book review: the entangled activist

how activism often replicates the dynamics it seeks to deconstruct

I recently came across a book with a fascinating thesis on activism: The Entangled Activist. In it, the author Anthea Lawson argues that activism often mirrors and replicates power dynamics and structures of the systems it seeks to critique and transform. This “entanglement” undermines the effectiveness of the activism program, and a more effective form of activism involves not just revising practical strategies to create change, but also changing the ethic and intention behind engagement.

I was instantly intrigued because it mirrored feelings I’d been having over the last few years, but wasn’t able to properly articulate. I’ve stopped obsessing so much over having the “right” views or trying to convince others of the “right” platform; I’ve become more curious about the way in which people engage with politics and the emotions they bring and express. I’ve largely felt that much of activism has devolved into self-indulgent performances and people searching for gotchas against others. It’s been strange trying to find a home in this highly emotional and touchy political moment as someone who has no desire to play those games but who also deeply cares about trying to make the world better in whatever way I can.

But what do I know? I’m young and have never been in the game, so I’m speaking on these issues as a relative outsider. Lawson, on the other hand, has decades of experience as an activist and investigative journalist. Despite initially finding much satisfaction from “get[ting] the bastards” and putting other people in her place, she eventually concluded that righteousness, saviorism, and burnout are amongst many problems that activist circles perpetuate internally that undermine the goals of activism. Unlike me, the weight and depth of her experience make her an extremely credible candidate to speak on these issues.

Here are some of the things that stuck with me:

eastern spirituality

Lawson never uses the term, but her view of entanglement echoes a deep Eastern spiritual tradition that sees the boundary between ‘self’ and ‘world’ as not just porous but illusory.

Here’s how Lawson contextualizes this to activism:

That activists are part of what we are trying to change, and that the problems frequently appear in us, too, appears on the one hand to be terribly obvious. Yet at the same time it can be hard to grasp. It certainly took me a long time to grasp. It doesn’t help that some of the ways in which we are entangled – by being subject to the dominant culture’s way of seeing things, for example – help to obscure the depth to which we are entangled. ‘You’re off changing the world, then,’ people would remark to me when I talked about my work. Or sometimes, for those with an even more inflated idea of what activists might be up to, ‘you’re off saving the world’. It is often just a turn of phrase, but it is revealing. The grammatical structure of that sentence uncovers the heart of the problem. The activist is the subject, and the world is the object. In my experience, activists do not claim to be ‘saving’ the world or ‘changing’ the world as often as other people describe us as trying to do so. Nonetheless, activists usually share this implicit view that the ‘world’ is separate to ‘us’, and that what needs changing is something or someone ‘over there’: something that is ‘not us’.

It’s interesting seeing a bottoms-up exploration of these ideas in practice. I’ve spent a lot of time coming to grips with the foundational, high-level ideas present in Eastern spiritual text, but haven’t seen an in-depth exploration of those ideas applied at this scale. I loved it and took away a lot from it.

depth psychology

At many points, Lawson referenced the ideas of the shadow and projection to help explain why certain dynamics emerged within activist circles. Here’s a quick ChatGPT explanation for those that are unfamiliar:

The shadow is the unconscious part of the self that holds repressed traits, desires, and fears—what we disown in ourselves but project onto others—and until integrated, it silently shapes our behavior, relationships, and worldview.

Here’s one instance where Lawson uses the idea:

Yet progressive activists also want to identify with being ‘good’. Our goals are equality, justice and peace, and so, focused on these worthy values, we have an added incentive to push the ‘shadow’ in ourselves out of sight. We have an incentive to disavow the parts of ourselves that are the opposite: dominant, unjust and violent. We may be defended against acknowledging that the potential for violence, verbal as well as physical, is in all of us, and is much more dangerous if we don’t acknowledge it. So we are in a position to see that inner work is necessary for a more peaceful world, yet, identified with the ‘good’, we may be more invested in not seeing the full implications: that we need to do this work too. We might even want to turn away from it.

Wonderful explanation for how those invested in being good and helping others may experience more resistance at the idea of doing transformative inner work.

