Joy is Active Resistance — Why Joyful Protesters Are Threatening Power
by Stevie Lynn | Crunchy Anarchy
What is Joy?
There’s a word that gets thrown around a lot right now. Joy. Joy is resistance. Find your joy. Protect your joy. And I believe all of that — but I think we’ve flattened the word so much that we’ve lost what makes it actually dangerous.
We’ve turned joy into happiness. Into feeling exalted, exuberant, ecstatic. Into the absence of pain or worry or grief. And that’s a problem. Because if joy is just happiness — if it’s just feeling good — then it has no business showing up at a demonstration. It has no business surviving grief. It has no business being called resistance.
But that’s not what joy is.
Joy is not happiness. Happiness is circumstantial. Happiness depends on things going well. Joy is something older and harder than that. Joy is what the mystics were talking about when they described an encounter with the real — with something that doesn’t shift when circumstances shift. Simone Weil wrote about affliction and joy in almost the same breath, because she understood that genuine joy isn’t the opposite of suffering. It lives alongside it. It survives it.
Think about every great spiritual tradition. The psalms are full of lament AND full of joy — sometimes in the same poem. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. That’s not toxic positivity. That’s an orientation. A direction. A refusal to let the night be the final word.
The mystics called it the joy that the world cannot give and cannot take away. And that phrase is doing a lot of work. The world cannot take it away. That means it is not dependent on your circumstances being good. It is not dependent on winning. It is not dependent on the protests achieving their immediate goals. It is something underneath all of that.
And that — that specific thing — is what makes it threatening.
Joy as Witness
In Quaker practice there is this concept of bearing witness. It doesn’t mean performing. It doesn’t mean pretending. Bearing witness means showing up with your whole self and testifying to what is real.
When someone shows up to a demonstration and they are joyful — visibly, genuinely joyful — they are not saying everything is fine. They are not saying this isn’t serious. They are bearing witness to something real that still exists. They are testifying: something worth protecting is still here. I can still feel it. It has not been taken from me. That joy becomes the anchor. It is the spiritual territory they refuse to surrender.
That is a completely different category from happiness. Happiness says: things are good. Joy says: I know what I love, and I have not forgotten it, and you have not been able to make me forget it.
And neighbors — because that’s what we are, even when we’re strangers at a demonstration, we are neighbors — neighbors who can still feel what they love are not defeated neighbors. They are dangerous neighbors. Because they remember what they’re fighting for.
This is why the people who resisted slavery — enslaved people themselves first and foremost, and the communities who supported them — didn’t just know what they were against. The Underground Railroad was built primarily by the people with the most to lose, people who kept the vision of freedom alive in their bodies, in their spirituals, in their faith, even when the work was long and the wins were slow. Joy wasn’t a luxury. It was how the vision survived.
No Kings Day in Burlington, NC
Why Joy Threatens Power
Now let’s get political. Because this isn’t just theology. This is strategy.
Any system that wants your compliance needs one thing above everything else. It needs you to believe that resistance is pointless. It needs you to have already accepted the ending before the story is over.
I’ve started calling this inevitabilism. And it is the primary psychological weapon being used against us right now.
Inevitabilism doesn’t look like a weapon. It looks like realism. It sounds like: “I just don’t see how this changes anything.” It sounds like: “We’ve been doing this for months and nothing is different.” It sounds like: “You’re so naive.” And it sounds like: “Why are you so happy? Don’t you understand what’s happening?”
That last one is the tell. Because that question — why are you so happy — is actually asking: why haven’t you surrendered yet?
Audre Lorde said that joy is an act of resistance against those who believe our destruction is inevitable. I used to think that was a beautiful sentiment. Now I think it is a precise and tactical observation. Because a people who still have joy are a people who have not accepted the inevitabilist narrative. They are still oriented toward something. They still know what they love. And you cannot sell hopelessness to someone who can still feel what they love.
This is why visible joy at a demonstration is not a sign that people aren’t serious. It is a sign that the machine has not won. And the machine knows it. Which is why there is so much energy — so much coordinated, strategic energy — dedicated to making you feel ashamed of it.
The History — It Really Happened
I want to talk about something that sounds like a conspiracy theory but is actually just history.
In the 1950s and 60s, the FBI ran a program called COINTELPRO — the Counter Intelligence Program. And its explicit goal was to surveil, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt domestic political organizations. Civil rights organizations. Anti-war organizations. Any movement that threatened the existing order.
And here is what is important: they didn’t just attack from the outside. The most effective tactics were internal. They seeded division. They manufactured conflict. They sent fake letters designed to make leaders distrust each other. They infiltrated meetings and introduced the language of purity — you’re not radical enough, you’re too radical, you’re compromising, you’re performing.
Sound familiar?
I’m not saying everyone who criticizes joy at a demonstration is a federal agent. I’m saying the tactic of getting allies to police each other’s affect — your tone, your seriousness, your level of visible suffering — is a documented, named, historically deployed strategy. Whether it’s being run deliberately right now or whether people have absorbed it so thoroughly that they’re spreading it sincerely — the function is identical. Demoralization from the inside.
And here is what the civil rights movement knew that we seem to have forgotten: the singing was not incidental. The music was not a nice addition to the serious work. The singing was load-bearing.
When people locked arms and sang “We Shall Overcome,” they were doing several things at once. They were sustaining each other through fear. They were communicating: you are not alone. They were maintaining their orientation toward the Beloved Community they were building — not just the segregation they were tearing down. And they were testifying — to each other, to the watching world — that they had not been broken.
Go look up Fannie Lou Hamer. She knew exactly what she was up against because she was a victim of it — over and over again. But she maintained her joy, she spread it to others, she sang and continued to love her neighbor because she knew that is the only way to create lasting change.
