[Francesca] This book, How to Be a Dissident, is a guide to and a meditation on being a dissident. I read it like drinking a large glass of water that could slake my own thirst for answers to this moment. So I just want to start out by thanking you for writing it. [Gal Beckerman] Oh, thank you. There's nothing a writer likes to hear more than that. [Francesca] You begin the book with a haunting dream, facing an interrogator, not knowing what you would do. Tell us about that dream. [Gal Beckerman] Yeah, I think it's the kind of dream or the sort of subconscious experience that I'm not alone in feeling, especially over the last two years, let's say. It was a dream in which I was being interrogated. I didn't know exactly for what, but the point was that there was some kind of choice that I had to make. I had to either stand by some principle or compromise and give in to the demands of the interrogator. And I say in the book, the dream sort of ends before I really make a choice. But it haunted me also because I wanted to understand what in our world was sort of making me have such a dream. And I think what it was, was that I feel almost assaulted by these kind moral choices every day. What do I do in response to Gaza? What do I do in response to AI? How do I react when I hear that people are being rounded up by ICE? And this felt like a new experience to me as an American, frankly. Maybe I'm naive and sheltered and privileged, but it really shocked me into a confrontation with the kind of person that I want to be. How do I behave? What do I think? How do I respond? And so clearly that trickled into my subconscious, but it also became the impetus for pursuing this particular project. [Francesca] When you say the kind of person you want to be, could you say more about that? Sure. [Gal Beckerman] I think it's very easy to put things out of our mind, to open the newspaper every day, and see things that are happening in the world, or experiencing things that are happening in our own community, and find justifications for not just not doing anything. I mean, that's a simple way of thinking about it, but just not even feeling emboldened to make a choice, feeling that you don't have moral agency. I say in the book, I write about how this is actually a very natural process for a human being. We are very much engineered not to stand out. We're engineered not to become the squeaky wheel. We want to conform. We want to work with each other in our communities to just get along and be okay, be comfortable, and get the essential needs of our lives fulfilled. Taking the risks that come along with realizing that you have a choice, trade-offs that sometimes are a consequence of making a choice, is very hard to accept. By the person I want to be, I guess I meant, I sort of felt this by the end of the project, was not so much that I understood in every given case, okay, this is what I should do, or I should go set myself on fire in front of the State Department or something, but to feel like I have a choice, even if the choice is not to do something, to really understand it and to wrestle with that choice as a choice. [Francesca] And yet you also say that dissonance, and this is something that I found as well, and I just want to say my listeners know this, but my father was involved in the Dutch resistance against the Nazis in World War II, and he sheltered a young man in his apartment for three years. And I know from hearing him talk about this, that he didn't really feel he had a choice. [Gal Beckerman] Right. Right. [Francesca] And that was true for a lot of other people in that situation and others. So, talk a little bit about how do dissidents confront that issue of non-choice? [Gal Beckerman] No, that's a really good point. And in a way, it's a kind of tension in my project, because on the one hand, I want to say that this type of a dissident, it's a person who, you know, I quote Hannah Arendt in the book, she was looking at the people who resisted, Germans who resisted the Nazis. And in the end, after thinking about this for a long time, she came to the conclusion that it wasn't that they had some kind of different set of morals or precepts that allowed them to behave differently. It came down to a very simple question that they posed to themselves, that this type of person posed to themselves. It was, can I live with myself? And it was poignant to me, because it cuts right to the heart of the matter. And she said, you know, it wasn't so much that, you know, they were obeying the commandment, I shall not kill. It was that they couldn't live with a murderer themselves. And so that would argue for dissidents being a kind of like almost innate quality, you know, maybe like having somebody who, what question is there? Like, there is this moral wrong, and I have an opportunity to do something about it. There's not even, it's just like a reflex. And I think that's probably true of a lot of the people that I write about in my book. And it's something that feels consistent to me over thousands of years, and over the many different role models that I look at. But I also wanted the book to be able to say, let's look at these people. Let's look at this reflex that they have, that sort of gets triggered in these moments. And let's understand what's behind it. What's the orientation to the world? Why does their moral compass sort of point this way? You know, how do they discern for themselves