How to be a dissident

Jennifer Rubin -   Gal Beckerman’s How To Be a Dissident is not a guide for how to resist authoritarianism. Rather, Beckerman explores the mindset of dissidents. The volume is less than 200 pages but densely packed with fascinating accounts of global dissidents over thousands of years, from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Baruch Spinoza to Diogenes to Henry David Thoreau (and many whose names will not be familiar).

To be a dissident (literally to “sit apart” from the Latin) is not, Beckerman says, a “political stance” or the equivalent of “being outspoken” (especially in countries where free speech is largely protected). Rather:

It is something much more profound. Being a dissident means trying to close the distance between what you believe and how you act. It means understanding the conditions that allow you to be yourself, and not accepting any violation of them. And it means doing all this when there are great risks involved. You feel you cannot do otherwise.