← Outrage Overload: Rethinking politics, division, and media
Outrage Overload: Rethinking politics, division, and media
80. Small Acts Matter More Than We Think – Luke Berryman
00:32:25
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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to Outrage Overload, a science podcast about outrage and lowering the temperature. This is episode 80. We tend to imagine resistance as something dramatic. Heroic figures, singular moments, people who stand out from the crowd. But that story can be comforting in a dangerous way. Because if resistance only belongs to larger than life heroes, then most of us never have to ask what it would look like for us. And that raises a more difficult question. If resistance is more than what we see in the movies, how would we recognize it? Today, as anti democratic ideas re emerge in different forms around the world, there's a temptation to wait. Wait for leaders, wait for institutions, or wait for some extraordinary individuals to step in and do the resisting. For us, history suggests that waiting can be its own form of acquiescence. Not because people agreed with dangerous ideologies, but because resistance felt too risky, too rare, or too heroic to attempt. But resistance isn't always about seismic change. More often, it's found in smaller decisions, quieter refusals, and ordinary people choosing not to go along. And that's what we're going to talk about on this episode of the Outrage Overload podcast. I'm your host, David Beckmeier, and our guest today has spent years studying exactly that question. Not through myths or symbols, but through real people, real choices, and real consequences.
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B
Hi, I'm Dr. Luke Berryman. I'm the founder of the Ninth Candle, a Chicago based nonprofit organization that helps schools to improve Holocaust education across the United States. I'm also the author of the forthcoming book Resisting Nazism.
- [01:46]
A
What makes this conversation especially valuable is that this work doesn't treat Nazism as a frozen historical episode, but as an ideology with recurring patterns. It examines how beliefs about world historical destiny, racial hierarchy, and the legitimacy of violence show up again and again, sometimes wearing very different clothing. Just as importantly, it reframes resistance as something most people could do, but rarely imagine themselves doing. This perspective matters, especially at a moment when many people feel overwhelmed, polarized, or unsure where responsibility really lies. So if you've ever wondered what resistance actually looks like, or whether small acts still matter in a world that feels increasingly extreme, stay with us. This is a conversation about how dangerous ideologies take hold, why waiting for heroes is a risk, and what resistance might look like right now in ordinary lives, let's dive in. So, yeah, Luke Berryman, thanks so much for coming back on the show.
- [02:45]
B
Yeah, thanks, Dave. I'm excited to be here again.
- [02:49]
A
Yeah, I really was blown away by the book right away. It captured me and did throughout the whole book. So I'm going to do this interview A little differently than normal because I don't want to give too much away because I think people have to go read the book. So hopefully that's going to be a strategy that works. It doesn't backfire. But I really do. I think it's a great book and I really appreciate you writing that.
- [03:11]
B
Yeah, thank you. And yeah, thanks for reading it. And thanks. Thanks for having me on to discuss it.
- [03:18]
A
Yeah. There's so many parts to go with. I was mentioning before we started that I've kind of played around with what questions to ask. And so, again, if there's something that sounds like an opening to something you really want to make sure we talk about, feel free to just insert it in if it somehow wasn't part of the questions. But I kind of was going to try to steer it a little bit towards some of the social science, moral psychology type things that we do talk about on the show because I think there's a lot of overlap. One thing you talk about is this. I'm probably going to not pronounce this name quite right. Dietlev Piker. Is that how to pronounce it? Yeah. And he talks about this tiered idea of resistance from sort of a scale, nonconformity, refusal, protest. So I was curious to just have you talk about that a little bit and if that adds some sort of nuance to this whole story of resistance.
- [04:12]
B
Yeah, it's a great place to start. I mean, I was fascinated by his idea. And I think it's also worth underlining that this is an old idea. This is something that he came up with, I think the late 70s, early 80s. I forgetting the publication dates off the top of my head, but this is work that was done a long time ago. So it's not at the cutting edge of historical or sociological studies by any means, but I think it's interesting to revisit because I feel like a lot of what he wrote has been, I don't want to say forgotten necessarily, but it's just vanished in the meantime. I think in the decade since he was writing, the general view of resistance seems to me to have become far more black and white, far more reductive. And either one was a kind of great pioneering hero who risked absolutely everything. Someone like Oskar Schindler, for example, who most folks are familiar with through the movie Schindler's List, or. Or they were perpetrators or bystanders. And I think there's a lot of different reasons that that narrative has become so simplified in recent years. But I was taken away by this book when I first saw it in his research, and the idea that there are levels beneath that kind of final stage of over risk, everything, resistance, and that instead all of these kind of much smaller gestures can still count for something when you are working against a extremist or totalitarian system. And yeah, that theory then informed who I was picking out to study in my book because I deliberately wanted to go toward the people where the definition of resistance might be problematic or where it may not be as immediately obvious as a resistor like Oskar Schindler. You know, not, not to diminish his achievement by any means. But, you know, what I wanted to do was cast light on all these folks who had done things that were really important and that really did make a difference, but have been almost completely forgotten since 1945.
- [06:52]
A
Yeah, well, and you know, and to that point, you also talk about how Nazism has always faced resistance and does that sort of wider view of that, especially when you're thinking about in that the way that that researcher broadens the definition kind of change maybe some of our understanding of it and this maybe, maybe reveal sort of a more common, less visible form of moral actions?
- [07:27]
B
Yeah, perhaps. I mean, I do think it's one thing that's unusual about my book, you know, that normally when folks talk about resistance and Nazism, they're thinking about things that happen, happened in the Nazi era. Right. The time that Hitler was in power between 33 and 45. And of course, there are all sorts of very good reasons to focus on that period. But I instead wanted to treat Nazism as an ideology. So that meant following it from the moment of its birth right up to the present. Obviously it reached a peak, an apogee, a mountain in Germany in the years between 33 and 45. But it was around before 33, and it certainly survived after 1945. And once you take that longer view into perspective, again, the way that you look at resistance and how you define resistance necessarily changes because any form of resistance in Nazi Germany was extremely perilous. But then once you're talking after 1945 and you're talking different countries around the world, again, the ways in which people can resist become a lot more nuanced. And yeah, they kind of multiply.
- [08:51]
A
Yeah. So I'm going to sort of go and cover both those things, but one at a time. So I was first going to add a little bit about the, you know, talk about that most Germans, that it seemed like not that many Germans engaged in sort of this act of political resistance and that maybe the reason was things like that, they kind of acquiesced to them or they just learned to tolerate, tolerate them, or maybe even they supported them. And maybe I'm getting that wrong. But, but you let me know there. And, and then, so based on your research on that, what are some of the social science mechanisms that maybe that can, you know, we see conformity, normalization. I mean, what are some of the things going on there that would move a populace to, from opposition to acquiescence?
- [09:39]
B
Oh, well, I think in the case of Nazi Germany, and I do think this doesn't get said often enough when we're tossing around comparisons between the present and the Nazi past, what made the difference then was extreme violence. People can draw comparisons between that era and our own era. And as I say in the book, there are some genuine points of overlap which are obviously extremely concerning. But one real point of difference is that the Nazis utilized extreme violence as a political tool in a way that I think really hasn't been seen in the west for a very long time. You know, your odds of just being gunned down in the street for voicing political opposition, you know, that's not something that happens in the present day United States. You know, meetings of opposition parties aren't being broken up with people being herded off to concentration camps and so on and so on. And you know, when you are dealing with a government that sees that kind of extreme physical violence as a legitimate political tool for the public, it changes everything and it becomes a matter of self preservation, I think, first and foremost. And so that's how acquiescence is generated, at least in that pocket of history. I think that, like I said, I feel like that point often goes missing in the kind of comparisons that we make today.
- [11:27]
A
Well, yeah, on the other side of that then talking about how as an ideology, Nazism sort of started before that, like I think you talked about maybe 1920 time frame, and then goes up to the present, you know, so what are some of the things we can say, ideological structures that connect those original Nazi movement to this sort of what we see now with this new far right extremism?
