Ohm's Law and the Power of Resistance
Tough times are ahead. Social change depends on our capacity to manage power. To do so, it’s time to pay attention to the power of resistance.
Classical Power
Oh my. The results of the US election are too much to think about right now, whether in relation to climate action, human dignity, equity, women’s rights, education, and everything else I care about. Not surprisingly, I can’t focus on work. I feel powerless.
Watching politics, power, and interests play out in real time has been exhausting. To understand how I can regain my own power and at the same time restrain the power of reckless and irresponsible people in positions of authority, I’m turning my metaphorical mind not to quantum physics, but to classical physics. Specifically, Ohm’s Law.
Ohm’s Law
Let’s go back to high school physics. Recall that Ohm’s Law describes the relationship between voltage, current and resistance. As an electric charge moves continuously across a wire or any other conductor path (a circuit), it creates a current, or a “flow” of electric charge. Voltage provides the energy per unit charge needed to drive current — it is the measure of potential energy between any two points. The flow of the electric charge is slowed by resistance, which is the degree of friction or opposition to motion between the two points. The voltage (V) across a conductor is the product of the current (I) flowing through it and its resistance (R). To put it simply, Ohm’s Law is V = I × R.
What am I getting at here, and what does this have to do with quantum social change? The power in a circuit, i.e., the rate of energy transfer, is related to voltage and current. Resistance, measured in ohms, influences power. High resistance reduces the flow of energy and diminishes power, while low resistance does the opposite. In short, power is related to energy flows and resistance, physically and metaphorically.
Right now I feel so much friction and resistance to “what is” that my potential energy is low. Very low. After viewing the election results, I’m struggling to mobilize energy and enthusiasm for anything.
If I want to feel more power or potential energy (a higher voltage), I need to maximize the intensity of my energy flow and minimize my resistance. To maximize energy intensity, my crisis ‘go to’ is chocolate - dark vegan chocolate.
Another option is to decrease resistance and “go with the flow.” Meditation and deep relaxation help with this. Going with the flow does not mean passively accepting a government that does not care about climate change, the well-being of all people and the protection of nature; it means admitting that the next four years will be difficult and accepting that we will need to work consistently and strategically to generate the results we need for an equitable and sustainable world.
Resistance
There are times when we have to create as much friction as possible to diminish the use of power for oppressive or destructive purposes. Going back to Ohm’s Law, resistance slows the current for any given voltage. Resistance is essential when others have power that they are willing and able to abuse.
How do we resist? Lucky for me, my husband, Kristian Stokke, happens to be an expert on democracy, autocracy, and resistance. His perspective was extremely helpful this morning, as the outcome of the US election sank in.
Grieving, I remembered his recent article on Revolutionary resistance against full autocratization. The paper, which focuses on actors and strategies of resistance against the 2021 military coup in Myanmar, offers important lessons for getting through the next few years. Re-reading it on November 6, 2024 helped me recover some energy.
The military coup in Myanmar differs from a democratic election in the United States, and it’s important to keep in mind that between full autocracies and substantive democracies, there’s a broad spectrum of government regimes. Still, considering the recent global wave of autocratization, Kristian points out that we all need to be aware of the autocrat’s toolbox for regime survival, which includes repression of opposition forces and human rights, along with the instrumental use of nationalism, religion, security, and other discursive resources to legitimize dictatorship, and the co-optation of individuals and groups through various forms of transactional concessions.
In the case of full autocratization, countering these strategies involves a combination of economic resistance, symbolic resistance, and political resistance. Economic resistance refers to contesting the regime’s control of economic resources. Symbolic resistance contests the regime’s claims to legitimacy, often through public protests or cultural interventions. Political resistance includes challenging the regime’s claim to state authority. In Myanmar, where the military junta has used brutal military force against civilians, armed resistance by People’s Defense Forces (PDFs) and Ethnic Resistance Organizations (EROs) has been part of the strategy.