Lawson argues that there isn’t a binary choice between doing inner work and taking external action:

If we are so entangled that the problems run through us too, then we know where to start: with ourselves. And in saying this, I am not proposing that activists only retreat to the meditation cushion. Many activists sense that personal transformation alone is insufficient when the problems are structural, yet we also sense that carrying on as we have been, replicating the habits of the dominant culture until we repeatedly burn out, is not going to work either.

We can do both reflection and action, as long as we acknowledge that the reflection may profoundly alter what we think the task of the action is. Appreciating the depth of our own entanglement is a useful guide to what needs doing. Yes, it is unchangeable that we humans have some psychological habits, like projection and scapegoating, which, mishandled in the collective, have negative social consequences. But the reverse is also true: many of the psychological and spiritual difficulties that we experience as individuals arise from the ill effects of an unhealthy culture upon us. If activists are able to notice what is unhealthy about our own ways of being, we have a compass that points to what needs to shift in the wider culture.

anti-capitalism

One of the more jarring aspects of reading this book was how Lawson alternated from a conscious and grounded critique of duality in an activist sense, but then ruthlessly criticized capitalism from a dualistic lens on the other. It was a foundational premise in this book that any spiritual, ethical, or evolved activism would naturally be anti-capitalist and anti-materialistic.

But being this reflexively anti-capitalist just mirrors the same dualistic thinking it aims to critique. Lawson replaces one side of the binary (capitalism = good) with the other side (capitalism = bad) without dissolving the binary itself. It positions capitalism as inherently extractive without exploring the idea that capitalism’s current manifestation may reflect a particular purpose anchored in accumulation and separation rather than an unchangeable essense.

This pattern of thinking is a direct replication of all the activist tendencies that Lawson criticizes (scapegoating, righteousness, saviorism, etc.) She defines identity in opposition, by implicitly framing anti-capitalism as good, reinforcing a power dynamic of domination through negation. She manufactures external enemies in the system, billionaires, corporations, etc. without confronting internal complicity and unconscious drives. It’s probably a separate subject altogether to explore how duality manifests in capitalism (and anti-capitalism), but regardless, I found Lawson’s frequent anti-capitalist asides to be unnecessary to her core argument and in many ways disruptive to her thesis by mirroring everything she’s criticising.

On the anti-capitalist note, I think it is completely possible to imagine a different form of capitalism organized not around money as an end, but on interdependence and value co-creation. This wouldn’t oppose materialism but would treat it with reverence and awareness (which is the same orientation that Lawson advocates elsewhere with activism!) I simply don’t think it’s necessary to be anti-capitalist to be spiritual or relationally awake.

guiding principles for moving forward

I really liked Lawson’s 4-step program for building awareness moving forward:

1. Knowing ourselves

I am suggesting, however, that activist organisations and movements could explicitly develop cultures of reflection in which – alongside the planning for action – we can talk openly about the ways in which we can be part of the problem ourselves. About our anger and our desire for control and status and saviourhood and being right and everything else that we are seeking. Activist organisations and movements could explicitly develop cultures that normalise checking in and support in terms of what we are bringing of ourselves to the tasks in the outside world, that develop our capacities to relate to each other across difference, without trying to assimilate everyone to our own point of view. They could develop cultures that encourage activists to relinquish as well as reclaim. Relinquish, for some, the need to know best, or to be right; while others relinquish their silence. Reclaim, for some, the humility that would allow them to risk sharing their vulnerability, so that the silence around it becomes neither armour nor complicity; while others reclaim their power.

2. Thinking is not enough

We can convince ourselves of anything if we cut ourselves off from the information and empathy that comes from our body through our feelings, and that comes through our intuition when we practise stillness. Of course reason is necessary. This is not a baby-and-bathwater move of chucking out 300 years of Enlightenment influence. But in entanglement terms, activism that claims to operate only on reason is caught in the liberal imaginary. We need this ‘something’ that we sense is missing. This was one of Martin Luther King Jr’s insights when he was forming his outlook and methods. It was obvious to him that reason on its own could lead to atrocities, and his response was that reason needed to be tempered with faith.

3. Activism as a practice

If you ask me what sustains you, without feeling frustrated or disappointed or despondent, I would say that for me, activism is not about achieving results, activism is about being engaged in the process, because process itself has its own value. There is no utopia out there which we can establish. It’s always a process of living. Every day, we have to shower – there’s no utopia that you can have one shower and the rest of your life you are clean. Every day you get hungry, and there is no utopia that one day you eat, and for the rest of your life you are not hungry. It’s a process. Activism is every day doing something that is worth doing.

