Hearth & Horn

isn't Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes just. the most millennial song. I've not heard it in about 10 years, and it's great, and also nobody in the band turned out to be a posh kid slumming it with a ukelele on the cusp of right wing extremism, and that's also a plus one. It's so lovely, folky wall of sound, a reassuring album.

(i've tagged it for Solar, I think it expresses an awful lot of that: the yearning to just work in a little orchard, the exhausted desire to be 'a functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me', unformed feelings about men in dimly lit halls taking life out of your control. It's twee pastoralism, but not in a 1960s way. It could only have been written in 2011. Music about dropping out for people who won't actually do it.)

(I hope the boy i was dating in 2011 is doing ok. he maybe kinda sleepwalked into a job destabilising global democracy a bit then dumped me to flee the country, which puts the yearning of this album we loved together into a different light; I hope he's sleeping untroubled in an orchard somewhere, lovely fool. 🛹Liberalism isn't cool, kids! Don't try it! Just say 'no way!'🛹)

In activism, the concept of a Security Culture is little practices and habits which make everybody safer if done collectively. A strong security culture, paradoxically, means you can all spend less time thinking about security.

An example of Security Culture is 1. never disclosing the specifics of actions which you have been involved in or might be involved in in future, and 2. never asking other people to disclose it - unless its very clearly a situation where this is relevant. Or, never disclosing who is in charge (or better still, having a flat or mysterious organising structure in which people literally don't know. It's so socially normal that if someone asks 'who's in charge here?' , everyone knows to say 'idk mate' and more importantly, everyone is alert that this is NOT an appropriate question.

By doing this, you don't need to worry so much about police infiltrator on a day-to-day basis, and that's good because paranoia can rip movements apart and also kinda bums you out. Everyone should be alert and on the watch for tells, and some people should be doing active security research, but a consensus on Security Culture makes those tells easier to pick up, and if you do it well, it forms a kind of shield wall. Cops can come to your events (and they will!) but they won't get through it.

I'm thinking about this in the context of 'policing the borders of Pagan culture for far right extremism' - which our movement does incubate and attract, unfortunately. & it makes everyone paranoid and rips communities apart and it bums you out. I wonder if adapting the mindset of Security Culture is an route for managing the problem, while minimising harm. Because the things you have to do to protect your borders, in and of themselves can poison the thing you're protecting.

I suppose in practice, this doesn't look any different to what we're already doing: teaching one another a model for appropriate and inappropriate behaviour, because the more eyes on the problem who can hear a dog's whistle, the more swiftly we can say 'lol nope' and close ranks on ideas and people that want to take us nowhere good.

I think the appeal of Security Culture specifically is that it takes some of the emotion out of it? You don't need to be in a place of anger, hurt, frustration, or even reasoning with people on a interpersonal basis (letting them get close enough to do hurt and destruction in the process of evaluating who they really are). You have firm operating procedures, and you back one another up by doing them, and when it becomes automatic you're almost not thinking about it - not wasting emotional and practical energy on it. Because wasting your time and your emotions and causing disruption is, in and of itself, a win for infiltrators. So the less of that you can give to a hostile actor, the better.