right and wrong? What kind of essential questions do they ask themselves? And the notion is not like that we can all wake up tomorrow morning and suddenly have that same kind of surety. I know that I don't always, but that we sort of have it as a North Star, as something that when I say the person I would like to be, I would like to be like your father, who in that moment would know exactly what they should do. But I feel that if I don't, in some ways, train myself for that moment, then when it comes, I certainly won't know what to do. And my reflex might be to just join along with everybody else, not do anything. [Francesca] Yeah, and that's why I think your book is so important, because I think it does take that forethought. A lot of times in learning about my father's history, I thought, gee, I don't think I could ever do that. I couldn't put myself at risk. And yet, now that I'm facing the possibility, because we all are, of this being something I may have to deal with, I feel more courage. And I feel inspired by other people's examples. So many of them are in this book. For example, you talk about Osip Mandelstam. I'm not sure, Mandelstam. That's correct. He wasn't trying to start a movement. He just refused to deny what he saw. Tell us about his example. [Gal Beckerman] So Osip Mandelstam was a poet, Soviet poet, who was fairly well known in Moscow in the 20s and 30s as one of the leading lights. And as Stalin was starting his great repression of the early 30s into the late 30s, Mandelstam just felt the atmosphere around him shift. He saw how scared people were. And it really was a time where fear just kind of rippled through everything. And he started writing a poem. But he did a very interesting thing, which is—and Mandelstam did this quite often—he wrote the poem in his head. He never wrote it down. He would do drafts in his head. His wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, who wrote an extraordinary memoir about 50 years after this fact called Hope Against Hope, which I highly recommend to readers, she was his only sort of receptacle of memory for these poems. They would lie at night in bed, and he would whisper them to her until she had memorized them, so that if anything ever happened to him, that she would be able to eventually write them down one day. So he wrote a poem essentially kind of mocking Stalin, or it felt very much like he mocked Stalin. He made fun of his mustache. He comes across as almost like an ogre and describes an environment in which people were just living in terror of this Georgian mountaineer, is sort of how he comes across in the poem. Mandelstam recited it to a few friends, but it went, in the parlance of today, viral. It kind of got out of his small circle, and eventually he was arrested, and he was interrogated in the Lubyanka prison. He was asked point blank by the interrogator, who was frankly confused, why are you even fessing up to having written this poem? It's not actually written. It's just in your head. What would even compel you to do this? And he had a, I mean, this is according to Nedzhezda, his wife. He said, I hate fascism. It's as simple as that. And for just not being able to deny the poem and why he wrote the poem, he was eventually sent to a labor camp. He had kind of a mental breakdown. He was released at some point and then sent to another labor camp and eventually died there by the late 30s. But, you know, he was one of many examples of a person who just really could not deny something that they saw. He couldn't deny his form of expression. He felt that his job as a poet was to channel feelings, to channel an atmosphere that he was experiencing, and that that's what he did. He had to own up to it because otherwise he couldn't, you know, as we said with Arendt, he couldn't live with himself otherwise. Yes, that's Mandelstam. I mean, he's always been somebody I've thought about a lot. And he gave me like sort of a great opening into some of the other characters in the book. [Francesca] And of course, one of them that our mind goes immediately to is Alexei Navalny. And, you know, he's come up recently a number of times in my discussions with authors. And I think he's very present in our minds because he is the most recent example of someone who basically knew that he was acceding to his death by going back. How do you balance that kind of ultimate sacrifice, the risk of it? It's not even a risk. It's almost a certainty. And he knew that with his integrity. And how do you deal with that in the book? [Gal Beckerman] Oh, I really wrestled with this. You know, Navalny is a character, a person who meant a lot to me, you know, just as somebody who I followed while he was alive and was very affected by his death. And he is sort of a quintessential dissident, as I understand what a dissident is. He was in a situation in Russia where he was experiencing sort of growing authoritarianism, growing corruption around him, a kind of a way of life that was closing down around him. You know, people weren't having economic opportunities. I mean, that's also something that people sort of understand to be a normal part of what it means to be a human being, to be able to support yourself and your family. And his response was to push back. And he pushed back the humor, which is something I write about a lot in the book. He was, he had this kind of irreverence. He made these very viral videos about, you