- [11:50]
B
Oh, well, that's a really great question. And it's one that I, yeah, it's, it's one that deprived me a lot of sleep while I was writing the book. Because, yeah, it's, you know, what does a far right extremist who's out recruiting people in the 1980s Midwest US and that's, that's one of the folks that I interviewed for my book have in Common with someone in a beer hall in Munich in 1920 or 21 who's listening to Hitler speak. And I think the honest answer is not very much, but there are some really core important things that they do have in common with the way in which they tend to see their own movement as this kind of world historical movement that is going to bring about a glorious new era. Obviously the kind of racial science in quote Marx element, wherein there is this belief that the so called Aryan race is superior to all of the other races. That's another fundamental core component. And again, this kind of belief in belief in violence or belief that violence is a legitimate tool to achieve political ends. I think those three things at least are themes that are common to everyone who is identifying as Nazi from the 1920s right up to the present.
- [13:36]
A
Yeah, I think another attribute you talk about that is necessarily part of their identity but just a characteristic is, you know, that there's this sort of a disregard for, you know, sort of facts and truth and reality, I guess going back to the Nazi regime. How did they. Again you talked about the violence part and maybe that is the answer, but how did they sort of systematically strip people of the tools needed to mount resistance? Because people would think here, well, as if violence started to ramp up, that can't sort of happen all at once. There's going to be an opportunity somewhere in that to start doing resistance. There must have been a, a turning point of some kind that that sort of made that, that type of resistance just not practical anymore.
- [14:27]
B
Yeah, well, and again it's, it's kind of an important thing to remember when we're making any comparisons between past and present is that German democracy as it was, was really fragile. You know, it was born after the first War, first World War, into extremely fractious circumstances, narrowly avoided a communist revolution. And so it was kind of teetering on a tightrope anyhow. And the Nazis are this kind of fringe novelty act, for want of a better description for a very long time. They are not a party that anybody, that almost anybody took seriously right up until I would say the late 1920s. And then everything shifts quite suddenly after the Wall street crash, which has an impact on Europe's economy as well as the United States. So there wasn't really a gradual transition. I don't think happened very suddenly. Like if you look at electoral results and how the Nazis are kind of getting under 3% of the total electorate right up until 1928. And then suddenly after the economy, tanks, everything shifts dramatically in their favor. And then the kind of bigger picture is that there are loads of people in the country who don't like democracy anyway. Right. They remember what it was like to live under the Kaiser. They preferred that kind of aw, authoritarian military state kind of rule and they wanted to get back to it. And so for, you know, for a lot of people, I think Franz von Papen is one of the politicians I mention in my book who's a guy who plays an active role in bringing Hitler's power, but despised him and thought very little of him and really just saw him as a tool for achieving the things that he wanted to achieve. And von Papen obviously is one of these guys who wants to get back to the old days of the Kaiser, sees democracy as kind of decadent and overly liberal and wants to get rid of it by, by any means. Hitler is distasteful and uneducated and a rabble rouser, but he'll do. And so, you know, he thinks that he can use Hitler to bring about his own goals. Anyway, the point is that I think the Nazis, their fortunes change very quickly. That's partly because of this extraordinary set of economic circumstances. It's also because of this bigger picture that they benefit from wherein there are a lot of people who are very skeptical of democracy but aren't necessarily supportive of Hitler or the Nazis. So yeah, to your question, whether or not there's a gap or a period in which people can step up their resistance, maybe between 29 and 33, but I think there are still plenty of people for whom the idea of Hitler, someone like that ever ruling the country as the sole leader would have been completely and utterly unthinkable right up until the moment that it actually happened. And then the moment it actually does happen, Hitler does what he's always done, which is rule with violence. He had always made it very plain that he saw violence as a legitimate political tool. And once he was in, there was, there was no grace period.
