Today feels weighty with historical significance. As I grapple with my own sense of despair, I keep returning to a fundamental insight about resistance: visible dissent matters.
Timothy Snyder's "On Tyranny" identifies "Do not obey in advance" as its first principle – a crucial observation about how democracies erode. People often begin accommodating autocracy before it's fully arrived, self-censoring and stepping back from civic life not because they must, but because they assume they'll have to eventually. This anticipatory obedience, multiplied across millions, can accelerate democratic decline.
That's why we created our "Do not obey in advance" shirts. When you wear this message in public, you're tapping into what social scientists call behavioral contagion – the tendency for human beings to take cues from those around them about what's acceptable and possible. Each person wearing the shirt becomes a small but potent signal that resistance is normal, expected, and safe. These visible symbols help counteract what political scientists term preference falsification, where people hide their true beliefs because they think they're in the minority. When enough people see others openly signaling opposition, it can trigger a cascade effect, where previously hidden resistance suddenly becomes visible.