know, the ways, the different sorts of corruption that was happening among Putin and his circle. And he just did not let up, but always with good humor, and always with a sense that he was defending this notion of living a normal life, of having choices, of having freedom, of being able to pursue your interests. That's what he was defending. Now, this question that you ask, which is what I asked myself, which is after Putin tried to kill him once, and he managed to escape that really barely escape it, he returned. You know, the shocking thing for me is that, you know, for him, it was not complicated. He said, how could I, again, how can I live with myself if I'm not there, if I'm not standing next to other Russians? Yes, there's an argument, and I go, I play out this argument in the book. If he stayed abroad, he could have been a great symbol for dissidents. He could have done his work over social media. He could have been a thorn in the side of Putin and been alive. But to his mind, he would have, and I agree with his argument to some extent, is that he would have sort of reduced his moral stature, because he would have been, he would not have been taking the same risks as the people who he was in solidarity with, as his people. So he felt that it was incumbent upon him to return. And I think he knew he was going to become a martyr. And he was going to become a martyr. And that hopefully that would help his cause in the long run. But he was incredibly clear headed about it. There's points in his memoirs, which are, again, a wonderful, I also recommend them highly. You know, he does express fear. He does express doubt at moments. But he quickly bounces back. He has, this is a wonderful moment that I write about in the book where his wife, Yulia, comes to visit him in prison. And he manages to have sort of this private moment with her where he thinks they're not being watched by cameras. And he wants to convey to her, he says, look, I just need you to know that I don't think this is going to turn out well. Like, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to die one way or the other. Even if the regime begins to fall, for some miraculous reason, they'll poison me rather than let me actually be out. And she turns to him and she says, I know, I have accepted the same thing. And he's filled with this enormous sort of love for her in that moment. Because what he doesn't need to hear is, it's going to be all right. You know, it's going to be fine. You're going to get out of this. It's kind of magical thinking. He actually needs to accept the worst outcome and be okay with it in order to sort of wake up the next day and keep fighting. Which is another lesson that I sort of learned from these dissidents is a certain amount of pessimism is actually a very, can be a very positive thing. [Francesca] Yeah. In fact, that was going to be my next question. One of the most striking things that I read was your chapter on pessimism. So I'd like to explore it a little bit more. You challenge optimism as even possibly dangerous. Why is pessimism the answer instead? [Gal Beckerman] So I think first it's important to say that people often associate pessimism with fatalism. Fatalism is, everything is inevitably always and forever going to get worse, right? Or negative fatalism is that there's a positive fatalism, which is everything is ever and forever going to get better. But negative fatalism, which is often how we think of pessimism is that everything is always going to get worse. That's not what pessimism is. Pessimism is that it's probably going to get worse. It doesn't mean that it's inevitably going to get worse. It's a mindset that believes that if things continue as they are, they will probably get worse, right? So to me, that feels more productive than the opposite, which is optimism. The belief that things are probably going to get better. Because if you believe that things are probably going to get better, if you believe that, you know, the arc of justice is always going to bend in the right direction, then I can see a kind of passivity taking over a sense that what does it matter what I do, something's going to work out here. Somehow something's going to work out and everything will be okay. That's how I understand optimism to be. Pessimism opens up for me a space of action or the possibility of action, the opportunity for action. Because if you tell yourself, let's say you're a climate activist, and if you say, look, I probably can't prevent the, you know, a degree and a half warming that's going to happen, it's going to dearly affect our world. But maybe I can do something about like the suffering that's going to come as a result. And maybe I can prevent it from getting that bad. I just do accept that it probably or that it could. And it makes me feel urgent about doing something. To my mind, much more urgent than if I think people will figure it out. Smarter people than me will figure it out. Governments will eventually realize the catastrophe awaiting us. It'll be okay. So I suddenly realized that like, there's a wonderful Dutch philosopher named Mara Vanderloot, who has a wonderful phrase which she calls hopeful pessimism, which I borrowed from the book. And it's exactly this idea that pessimism doesn't prevent you from being hopeful, but it just sort of places your hopefulness within parameters. It allows you to kind of say, let me do what I can right