It is capitalism – quick fix, everything as quick as possible – that taught me to believe that it was actually possible to solve the world’s problems by the time I was 33.

We must let go of one vision of progress, then, while holding on to the one we are fighting for. The one we must let go of has ourselves at its heart, as causal agents, participating in a grand narrative of progress by helping to bring some of it about. When we are attached to the idea that we will create progress, we make ourselves more prone to burnout at the many times when we are not experiencing forward movement on the things we are working on.

4. Not starting with ourselves

if we have the privilege of choosing where to intervene with our activism, we can approach, as the facilitator Kat Wall suggests, with the question ‘what service can I give’ and not ‘what’s my thing going to be?’ Surrender, then, is a good description of how activists can be truly alongside those we are trying to help as well as those we are trying to change. And we cannot be truly alongside others, or approach activism as a practice rather than something we personally have to win for it to be worthwhile, unless we get over ourselves.

We have to be able to acknowledge ourselves and our needs and position in order to then put ourselves to one side and offer service. Otherwise, we risk being the narcissist who needily covers their own vulnerability by acting in a way that claims to be helping, but whose purpose is to attract attention that deflects from what we want to hide.

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further highlights

Here are some additional parts of the book that stood out to me:

On entanglement:

We are entangled activists when we are talking about human rights and yet are treating other people – colleagues, collaborators or opponents – horribly. We are entangled activists when we are burning out in exhaustion from working so endlessly to stop an endless-growth economy from burning out the planet we live on. We are entangled activists when we are shouting loudly to ‘save’ others from harm while, in doing so, placating our own unacknowledged emotional needs for recognition and security. We are entangled activists when we are getting a kick out of attacking and criticising the people on the ‘other side’ who we think have got it so wrong. And we are entangled activists when our need to be so right and to sound so certain about the problem we’re talking about – and it does feel good to sound certain and right in such a confusing world – prevents us being honest about the complexity of our own position.

What are we entangled in? We are entangled in the stories that our culture tells about heroes and saviours, and hard work, and the value of doing over being. We are entangled in the oppressive effects of systems of power upon us, whether we have suffered from them or benefited from them or both, and whether or not we can perceive that there are other more generative forms of power that are based in partnership rather than dominance. We are entangled in the habits and ways of being that are normalised in a culture where truly feeling – our own pain, and that of human and non-human others – is numbed and discouraged.

All of these entanglements affect how we try to achieve change. We may be projecting unwanted aspects of ourselves onto the people we are busy disagreeing with, and they may be doing the same onto us in return. We may think it is the ‘systems’, external to us, that need changing, when the problems we are tackling run through us too. And many of the methods we think could work emerge from the same mindsets that caused the problems. But often we don’t realise it.

On wise activism:

If we can look more honestly at what goes on behind our desire to change the world, we are more likely to be able to reach a wiser form of activism that goes beyond our own projections and emotional needs, and that avoids the self-defeating consequences that occur when our righteousness and need to be right overwhelm the subject of the conversation.

On our “will to control”:

it is harder to see how the racist and hierarchical thinking may be manifesting in our own interactions with the people we think we are trying to help – or, indeed, that the entire frame of ‘helping’ is suffused with unhelpful notions. We have developed the sharp eye to observe abuses of power wherever we look, yet do not want to see the internal forces that drive our own will to control.

On perceptions > material systems:

When we understand the extent to which we are entangled, the real task of activism comes into view: to change not just the rules of the system, but the perceptions and thinking behind the system. Unless we can ‘see’ this perception and thinking, and get a handle on it, we remain in its thrall, seeing ‘through’ it, as a lens colouring our vision. As long as we continue to insist that ‘the system’ – whatever is ‘out there’ – is what needs changing, we turn away from seeing the perceptions that we still share with the people who run it: that we are above nature, that rational analysis is the only tool we need, that control is the answer, that anything we do can have simple cause and effect.

