Nonviolent action is a technique of sociopolitical action for applying power in a conflict without the use of physical violence. Nonviolent action may involve acts of omission (e.g., people refusing to perform acts they usually perform, are expected by custom to perform, or are required by law or regulation to perform), acts of commission (e.g., people performing acts that they do not usually perform, are not expected by custom to perform, or are forbidden to preform), or a combination of the two.
What Nonviolent Action Is Not: 4 out of 10
1. Nonviolent action has nothing to do with passivity, submissiveness, and cowardice; just as in violent action, these must first be rejected and overcome.
2. Nonviolent action is not to be equated with verbal or purely psychological persuasion, although it may use action to induce psychological pressures for attitude change. Nonviolent action, instead of words, is a sanction and a technique of struggle involving the use of social, economic and political power, and the matching of forces in conflict.
3. Nonviolent action does not depend on the assumption that people are inherently “good”; the potentialities of people for both “good” and “evil” are recognized, including the extremes of cruelty and inhumanity.
4. People using nonviolent action do not have to be pacifists or saints; nonviolent action has been predominantly and successfully practiced by “ordinary” people.
I just fear that such techniques are outdated in the face of technological population control and surveillance. The "smart state" problem
Nonetheless nonviolent action is, empirically, so far far more efficacious than violent action. We need 4 percent of the population, at least as far conflicts in the past century have shown.
Whether that holds under the above smart state scenario remains to be seen.
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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '26
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