now. [Francesca] It's like, I don't know if you've ever seen the movie 12 Chairs. [Gal Beckerman] No, I don't think I have. [Francesca] It's a wonderful movie. It's Mel Brooks. And I'm just blanking on the name of the other actor, but it takes place in Russia during the Tsar. And there's a wonderful theme song in that movie where the lyrics are, hope for the best, expect the worst. [Gal Beckerman] Yes, I think this is sounding familiar now. Yes. I mean, in a way, that's what it is. And, you know, in the book, I wonder if this resonated because of your father, too. I use the story of Eddie Hillesum, who was a Dutch Jewish woman who very much had that expect the worst, hope for the best attitude in the deepest, most spiritual way. She was in the transit camp from which people were being sent, Dutch Jews were being sent to Auschwitz almost every week, a camp called Westerbork. And she left behind this extraordinary diary, which I hadn't really known about, you know, and I have been sort of immersed in Holocaust literature for most of my life. I was surprised that I didn't know about it. And I think it's because she really is not, does not see herself as a victim or she knows she's a victim, but she doesn't accept that that sort of releases her from trying to do whatever good she can do every single day, from being present every single day. And in fact, the knowledge of impending death, the knowledge of her fate is something that's, again, opens up space for her to say, what can I do now? What can I see now? How can I be in touch with my inner world right now? I mean, it seems almost like an impossible attitude to have, but I feel very inspired by it. And it was sad to have to like sort of go to those circumstances to sort of see that pessimism in play, that hopeful pessimism in play. But, you know, like many examples in this book, that extreme, I think, presents, again, that sort of North Star for us, from which we can draw some examples when we're thinking about the climate, you know, as one example. [Francesca] Yeah. And in fact, Eddie Hillison was actually released from Westerbork and then chose to go back and chose that because she felt she could do some good there. [Gal Beckerman] Yeah. She felt she could do some good. And she felt that it's a very hard attitude to fully grasp. But she said, who am I to try to escape this fate that my people are suffering? It would this is what she compared it to. It would be like, you know, having a boat sink and everyone being on one piece of driftwood together and pushing everybody else off so that I could survive and I couldn't live with myself if I did that, you know, which is clearly not the way most people approached that situation. They did whatever they could to survive. So in some ways, there's something almost otherworldly about her attitude towards it. And, you know, she has been sort of taken up by by Catholics as a potential candidate for sainthood. But she I think it just actually helped her to live through that moment, probably in a more spiritually healthy and contented and full way than most of the other people around her who are also going to die anyways. [Francesca] And I think her example also brings up another important point you make in the book, and that is that dissidents create the world that they want, even in the midst of the horror that they're living. So explain that. [Gal Beckerman] I call this quality presumptuousness, which I guess I'm trying to challenge readers a little bit by using words like pessimism and presumptuousness, because those aren't how we normally associate those qualities as being positive ones. And presumptuousness we think of as a kind of arrogance or something. But to be presumptuous is also to assume something, to assume that there is kind of a different way. And for me, the dissident sort of lives in this state where they have a present reality that's and it can be oppressive in all kinds of different ways. But they are acting as if, and as if is kind of a key phrase here, as if they lived in a better world, as if they lived in a world that had the kinds of values and the kinds of conditions that are ideal for them and that are ideal for other human beings around them. [Francesca] One of the ways I could see this being expressed so brilliantly in our current situation is in Minneapolis. [Gal Beckerman] Oh, absolutely. [Francesca] And it's linked to something else you talk about in the book, and that is loyalty as a feature of dissidents, that totalitarian systems are kept in power by dividing people. And that by countering that, it allows an alternative society to form. So talk about Minneapolis and how it struck you when it was, I mean, I think your book had probably already been done by the time that happened. [Gal Beckerman] It has. I mean, fortunately, I got a chance to write about it for The Atlantic at my day job. But absolutely, I was struck by how completely what was happening there was an example of the things that I had been thinking about. And I was so pleasantly surprised to see this sort of very real world, very American example of this thing that I had been thinking about, because it instantiated two of the qualities that we were just talking about. The presumptuousness here is you're living in a city with neighbors and you see your neighbors being mistreated. Again, this isn't about politics. It's not about some set of strict ideology that you adhere to. You just