On mirroring:

It means that the problem we are trying to tackle can be manifested by us, the activists, as much as it stems from anyone else. And this in turn means that some of the task of change is located within us. If we as activists are doing the things that need to shift, if we are stuck in the perceptions that are at the root of the problem, then the route towards change must include our willingness to do something differently ourselves, as well as seeking to influence others. This is unlikely to happen when we are in action-panic mode, focusing all the attention outwards on the thing or person to be changed, or the people who need saving or helping.

On doing activism badly:

And social media’s outrage-amplifying and division-widening function is increasingly recognised to be a huge political problem, and evident beyond any questions about how activism is done. But its outrage and polarisation functions are a problem for activism, too. If the social platforms make it easy to look like we’re doing activism by saying certain things, they also make it easy to make ourselves feel better by criticising those who don’t get it (‘it’ being whichever issue is in question) as much as we do. They make it easier to do activism, but they also make it easier to do activism badly.

On inner reflection:

To be resistant to looking at our inner lives because we must urgently focus on the workings of power is to reinforce once again the dominant culture’s insistence on separating them. We can explore ways to consider our inner lives together with thinking about power. This book proceeds on the basis of recognising that the abuse of power we fight against has also impacted our inner lives, and that transformations in our inner lives therefore hold the potential to transform the workings of power. It is a means of resisting oppressive power, not a subjugation to power, to look at how it runs within us, how it makes us its agent.

On burnout and false urgency:

But whatever the urgency of the situation, the heightened place of nervous system arousal that comes with urgency and panic is not an effective place to begin. It doesn’t encourage clear thinking. It is not sustainable, leading to quick burnout. It creates a stridency that makes us hard to listen to and closes doors for dialogue. And it perpetuates the collective trauma that may already be running through us, conditioning us towards reactivity rather than response. If activism in calmer times already risked recreating aspects of the existing system, then urgent activism at a time of more pervasive fear, anger and awareness of breakdown, risks spreading the fearful states that are linked with attraction to authoritarianism.

On labeling:

activists are not as separate from everyone else as we like to think. We are entangled with the people we are trying to change or influence, to the point where the interactions that take place may be helping to cement each ‘side’ in our identity of ‘activist’ and ‘not-activist’, which ends up making us less effective, less likely to be heard.

On managing paradoxes:

Simms’s sense of this is that, as he described it, ‘the right is more comfortable with paradox, better at just accepting it, and that liberates them, allowing them more easily to exploit the flow of a human condition which resists moral simplicity, whereas the left is more inclined to tie itself in knots because it is not comfortable with paradox and accepting human complexity.’ These are big questions, and they were speaking, I realised, to my instinct that as progressive campaigners we should be looking below the surface, at our shadows (our ‘beast’) as well as at our high-flown ideals (our ‘angel’).

On political anger:

Political anger, specifically in those who have not experienced the problem personally, is interesting. So is an urgent desperation to get the problem fixed, an urgency that runs close to the need to be in control.

On values not implying status:

We are not necessarily better than anyone else just because we have different values, and it is useful to hold this awareness even when we think those values are worth fighting for. Nor is feeling disgust a confirmation that we have successfully differentiated between right and wrong. It is possible, with awareness and practice, to hold the view that someone is wrong and that the alternative to their view is worth fighting for, without being overwhelmed by disgust.

On the activist/non-activist binary:

I have come to think that something like this, each side holding some characteristics of the other, is what is happening in the creation of activists and not-activists. Each side of the activist/not-activist polarity becomes a ‘monstrous’ version of what it was. Each needs the other in order to exist: there’s a mutual fascination. So the activist is shouty, passionate, righteous, busy and frequently burns out. The not-activist is passive; they don’t need to do anything because the activist is so busy doing it. The activist needs the not-activist to blame and shout at, to feel superior against, to define herself against as an activist. The not-activist needs the activist to do the work of speaking up on issues they care about, though they may criticise the way in which the activist does it. Action and inaction have become polarised, and located in different people. We each need the other to receive our own projections. So both the activist and not-activist are entangled with the other, different as they both think they are. There is no activism that is not entangled with the people it is trying to convince or change. And there is no reaction to activism that has not got something of the activist in it.

On paradoxical progressivism:

One of the apparent paradoxes of ‘progressive’ activism is how it can appear to preach tolerance of all diversity, except those who do not agree with its view.

