You do not become a ”dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. – Vaclav Havel
2011 will go down as the “Year of the Protester.” For all the obvious reasons, the name fits. And for what should be similarly obvious reasons, that’s a tragedy.
The world needs protesters now like a doomed airliner needs more stewardesses. The thing it really, desperately requires are dissidents.
Yes, there’s a difference between the two, a crucial one. The dissident doesn’t scream in the streets. He doesn’t sit in drum circles. He doesn’t dress like in a fashion contrived solely to alienate others. He isn’t incoherent by design. Or a lost soul simply looking for some angry movement to belong to.
The dissident thinks. He’s formulated an idea, a plan, that challenges consensus, conventional wisdom, and the power structures in industry, government, and society that support the status quo. He has an argument in favor of an alternative. He can debate. He offers a workable option that can rally millions of similarly thoughtful supporters – that silent majority we need to join the debate. Unlike the protester, who can spark what appears to be revolution, but is usually nothing more than replacement of his current oppressor with another, the dissident, by offering a formula for change, can radically upend the systems around him.
The dissident recognizes that screaming will always be cheap, and quickly forgotten. But that a well constructed idea is sticky.*
If the difference I’m highlighting is opaque, allow me to offer a few concrete examples of dissidents. It’s a good time for it, as we lost three huge ones last year: Steve Jobs, Christopher Hitchens, and Vaclav Havel. Each of these men, through the power of well reasoned, well crafted affronts to the accepted narratives, caused more change in their spheres of influence than ten years of Occupy Wall Street, or any other similar protest movement, would have in its.
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