- [18:34]
A
Yeah, interesting. Well, you know, I know this is, this is a little bit outside the scope of Nazism specifically, but it does speak to sort of the anti democratic side of things, whether the other end of that is Nazism or something else, you know, and I do see some parallels there, that there's, you know, there's a movement, movement maybe isn't quite, quite right, but there's a, you know, a segment of the population that's frustrated with quote, unquote, democracy and some of these democratic institutions and sees, you know, sees it as sort of corrupt, sees these institutions as corrupt and, and not serving the people anymore and that kind of thing. And there's this, you know, there's a lot of polling that shows that there's, you know, an openness to some of these non democratic approaches. And depending on which polling you go with, might be as many as half the country are at least sort of apathetic to it, if not, you know, downright in support of it. And you know, I think some of that's messaging because like, they don't really understand what democracy and those institutions do for us. And you know, and some it is the, you know, the institutions have to gain trust as well. Right? They have to earn the trust. They can't just, you can't just say institutions will protect you, but that they don't seem to be actually doing it. Right. But I'm curious to get if you're doing in your research for this book and you're just thinking about that in general, I mean, did any of that kind of parallel cross without sort of necessarily being specific about Nazism?
- [20:03]
B
Oh, yeah, I think for me, yeah, definitely. That's one of the most disturbing points of comparison that like you say, there are a lot of stats and polls around right now that show that significant portions of the population would prefer. I think it's normally kind of put in quite much a strong leader. And yeah, for me it's deeply disturbing. I think that the nature of those kind of strong leaders has shifted from between the 20th and the 21st centuries where we're not dealing with the kind of military ideologues like Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin anymore. It's these kind of larger than life, kind of quasi celebrity, very corrupt, the alpha male kind of people like Putin and Orban and Trump. So the nature of it has changed, or the character, the flavor of the leadership has changed. But the basic premise of people falling into a black hole because they have been made to believe that it's in their own best interests to live under a dictatorship. That is really alarming and should be a cause of great concern for everyone. You know, for me, it is a, a huge red flag and alarm bell that there is something fundamentally wrong with our education system. There is something, something fundamentally wrong with our political system and the way in which kind of politics is conducted. And yeah, there's just something fundamentally wrong with the way in which people are gathering and absorbing their information.
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A
You know, and on that, you know, in terms of like the messaging and thinking about this, I mean, you know, and I, I want to let you have an opportunity to talk about like how you are defining, you know, a Nazi or Nazism in this book because there's a lot of, you know, people out there that there's this sort of almost like a. A sensitivity to this. Well, they just call everybody Nazis. Right. If you just don't believe in my politics, then they just turn on. And there's some truth to that. Like, that does happen. People do that. But can you just speak to that a little bit and how sensitive you were to that thinking?
- [22:44]
B
Yeah, that's a great question. Just for some kind of context, I came up with the idea for this book and. And kind of signed the deal to publish it somewhere in the middle of 2022, at which point the political landscape was very different from how it is right now. When I signed that deal, my expectation was that this would be a kind of cool historical book with a bunch of case studies about people who'd resisted the Nazis or Nazism in one way or other, that it would be a neat tie in with the Ninth Candle's educational programs, and that was it. And then as I was completing the book, the political landscape shifted around me in ways that cast the book in a completely new light. So much so that I ended up rewriting both the introduction and the conclusion precisely with the question that you've just asked in mind. And so I try to be very cautious about brandishing anybody in the present as being a Nazi. I did go out of my way to avoid making direct comparisons like that, because that wasn't really what the spirit of the book was about. It was about far right extremism in a more general sense, I suppose, or at least the spirit of the book in terms of how it relates to today. Far right extremism in a more general sense, however you call it, whether you call it the alt right or the neo right or populism or neo fascism or whatever. And again, I was careful to say it's not always the same thing as Nazism, but there are enough points of overlap to give all of these stories maybe a new resonance or a new relevance for right now. So I think my intention wasn't to rake through history and say, oh, this exact same thing is happening today. Because, yeah, one does have to be cautious, not least because, as you rightly say, people just turn off. If you start just saying, oh, well, you're a Nazi and you're a Nazi, and this is Nazism, it very quickly grinds the discussion to a halt, which is the opposite of what I was hoping for this book. So, yeah, yeah.