What lessons can we learn from the case of Myanmar? For one, it highlights “the importance of a durable resistance movement that uses diverse and mutually reinforcing strategies.” Kristian also emphasizes that geographic patterns of resistance have contributed to the movement’s durability and effectiveness. This draws attention to the roles of diverse actors and strategies within different political spaces, emphasizing that everyone has a role to play in resistance.
Civil Society
We can learn a lot from extreme cases, but in most cases autocratization is a slow, gradual processes that stems from mounting discontent in society. Here I am going to quote extensively from a forthcoming paper that Kristian wrote with Selma Yssen on “Resisting autocratization? Civil society’s response to the autocratic turn in Tunisia.” (I have highlighted text that makes me think of the current political situation in the United States). In reviewing the literature on gradual autocratization, Selma and Kristian emphasize that it stems from
mounting discontent in society … used instrumentally by anti-pluralist parties and leaders to win elections and gain political power. Polarizing populist rhetoric — claims to speak, represent, and act for ‘the people’ — is hence a key feature of contemporary autocratization (Brubaker 2017). By fuelling discontent and claiming to protect the interests of disadvantaged people and places, anti-pluralists can mobilize support, win elections, and establish themselves in a position to dismantle democratic institutions (Svolik 2019; Lührmann 2021). Bermeo (2016) thus observes that contemporary autocratization typically takes the form of executive aggrandizement — a series of institutional changes that weaken the checks on executive power — and strategic manipulation of elections rather than blatant electoral fraud or military interventions. Once in power, autocratic leaders and regimes also use repression, co-option, and legitimation strategically to contain opposition and justify their rule (Dukalsskis and Gerschewski 2017).
Does this sound familiar? In analyzing the case of Tunisia, they found that civil society’s response has been soft, slow, and fragmented, following a ‘wait and see’ approach. The lack of a broad-based movement is explained by pre-existing cleavages and organizational fragmentation. Hmm. This sounds like an effective strategy to quell social activism.
Moving forward
Where do I/we go from here? Selma and Kristian describe resistance as a relational and open-ended process. You can probably guess that this has me thinking of fractals, uncertainty, potentiality, and a ‘you matter’ approach to quantum social change.
Going back to Ohm’s Law, I/we need to embrace the paradox of resistance, decreasing internal resistance in order to increase our energy and power, while at the same time increasing external resistance by working with diverse actors and strategies to resist abuses of power that feign to take on the interests of the disadvantaged while instead destroying social cohesion and nature.
The linear relationship between resistance and power is apparently not limited to the classical world. A study some years ago based on conductivity measurements revealed unexpected classical electronic behavior at the quantum level. This suggests that the impact of resistance transcends scales. Still, in the social world small changes in resistance add up and can make a big difference. Reflecting on the power of resistance has energized me and motivated me to get going again. Chocolate also helps! There is work to be done in the years ahead.
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Thanks so much for this, Karen. I especially appreciate you highlighting how our resistance to “what is” saps our energy and enthusiasm to work for change...
I go back to Laudato Si's call for a new kind of solidarity, Karen. I think in times like these to come, that may be the best place to put our energies - especially building solidarity with Earth and Indigenous communities around the ethic of shared responsibility for the climate, and focusing as well on our local ecosystems. We can still work on changing our relationship to Earth at the grassroots level, in part by strengthening cross-cultural alliances, while things proceed to fall apart at the national level. And then, hopefully, we'll be in a better position to resume progress when the opportunity arises. After a lifetime of futility in defending Nature, I'm just not a big fan of mass protests. It seems we could direct our energies instead to building a movement from within rather than making a big show of things and/or getting arrested. We need to be real about what is not working. Of course, we need to come to our allies defense if and when they are threatened. I think the Tribes at Standing Rock got it right when they characterized themselves as "protectors" not "protesters." We need to build solidarity around protecting our Mother, protecting one another, and improving our local ecosystems. Everywhere all at once. Thanks for your wisdom! (Circuit analysis is what caused me to abandon electrical engineering! ; )