds us, “The way forward has to come from the bottom up.”
Resistance, in the workplace or the world at large, is rarely easy, but it can work when we’re willing to do the work in good ways and then stick with it. As Nina Petrov put it,
True change won’t happen overnight, but we are committed to the journey, no matter how long it takes.
Given that good things will likely take a long time, resistance is not an overnight activity, and hope (and sun) are essential to healthy living, find inspiration where you can. Take time to look in unlikely places. Study Sam Keen’s books. Be patient. Write a poem. Draw inspiration from the students in Serbia. Having lived through many gray midwestern winters in my life, I know that apricity often arrives when we least expect it. Smile when you see the sun, and appreciate small bits of hope as they emerge. Light finds a way through.