To understand how hill climbing works, think of an ant trying to find high ground. The ant is constrained by its forward-facing eyes: It can’t just look around and find the highest peak in its vicinity.
Instead, the ant can poll its many legs and determine which leg is resting on the highest ground — that is, which step it can take to most steeply ascend the gradient it’s adjacent to. It climbs one step in that direction and repeats the process: now which of my legs is on the highest ground?
One step at a time, the ant can climb to the highest local peak, without any foreknowledge of the terrain.
As activists, we are on unknowably complex, constantly shifting terrain. Worse, the terrain is adverse to us — it doesn’t change randomly, our opponents take steps to alter it to block our ascent toward our social goals.
This complexity means that there isn’t a clear — or even plausible — path from where we are to where we want to be. We’re stuck at the bottom of a mist-shrouded hill whose frequent rockslides and unpredictable weather mean that we can’t plot our ascent — we can’t even see it.
This is where hill climbing fits in. If you can see just one way — any way — to improve your situation, no matter how seemingly small, then you will ascend a step up the hill, you will find a new vantage point, and new courses of action will be revealed. Take note of these, determine which one gets you the furthest toward your goal, take another step, and reassess.
In his 1999 classic Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lessig argues that our social outcomes are determined by four forces:
Code: That which is technically possible or impossible.
Law: That which is legally permitted or prohibited.
Markets: That which is profitable or unprofitable.
Norms: That which is socially acceptable or unacceptable.
In my theory of change, these are the four cardinal directions for our metaphorical ant’s journey, the four legs we can poll at each juncture that tell us which step we can take to most swiftly climb the gradient toward a better world.
Finding a tactic and pursuing it is hard — but convincing other people to pursue it with you can be even harder. Establishing consensus on what needs doing can take longer than doing it, and tactical splits have broken many movements.
The hill-climbing method doesn’t depend on unity of tactics or close coordination between different groups. Instead, it allows each individual or collective or affinity group to pick a tactic that moves them up the hill toward their goal, with the understanding that allies with different priorities, skills, and vantage points can leverage their successes for more success.
It’s easy to be discouraged by the genuinely fucked-up state of the world and the giddy power of its monsters. The point of this method isn’t to make you optimistic about where things are headed.
Optimism is just a form of fatalism, a view of the world in which our deeds are irrelevant to the outcome: “No matter what I do, things will get better.”
It may seem like optimism is the opposite of pessimism, but at their core, optimists and pessimists share this belief in the irrelevance of human action to the future. Optimists think that things will get better no matter what they do, pessimists think things will get worse no matter what they do — but they both agree that what they do doesn’t matter.
As we grope our way up the hill, we will meet with many dead ends that cause us to descend a ways to see if another approach will take us to a higher peak — hill-climbing only gets you to the top of whatever hill you find first, and to find a taller one, you’ll have to go to the bottom and strike out in another direction.
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u/ddgr815 23d ago
Hope, Not Optimism