see somebody being treated in a way that feels like it is violating something basic about how a human being should be treated. People are scared to send their kids to school. They're scared to go out and get groceries. These sort of thuggish characters are roaming your city and harassing people. And that triggers in the dissident a moment of choice. And they decide that they're going to behave not by the new conditions of reality, which is to be scared and to conform and say, OK, these are the new guys in charge, but by the ones that feel true to them, which are, I'm a neighbor, I need to help my neighbor. And so that was the impetus for people to start bringing food to one another, helping to alert people when ICE was around, doing these extremely sort of neighborly things for one another, living, again, in a kind of presumptuous way according to the values that matter to them and not the ones that were being imposed. So that's presumptuousness. Loyalty is the idea that you need to see other people. You need to actually see them. And I would even say in real life, in our mediated world that we live in, I think it's actually important to physically see them and know that they share your values, that they are just as invested in those conditions of life as you are. Hannah Arendt, again, who I draw on a lot in this book, because she's one of my, you know, not mine alone, but one of my favorite philosophers for this kind of human condition stuff. She talks about a space of appearance. And what Arendt means by saying that is that we need to appear to each other to present. And only human beings can do this. It's this quality of showing one another where we stand, what we believe, what our deepest values are. And so I believe that what happened in Minneapolis is both people wanting to express their deepest values, regardless of what was happening around them, and also seeing each other doing it, seeing other people doing it, which was so reinforcing. And it created a kind of a snowball effect that I found very heartening, you know, because it gave me a sense that, you know, this notion of conformity as being a kind of a natural human impulse that we talked about earlier, it's not a given. You know, we've had so many examples in the last year and a half, since Trump took power again, of institutions conforming, of law firms conforming, universities, even senators saying that they were scared to speak their mind. And so to have people actually risk their lives, I mean, risk their lives, to behave in ways that they felt comported with their own conscience and moral compass was an incredible thing to see. (Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) [Francesca] And when you say a space, last, was it last weekend? I went to my local No King's Day 3, I've been to all of them. And my granddaughter asked me, later on I was talking to her about it, and she said, well, does it do any good? [Gal Beckerman] Right. [Francesca] And I think what you're saying is precisely, yes, it does some good because it creates that kind of a space. It's not sufficient, but necessary. [Gal Beckerman] Yes, I'm glad you brought up No King's Day because it's, to me, it's another good example of, sometimes we read an event like that in a wrong way, understandably. I mean, we live in a world in which we want to understand the immediate metrics and the payoff and the, you know, the immediate results of whatever we do. And, you know, people count the numbers at these protests, or they immediately want to understand how they might translate into electoral victories in the midterm elections. But I really don't think that that is not just not the point of these protests, but of protests in general. It is to see other people, to feel emboldened, and to build a habit of mind. You know, when we talked earlier about most people are not born dissidents, you become a dissident by taking these sort of like brave little tiny steps. And maybe it's about experiencing a rally like that, seeing how many other people feel the way that you do. Even doing something as irreverent as, you know, holding up a sign that makes fun of a president who really doesn't like being made fun of. All of those things are important steps in developing an orientation, a certain kind of orientation to your own society and to one another. Again, it's a hard thing to quantify. But I think one of the actual geniuses to my mind of the No King's Day movement, to the extent that it's a coherent movement, is that they haven't tried to do what happened during the first Trump administration, which is to do one end all be all demonstration in Washington, D.C. They would bring out tens of millions of people. They've said, let's have these be local, highly decentralized, not just in where they're taking place, but in message. Everybody has a reason that they feel overwhelmed and stuck and almost flattened by our political reality right now. And it might be a different reason. Maybe it's the immigration issue. Maybe it's the way you feel from an LGBTQ perspective. Maybe it's that you think that our foreign policy is becoming too dangerous for us. There's so many different reasons why you feel that your own stake is being kind of compromised in our democracy. And so to say, let's not find the one thing that unites everybody, but let's create entry points that are all underneath one umbrella, I think, which is this sort of growing fear of