- [25:29]
A
And what you. Thank you and what you mentioned earlier, you know, you mentioned a couple of the underlying challenges that kind of create this environment where people are cynical and, and start to see some of these more authoritarian type ideas as attractive. You know, you mentioned education, you mentioned, you know, just our politics and you know, these things like, are challenges to fix. You know, like, you know, that, that takes, you know, you don't just sort of fix education. And in fact, you know, you even have education as being one of the institutions that some people think needs to sort of be blown up. Right. It needs to be start over somehow. So, you know, and I know the work you're doing with Ninth Candle is obviously on that mission and we talked before the last time you were here, that none of us can sort of just go fix everything. We've got to pick a place and put our energy in. But, you know, so how do you feel about, you know, I think I've talked with a lot of people about this idea that, you know, we can often feel pretty discouraged that the work we're doing isn't getting anywhere until it does. You know what I mean? It's like one day, oh wait, it did make a change. And we see this change happening kind of fast. So maybe you can just kind of talk to us about, you know, sort of your optimism and your sense of, you know, can we pull ourselves out of this and what might be some ways we can maybe take some steps towards that.
- [26:55]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. And I think for me especially, one of the things especially that struck me about the people that I, I write about in my book is just how many of them weren't seeking to make some kind of seismic change and weren't seeking to get any kind of recognition for what they were doing. They, they were, they did what they did because somewhere inside themselves they knew it to be the right thing and they knew that it would make some difference, even if it was only a microscopic difference to one person for them that made the action worthwhile. Nevertheless, I think today one of the things that I hope to demonstrate with the book today, especially for young people with this reductive idea of resistance that they meet in many corners of their life, that one is either this kind of Schindler esque pioneering hero or one is a bystander. For a lot of them, they've got this idea that unless I'm out in the street hurling Molotov cocktails and risking my life, I'm not doing anything and I'm not going to do that. So I may as well, do nothing. And that's how apathy can very quickly set in for large swathes of the population. I hope that the book will show that resistance can be about more than changing all of society overnight, or about more than these kind of daredevil, heroic actions, and about more than being recognized as a hero. You know, that it's about doing the right thing because it is the right thing, and about affecting change where you can. And then if enough people get on board with that mindset, that's how society as a whole begins to shift and turn around.
- [29:06]
A
Yeah, yeah, we talk about that kind of thing. A lot of it is easy to fall into that. Like, yeah, if I can't do the big thing, then I guess I'll do nothing kind of thing. Yeah, right.
- [29:15]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [29:19]
A
So, yeah, so I love the book. I mean, I think I can't recommend it highly enough. It's great. Sort of got a lot of historical background in it, but it's also got some great personal stories. It's a really fascinating read. It's Resisting Nazism, and I don't remember the full subtitle, but I'm sure if you look up Resisting Nazism, you'll find it. Plus, we do have an Outrage Overload bookstore. I'm sure you can find it there as well, because I will definitely make sure it's available there. But yeah, tell us the full name and subtitle.
- [29:46]
B
So it is Resisting True Stories of Resistance to the World's Most dangerous ideology from 1920 to the present.
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A
Yeah. And if you think it's just like, you know, a history treatise or something, it's not. It's a fantastic story. The stories inside it, the personal stories are really fascinating and interesting. So, yeah, again, I can't recommend it enough. Well, Luke Berryman, thank you so much for making time for us again.
- [30:11]
B
Thanks, Dave. It's always a pleasure to speak with you.
- [30:25]
A
That is it for this episode of the Outrage Overload Podcast. For links to everything we talked about on this episode, go to outrage overload.net if something in this episode sparked a thought or maybe even lit a fire fire, I'd love to hear from you. You can leave a voice message or even Schedule a quick one on one chat right from our contact page at outrageoverload.net contact if you found this episode valuable, please share it or leave a review. It really helps. Thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time. It.