How to Be a Dissident: Gal Beckerman on Why Pessimism Is the Most Important Human Quality

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“Pessimism is not fatalism. Fatalism is the belief that things will always necessarily be worse. Pessimism is the belief that things will probably get worse. Within that ‘probably,’ it opens up space for action.” — Gal Beckerman

In the first months of Trump II, Gal Beckerman watched American society do something that shocked him: comply. In one pathetic example after another, prominent law firms, universities, and senior federal employees buckled to every Trumpian whim. America appeared unable to resist authoritarianism. There were no dissidents.

Thus How to Be a Dissident. Beckerman’s new manual of resistance is inspired by history’s more insistent dissenters — from Mandelstam and Solzhenitsyn to Navalny, Ai Weiwei, Thoreau, Havel, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and demonstrators on the streets of Minneapolis. The quiet manifesto focuses on what Beckerman considers the ten most essential qualities of how to be a dissident: Be alone. Be pessimistic. Be funny. Be reckless. Be watchful.

Pessimism, above all. Not fatalism — the belief that things will always necessarily be worse — but the belief that things will probably get worse. Optimism, in Beckerman’s mind, undermines urgency and thus enables passivity. Pessimism forces resistance. It’s the first lesson in how to be a dissident.

Five Takeaways

• Moral Nausea: Beckerman’s term for the feeling most of us recognise but most of us suppress: seeing something wrong — a neighbour treated badly, a homeless person in a terrible situation, a dead child in a newspaper — and knowing ourselves somehow implicated. Most of us swallow it back down. We don’t do anything. We try not to think about it. The dissident is the person who doesn’t. What separates them, Hannah Arendt argued after studying Germans who resisted the Nazis, is a single question: can I live with myself? If the answer is no — if living with myself would mean living with a murderer — the dissident acts. That question, and the refusal to avoid it, is what makes a dissident a dissident.

• The Pre-Political: Havel’s definition of where dissidence begins: not in ideology or revolution, but in the defence of whatever allows a human life to feel normal. For Havel, it started with a rock band — the Plastic People of the Universe, arrested for playing unauthorised concerts in communist Czechoslovakia. They weren’t political. They sang about drinking beer. But they were gathering people together outside state sanction, and that was enough. For Iranian dissidents: being able to drive unaccompanied, or not cover one’s hair. For the Tiananmen tank man: getting home to make dinner. The dissident defends those pre-political conditions — the normal life — when the state moves to violate them.

• Mandelstam’s Answer: Osip Mandelstam composed a poem mocking Stalin in the early 1930s — at the height of Stalin’s repressive era — and never wrote it down. He repeated it to his wife, Nadezhda, night after night in bed until she had memorised it. When it reached the secret police, he was arrested and brought to the Lubyanka. The interrogator asked: why did you do this? He could have denied it. Blamed his wife. Said it was a game of telephone. Instead he said: I wrote it because I hate fascism. It’s as simple as that. Beckerman opens the book with this moment because it captures the dissident at their most elemental — a man who, when asked the Arendt question, answered honestly.