an authoritarian form of government and a kind of a dehumanization that's taking place. And let's give people chances to sort of enter from those different areas. I think that's very smart. I think it's also very smart to have it be a continuous thing. When we talk about pessimism, it builds in a bit of pessimism because it's saying, you're not going to go to one rally and then everything's going to be fine and then it's going to be done. It's saying you have to keep going again and again and again. You're like Sisyphus a little bit. You got to keep pushing the boulder up the hill every time. So I think those are all really healthy aspects of protests in Trump 2.0. I think it's fair for your granddaughter and for anybody to wonder like, what is this for? Because we just don't think in these terms, but it's for something that's at a much deeper, more spiritual and more sort of existential level when it comes to sort of who we are as citizens. [Francesca] And it brings a kind of joy, which is so palpable and so important, which along with humor is so key. And I want to just share with my listeners by the time this airs, maybe more of them will know this, but yesterday I heard from the organizers of No Kings that they did a poll where they took a representative sampling of all different kinds of voters. And 7% of the poll said they had attended a No Kings march and 27% said they were going to go to the next one, which if really, if it translates to a population-wide, if it's a really true sample, is huge. [Gal Beckerman] Yeah. And there is some social science that backs up the idea. There's this famous 3.5% number that Erica Chenoweth came up with, which is that if you have, historically, if you have that percentage of the population coming out to demonstrate, it can have a real tangible impact. But you have to build to that and you have to build to a kind of a consensus among enough people of the importance of coming out. [Francesca] Yes. And more than just coming out, it is about developing that habit of mind that you spoke of. So, I just want to end by asking you that after finishing this book, what, if anything, has changed for you in the way you think about your own choices in your life? [Gal Beckerman] Well, first of all, just at a very basic level, I understand them as choices. I don't run away from the idea that when I'm presented with an option to do something or not to do something, or even among the options of what to do, that I can just sort of turn my face away from it. So, that I think is probably, I mean, it's not the most satisfying answer to this question, but that is at the most basic level, something that has changed about me. But then I'd also say that I really have come to understand those choices as not only burdensome, but actually the substance from which a real meaningful life is made. I want to be able to look back at my life and say, at this hard crossroads, I made this decision or that decision that allowed me to feel more present, more engaged with reality, more fully human. You know, I borrow in the book from Sartre, Jean-Paul Sartre, who understood moral choices. He called it a creative act. He thought of every choice we make as like a brushstroke in a painting that we're painting, which is a portrait of ourselves. And I really love that idea because it turns it from being like, oh God, you know, I'm opening the newspaper and here's the pictures of dead children. And now I have to do something about it to, you know, here's this horrible thing. And my sort of moral nausea is flaring up. I get to do something about it as a human being. I have the agency to do something about it. And the last thing I guess that I would say, and maybe this was the hardest thing, is also to accept that even if I've decided that I'm going to do something about it, it doesn't mean that what I individually do will tangibly change anything in the world. That I need to do what I'm doing because I can't live with myself otherwise, because it is the right thing for me, because it aligns with my set of moral, with my gut, with where my gut is. And that is, that's a hard thing to accept. It's a hard thing to accept in general. To your question about No King's Day, it's a hard thing to accept right now in our world where we do look for immediate payoffs for the things that we do. To live with the idea that you should behave in a certain way because it's the way that you want to behave and not because of how other people are behaving or because of the response that you might get is very hard. You don't have a lot of external indicators that what you're doing is the right thing. You have to believe and know that what you're doing is the right thing. And so what I hope my book does is it helps people sort of build up the muscle or gives them the sort of role models to think with, is how I like to think about it, to sort of get closer to a point where they can understand themselves and what feels right to them in a certain circumstance. [Francesca] Yes, and it's hard, but there's a great deal of relief and freedom that comes when you can do that. [Gal Beckerman] Absolutely, 100%. [Francesca] Well, Goldbeckerman, it's just been such a privilege to talk with you about this book. And again, it was a wonderful book to read. I mean, it was a page-turner. It was just so gripping and so pertinent. Thank you. [Gal Beckerman] Thank you. That means a lot to me. I appreciate it.