Time Travel Activism

After I’ve rambled enough at people about ideology, and anarchy, and communism, and universal love and acceptance, people ask “Okay Humanist, but what do you do about *real* problems? You mention preventing bad actions, but what does that mean outside the ideological system? If you love everyone and don’t cast justice on anyone, how do you stop all the serial murders and systemic poverty and potential global catastrophes, and that shit” Besides the problems that will whither away when fear and status are less strong - how do you prevent the monstrous, chaotic evil of an uncaring universe.

To which I say, watch a time travel movie.

When a protagonist has seen a catastrophe so bad they must go back in time to stop it, they act in certain ways. They are very very specific. They want to find one tiny thread that led to disaster, and stop it.

Maybe this just means telling someone “don’t do that”. Maybe it means hindering them, or even killing them. Maybe it means moving an inoffensive object at one innocuous moment, changing the course of history. It’s a limited change, but very dramatic and definite.

What do they not do? They do not “form a committee” or “raise awareness”. They do not accumulate their own power base. They don’t shun the person responsible or their works to keep their hands clean - if anything they engage with them as directly as possible. Those sorts of actions are very unlimited in scope, while being vague and ill-defined in their influence on a specific chain of events.

Sometimes the time traveller will for arbitrary reasons “not know” some key information, such as who the person they were sent to stop was, etc. This doesn’t cause them to give up or even change tactics. They must acquire that key piece of information, then again, act definitely. Or perhaps act on the tool that person will use, but still in a specific act definite way.

Think back to your own life, and disasters you’ve seen. Personal or national. Imagine you were sent back before one, and could prevent it. What would you do? How surgical would you be? It would probably involve a lot of yelling at a specific person to get them to change course, and that’s it.

If you are like me, it is very unlikely that your answer to that question resembles what ideological movements in practice do. They operate with less information, yes, but they are not even *trying* to be dramatically specific.

In fact, we can learn a lot from the time traveller. We admire their clarity of purpose. But they are also completely unmoored from society. They are well aware that everyone around them thinks that they are crazy but that doesn’t matter. Their judgment is obviously irrelevant to someone who has seen what they have seen.

The time traveller barely even tries to convince anyone. They don’t need anyone’s approval, so much convincing for our actions goes out the window.

And in a sense, the time traveller is acting completely without reason. No, without cause. For in fact the cause for their actions does not exist in this universe. They are a spontaneous ethical being, doing the right and necessary thing for no prior at all.

The time traveller is beyond class and status. They might remake the entire world, or they might just save one life, but they are laser focused on that and nothing else.

My favorite time travel hero is Ebeneezer Scrooge. He sees the Christmas Future and knows that a doom of loneliness is coming to him. And when he wakes up… he is filled with joy! He can fix things! He does not form a committee to see about this friendship thing, he immediately buys a goose and takes it to his employee’s family.

We can do this too. If something very seriously bad might happen, be as specific about it as you can. Act like it already happened and the details that led to it were realized. Then work backwards and prevent that very specific thing.

Free yourself of fear, status, alienated cruelty, and justice. When you do that many of the concerns that plague you will fall behind. Anything else you need to resolve: be a time traveller from the future to today.

"The role of the activist should not be to push history in the right direction but instead to disrupt it altogether. Žižek writes, 'this is what a proper political act would be today: not so much to unleash a new movement, as to interrupt the present predominant movement. An act of 'divine violence' would then mean pulling the emergency cord on the train of Historical Progress.' To accomplish this act of revolutionary violence involves a switch of perspective from the present-looking-forward to the future-looking-backward. Instead of trying to influence the future by acting in the present, Žižek argues that we should start from the assumption that the dread catastrophic event -- whether it be sudden climate catastrophe, a "'grey goo' nano-crisis or widespread adoption of cyborg technologies -- has already happened, and then work backwards to figure out what we should have done. 'We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny -- and then, against the background of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past.' In other words, only by assuming that the feared event has already happened, can we imagine what actions would need to have been taken to prevent its occurrence. These steps would then be actualized by the present day activist. 'Paradoxically,' he concludes, 'the only way to prevent the disaster is to accept it as inevitable.'"

-Micah White, Notes on the Future of Activism