On perceptual activist supremacy:

For activists from rich countries, there can be guilt and horror at how an economic system that has benefited them has hurt people elsewhere. These feelings send many people into ‘international development’ work, or into campaigning to reduce global inequalities – as they did me. Yet the same mental structure that created those economic systems is still at work. The idea that the activist is the one with agency, the one who knows the answers, the one who speaks publicly, who is acting on behalf of others, persists. ‘If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together’, goes a line attributed to the Aboriginal activist and scholar Lilla Watson.

On international development:

The very frame of international ‘development’ has long been criticised for labelling some countries ‘developed’ when they have in fact dispossessed, annihilated and impoverished entire populations. In this sense, to focus on the alleged pathologies of other countries is a turning away from your own culture’s problems (as well as, perhaps, your own problems: some of my encounters in Sierra Leone suggested there is some truth in the ‘missionaries, mercenaries, misfits’ cliché of the humanitarian worker). This structure resonates with the pattern of narcissism. Those who are ‘saving’ for their own purposes are performing the narcissist’s double move of taking the gaze off what is uncomfortable about themselves while at the same time elevating themselves. Contrary to popular opinion, narcissism is not about someone wanting attention because they think they are so damn fantastic. It is about the paradox of someone not being able to love themselves and thus needing attention to compensate for the lack of a healthy and stable inner sense of themselves. A narcissist is someone who seeks to hide their vulnerability from others by distracting them with grandiose outward shows that serve to obtain validating praise. This is tiring for those who must live with it at the best of times, but the form of narcissism that is so utterly rattling to those who receive it comes in the form of ‘I was only trying to help you’.

On conflating ideology with identity:

it is possible to retain the depth and strength of commitment to an alternative vision that we need in order to fight for that vision, while not identifying ourselves so completely with it. I started to see it in long conversations with activists who are intuiting and experiencing that it is possible to be very committed to the work without being quite so attached to the importance of your own place in it.

On governmentality:

What activists can learn from the idea of governmentality, then, is that unless we are very careful, the structures of a neoliberal system can end up producing the activists best suited to maintaining the status quo. This is the silent and invisible working of power. Foucault called it ‘governmentality’, and Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who was imprisoned by Mussolini, called it ‘hegemony’. Written from prison, his theory of hegemony describes how power is wielded not just by the force of the state, but invisibly by stories wielded in the culture by the dominant class.

On power structures in NGOs:

As we saw in the discussion of status needs in Chapter 5, activists internalise the unspoken rules about what is acceptable, and police them when colleagues propose something too radical: ‘we’re not dealing with that at the moment.’ (This reminds me, having spent time in a Murdoch-owned newsroom at the beginning of my career, of observing how people who went into journalism to tell the truth may self-censor what they even try to write about when they end up working for a newspaper whose proprietor has known views.) Meanwhile, companies that are the target of activism like to improve their reputations by being able to point to ‘NGO engagement’, while simultaneously tying those NGOs up in endless consultation processes to prevent them causing actual damage to business-as-usual. It is well documented that in such circumstances, NGOs can end up supporting free-market capitalism and the interests of the wealthy. INCITE!, a grassroots activist collective in the US, describes such phenomena as the ‘non-profit industrial complex’.

On intersubjectivity:

I have come to see that intersubjectivity or ‘betweenness’, a sense that we exist only in our relation to each other, is what is so often missing in ‘helping-others’ activism. Being the subject and the doer, the one with agency, who knows something about the objectified other and can do things to them: this can be a description of how power is invisibly exerted; how some countries exploit others; how the classes in power exploit those who are not; how men seek to control women. Exchange the ‘domination’ frame for a ‘saving’ or even just a ‘helping’ frame, however, and it can also be a description of the dynamics involved in activism. I am not suggesting we abandon wholesale the tools of modernity. The point is not to turn away from human rights, least of all at a time when authoritarian politics are seeking to roll them back. It is not to turn away from the possibility of rational thought, least of all at a time when demagogues are appealing to fear and anxiety. Nor are other ways of knowing always necessarily egalitarian or otherwise laudable simply because they are not European in origin. And there are other processes at play in the world than coloniality.216 But while acknowledging modernity’s achievements, we can also begin to transcend its limitations, by learning the lessons of decoloniality. For some activists it will be about reclaiming knowledge and agency. For others, it will be about taking ourselves out of the centre, recognising other ways of being, doing and thinking, relinquishing the certainty that we alone know, and re-engaging with a new disposition towards our task.

