On Dissent
The more massive a movement is, the more doctored and manipulated.
The more it tends to be a mass lie, a front……
Genuine dissent must always keep a human measure.
It must be free and spontaneous.
The slighter gestures are often the more significant,
because they are unpremeditated and they cannot be doctored
beforehand by the propagandist.
It is better that the “slighter gestures” never find their way
into the big papers or onto the pages of the slick magazines.
It is better not to line up with the big, manipulated group.
What seems to be “action” on the mass scale may be nothing
more than a political circus, or an organized disaster.
Such action is often nothing more than the big absurd lie,
the blown up puerility which, by its own emptiness,
ends in a cataclysm of frustration and destructive rage.Against the empty and debased rhetoric of the giant demonstration,
even the smallest, genuine idea, the slightest of sincere and honest protests
is not only tolerable but to be admired.
—excerpt, Conjectures Of A Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton
