My upcoming book was inspired by the question we’ve all been asking ourselves lately: What am I supposed to do right now?
I came up with ten lessons inspired by history & philosophy. Short and direct. Built for people who are overwhelmed but still trying.
How to Be a Dissident is out 4/21. In the meantime, I’m sharing insights, behind-the-scenes, and resources here. #nonfiction #nonfictionauthor #activism
I’ve spent the past year on a search. How do we push back against the forces that are crushing us right now? How do we resist the dehumanization of our politics, our technology? The answers came from people who pushed back before us: the dissidents.
I’ve got a new book coming out soon, and it’s a personal one for me. I have felt confronted by an endless stream of moral choices lately. How to respond to ICE? To Gaza? To AI? Dissidence is often framed as a decision in a particular moment, but it's actually a mindset, a way of being. "How to Be a Dissident" is a book about that mindset. I explore 10 aspects of the dissident that emerged from reading memoirs and talking to people in much more dire situations than our own. It helped me start to orient myself differently.
The book explores a history that stretches from the agoras of Ancient Greece to Tehran today (or Minneapolis; read the link in my bio for a recent @theAtlantic piece on why we should see the events there as dissidence). I looked at philosophy and art and stories from the past that all helped me get closer to an understanding of what makes a dissident. There are often extreme examples of behavior and thinking, and I don't believe we can all be dissidents, but these people offer us something essential—they do for me, anyway—when it comes to figuring out how to live a moral life, especially when it feels hard.
The book will be published 4/21 and my hope is that it sparks a conversation, that it helps readers think differently about the current moment, that it makes them feel more mentally equipped for it. Stay tuned for more! And pre-order! The link for doing so is in my profile.
After researching dozens of dissidents throughout history, I found 10 qualities that actually define them.
Here are three that surprised me most: be pessimistic, be funny, be presumptuous.
None of them mean what you’d expect.
These are three of the ten qualities I explore in How to Be a Dissident. Link in bio if you want the rest.
How did Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán lose his re-election?
Author of “How to be a Dissident” @galbeckerman examines Hungary’s recent election this Sunday at 9:30 PM ET on @cspan 2.
#books #politics #election #hungary
This is one of my favorite, underrated dissident stories from history.
It’s about Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a celebrated writer in Kenya. Kenya had won its independence, colonialism was officially over, and Ngugi was a celebrated writer — but he was still writing in English, the language of the colonizer. That contradiction ate at him.
What gets me about his story isn’t just the courage involved. It’s that his dissidence gave something back to him. He described it as finding harmony between who he felt he was and who he was allowed to be. He became more himself through the act of resistance, not less.
@galbeckerman joins Gaslit Nation to discuss How to Be a Dissident, a warning against obedience in an age of rising autocracy. Trump, ICE, China’s surveillance state, and Iran’s regime all reveal why conscience must matter more than comfort. Listen: https://loom.ly/cxVzJ2k
#oligarchy #dictatorship #dictatortrump
The festooning of Donald Trump’s name and likeness across Washington, D.C., is consistent with authoritarian tendencies, Gal Beckerman argues: These are leaders who “like to have their face in your face.”
For a link to the story, and to view a collection of images taken across the nation’s capital, comment “Read article.”
📸: @vanhoutenphoto
Giveaway now closed!
To celebrate the launch of How to Be a Dissident, I’m giving away three signed copies!
To enter: Drop a comment and tell me - who inspires you to think differently? Could be a writer, a teacher, a grandparent.
1 comment = 1 entry. Deadline is Friday, 5/8 at 11:59 PM. U.S. addresses only.
And if you can’t wait, grab your copy now. Link in bio.
Writing my latest book taught me something I didn’t expect: that I actually have moral choice.
That sounds obvious, but most of us don’t live that way. We conform, or we tell ourselves we’re powerless, or we find reasons not to decide.
From my talk with Adam Harris @adamhsays at Politics & Prose.
THIS WEEK: Gal Beckerman joins us to discuss the radical idea that dissidence belongs to all of us. Living with truth is the starting point to being a citizen changemaker and to taking impactful civic action.
Tune in TOMORROW wherever you get your podcasts 🎧
A full-circle moment: The New York Times just featured How to Be a Dissident as an Editors’ Pick.
What means the most is that Astra Taylor understood what I was really trying to do: “Though it’s written as a guide, the book can also be understood as one man’s reckoning with the existential questions posed by the rising tide of authoritarianism.”
That’s exactly it. It’s about me trying to make sense of this moment, not give prescriptive answers.
I’ve been circling the same question through three books now: How do ordinary people resist?
First, I told the story of Soviet Jewish refuseniks who fought for 30 years to leave. Then I zoomed out to understand how movements actually form, the quiet conditions that let radical ideas take root.
But this new book drills down to the individual. Not the group, not the movement. The single person who decides the risk of staying silent is worse than the risk of speaking up.
It’s the distillation of everything I’ve been trying to understand: What does it actually take, internally, to move against the current of your society.
That’s what a dissident does. And I think we all need those qualities now.