On decolonizing minds:

In short, if psychoanalytic theory sees the split on the inside, then decolonial thought sees the split on the outside. Psychoanalysis sees the split within each of us, as individuals. Decoloniality, while seeing that the individual has to decolonise their mind and heart, also sees the split within a larger ‘us’ – as communities, as nations, as a global society of humans. These dynamics are not mirroring each other by coincidence. They help to create each other. Coloniality, the idea that some people are ‘object’, to be extracted from, was and is put into practice by people who have disavowed the violence and inhumanity in themselves and projected it onto the people who are colonised and extracted-from. In this light, activists who cannot see these splits, both in themselves and in the shared imaginary, are trying to heal the world without understanding the hurt at the heart of it. What might activists need to do to heal these splits, in ourselves and in the shared culture? And what obstacles are in our way?

On giving others epistemic agency:

But what those doing this reclamation of agency can encounter in activism is people trying to help who think they are the only ones who are the subject with agency, people who are engaged in that particularly activist form of epistemic violence: assuming they know better. I have experienced this in the form of male activists ‘mansplaining’ things to me, and I have done it myself, as I described in Chapter 5, when approaching NGOs in Nigeria and Uganda as potential partners while holding my own or my organisation’s fixed ideas about what sort of policy changes or interventions are going to help, even when we were asking what we thought were open questions. For activists, and indeed anyone, who has been assuming they are the subject and everyone else is object, the very idea that we are all subjects, all entangled to the point of being co-created with everyone else, can feel both cognitively and emotionally challenging.

On trauma as a model:

Sophy Banks, like the cultural somatics practitioners, sees patterns in the shared culture as a mirror and a result of the widespread trauma that has been and continues to be experienced by so many individuals. In the cultural landscape of the collective, she suggests, we can see reflected the patterns that occur in the landscapes of the nervous system, physical body, emotions and mind. Her observation is that, over time, defensive behaviours and states that we use to cope with traumatic events have become self-replicating cultural patterns. And once they have become cultural patterns, individuals have to mirror the collective patterns in order to fit in, and so the patterns are perpetuated. They become an invisible deep frame that guides what we think is normal, that guides how we respond to each other, as parents, workers, lovers and friends. If enough people behave in traumatised ways, it starts to become normalised: invisible. And if people in positions of power behave in traumatised ways, it is legitimised.

On status comtests in activism:

It is less apparent, however, that other unremarked behaviours we consider to be common sense – the competitive and aggressive ways in which we may behave among ourselves, or the way that it feels wrong not to be in rapid-fire-reaction mode – have been constructed by the same forces that shape the systems we want to change. It makes me wonder about the adrenaline highs that can be experienced in ‘cancel culture’, Twitter pile-ons and the shouting down of those who are trying to make their point, and about the competitiveness among activists for purest status, whatever the metric. Being stuck in these frames also requires certainty. Psychotherapists I spoke to noted that trauma can bring a flattening of perception that makes it hard to perceive nuance. Our survival needs, when we are stuck in trauma patterns, require us to make quick decisions about what is safe and what needs fighting. This pattern brings a false certainty and a rightness, a sense derived from our heightened perception of safety versus danger, that things must inevitably fall into binary oppositions of right and wrong, us and them.

More on entanglement:

If we can acknowledge that we are part of the unhealthy system we are trying to fix, we can acknowledge that we have been hurt by it, too. And there is a gift, of sorts, in that. The sensitivity that comes with our awareness of how we have been wounded by the system allows us to understand the extent of the problem. We’re not always going to solve the personal problem before we can work on the external problem, but it helps to reduce our striving and forcefulness to at least acknowledge both the connections and the differences.

On projection:

We are not speaking the whole story when we project all wrongdoing onto the other side and do not acknowledge our own complicity in the systems we want to change. We are not being entirely true when the intensity driving our speech is rooted in what we are hiding from in ourselves: our need to be right, to be in charge, to be the saviour, to be heard.