We can’t do much about the hardened #fluffy crowd – so committed to comfort and respectability that no amount of evidence will shift them toward meaningful action. That is a real limit, and it’s worth being honest about it rather than wasting energy trying to convert the unconvertible.

But the hardened fluffy crowd is not the main problem. The more urgent challenge is the vast non-action bloc: the enormous number of people who are not hostile to change, not ideologically committed to the status quo, but who have simply stopped believing that collective action is possible, meaningful, or worth the cost. The culture of resignation that surrounds this bloc is one of the most significant political #blocks of our times, and it is almost entirely manufactured.

So how is resignation made, it’s not because people are stupid, but more that decades of #neoliberalism have done systematic work on how people understand themselves and each other. Isolation has been normalised. Cynicism has been marketed as sophistication. #stupidindividualism – the belief that you are fundamentally alone, that your choices are personal rather than political, that the market is more real than the community – has been embedded so deeply that it feels like common sense.

People are taught to see themselves as consumers, not citizens, as individuals navigating a system, not as communities capable of changing one. That teaching is not accidental as an atomised population is a manageable population. Resignation is not a natural response to difficult circumstances, it is a political outcome, produced and maintained by specific interests.

On coalitions? Some people argue we need to “build coalitions” with everyone – that the task is to be broad, inclusive, and endlessly accommodating. That pink haired instinct comes from a good place, but a coalition is not built by enabling anti-social behaviour, learned helplessness, or endless doom-scrolling. A coalition is not a waiting room where everyone gets to stay comfortable while somebody else does the work. A coalition needs people willing to act together – the only meaningful definition. Broadness is a means, not an end. A movement that is wide but paralysed is not a movement, it is a demographic.

These are two retreats that serve the same master – the real problem is not disagreement between people who want change, as disagreement is healthy and productive. The problem is the shared belief – held across otherwise very different political tendencies – that nothing can fundamentally change, or that someone else should be the one to change it. This belief takes two main forms, and both are dead ends.

• #toxicIdealism retreats into fantasies of purity – waiting for the perfect conditions, the perfect movement, the perfect analysis before acting. It mistakes the map for the territory, the theory for the practice, the vision for the work. It can look like radicalism while functioning as paralysis.

• Mindless cynicism retreats in the opposite direction – into excuses for inaction dressed as realism. Nothing works, nothing changes, everyone is corrupt, the system always wins. It can look like hard-headedness while functioning as surrender. Both #toxicIdealism and cynicism leave existing power entirely untouched. They are, in that sense, two faces of the same capitulation.

There is nothing in toxic idealism or mindless cynicism except fuel for the status quo, one retreats into fantasies of purity, the other into excuses for inaction, both leave existing power untouched.
The actual task

The task is not to hate people who have been shaped by these cultures. Contempt for the resigned, the cynical, or the burned-out is both morally wrong and politically stupid – it deepens the isolation it claims to criticise. The people inside the non-action bloc are not enemies. They are, in most cases, people who have been failed by every institution that was supposed to give them a reason to act.

The task is to challenge the culture that keeps people powerless., to offer, concretely and practically, experiences of collective action that work – that produce real results, relationships, and evidence that things can be different. Not rhetoric about possibility, but demonstrations of it. Free people from isolation, show them they are not alone, that their situation is shared, that shared situations have shared solutions. Free people from cynicism – not by arguing against it, but by making it empirically wrong. Rebuild collective action, not as an ideal but as a practice: small, visible, cumulative, and real.

The #enclosure we are pushing back against is not only economic or digital, it is the enclosure of imagination – the slow fencing-off of the belief that collective life is possible at all. Reclaiming the commons begins with reclaiming the conviction that there are a commons to reclaim. That is political work, and it starts with the person in front of you.

#OMN #fluffy #neoliberalism #stupidindividualism #toxicIdealism #enclosure #commons #activism #collectiveaction #openweb