Her joy was the proof that the system had not won. And that proof was essential. Because movements die not when they are defeated but when they believe they are defeated.
Anger is fuel. Anger gets you out of bed. Anger tells you something is wrong and demands that you respond. We need anger. But you cannot run on pure anger for four years. Anger without direction burns the container. It turns inward. It starts consuming the movement itself — which is exactly what COINTELPRO was designed to accelerate.
Joy is the compass. Joy tells you what you’re moving toward, not just what you’re moving away from. And without that compass, all the fuel in the world just spins your wheels.
When You’ve Never Been Taught Joy
Before I go further I want to say something important. Because I don’t want this to be an essay that just points fingers.
Some of the people pushing back on joy at these demonstrations — I don’t think they’re trolls. I don’t think they’re agents. I think some of them are genuinely suffering. And I think some of them have never actually had access to the kind of joy we’re talking about.
Here’s what I’ve noticed at these protests. The people who seem to get it instinctively — the people who are singing, who are laughing, who are finding each other — a lot of them are older. Gen X. Boomers. People who remember movements. People who remember what it felt like to be in a room with other people who believed the same things and felt it in their bodies. They recognize joy because they’ve been there before.
And then there’s a generation that grew up inside the attention economy. That has been psychologically managed since childhood by algorithms specifically designed to harvest anxiety and outrage. That learned to perform seriousness on social media as a form of credentialing — the more you signal your suffering, the more you prove you understand the stakes. Joy looks suspicious to them. Joy looks like you’re not paying attention. Joy looks like privilege.
And I want to say this carefully: the human industrial complex did that. This is not a character flaw. This is what happens when you are raised inside a system that profits from your despair. When your attention has been strip-mined since adolescence. When you’ve never been shown that joy is even available — that it is not naivety, not denial, not a sign that you don’t understand how bad things are.
Some of these people aren’t trying to demoralize the movement. They’re demoralized. And they don’t recognize joy because no one ever showed them what it was or why it mattered.
That’s actually the most important argument for joy I can make. We need to model it. Not perform it. Model it. Show people that it’s real, that it’s available, that it survives suffering. Because some people genuinely do not know that yet.
Collective Power and Pluralistic Ignorance
There’s a concept in social psychology called pluralistic ignorance. And it might be the most strategically important idea in this whole essay.
Pluralistic ignorance is when the majority of people in a group privately reject the group’s norms — but they each assume they’re the only one who feels that way, because everyone around them is going along with it. So nobody speaks up. And the norm persists, even though almost nobody actually believes in it.
It happens in classrooms when nobody asks a question because they each assume everyone else understood. It happens in workplaces when nobody names a problem because they each assume everyone else is fine with it. And it happens in movements when people start to privately doubt — is this working? Am I the only one who’s exhausted? Is everyone else more committed than me? — but they look around and see people showing up, so they keep their doubts private.
Inevitabilism runs on pluralistic ignorance. It needs you to believe you’re alone in your doubt, your exhaustion, your fear.
And here is what visible joy does. It breaks that illusion. When you show up to a demonstration genuinely, visibly, embodied-ly joyful — you are transmitting information. You are saying: I have not given up. I still believe this matters. I still know what I love. And every person who sees that and feels a flicker of recognition — oh, me too, I thought I was the only one — that is a movement tipping.
This is not soft. This is not naive. This is how collective power actually works. You cannot organize people who believe they are alone. Joy makes the community visible to itself.
Consider this: if every single person who is privately exhausted by this administration, who privately thinks things have gone too far, who privately wants something different — if all of those people decided on the same day to say so out loud, to show up, to refuse the inevitabilist narrative together — it would be over. Not eventually. Immediately. The emperor has no clothes. The power is borrowed. It depends on your belief in it.
Joy is the thing that makes collective refusal possible. Because you cannot refuse together if you cannot find each other. And you find each other by being visible. By showing up not broken.
Heaven Is the Goal
So what are we actually doing here?
I want to end with the biggest claim I’m going to make. And it’s going to sound impractical. But I think it’s the most practical thing I know.
We are not just resisting a bad present. We are reaching toward something. And that something has a name.
Martin Luther King called it the Beloved Community. Not a metaphor. Not a distant aspiration. An actual vision of a world where people genuinely belong to each other. Where the dignity of every person is not a political position but a lived reality. Where neighbors — real neighbors, people who know each other, who show up for each other — are the basic unit of human life.
Dorothy Day called it the world as it should be, practiced now. Not waiting for the right political conditions. Not waiting until we win. Practiced now, in small acts, in community, in the daily work of treating people as if the kingdom has already arrived.
This is what the mystics were pointing at. This is what the singing was about. This is what joy is orienting us toward.
Joy is not the feeling you have when things are going well. Joy is what heaven feels like when it breaks through. It’s what the Beloved Community feels like when you catch a glimpse of it — at a demonstration, at a concert, sometimes at a beauty salon or barber shop, or when doing charity work with others.
And that glimpse is not a distraction from the work. It IS the work. It is the proof of concept. It is the testimony that the world as it should be is not imaginary — it is possible, it is practiced, it is here in fragments, and we are building it.
So when someone tells you that your joy is inappropriate, that you’re not taking this seriously enough, that you should be more somber — what they are really asking you to do is forget what you’re building toward. To let the resistance become only about what you’re against. To lose the compass.
Don’t do it.
Be angry. Stay angry about the things that deserve your anger. But keep the joy. Protect it like it’s load-bearing. Because it is.
I cannot wait for the day when No Kings is no longer a protest. When it’s a holiday. An annual, joyful, ridiculous, beloved holiday where neighbors from near and far get together — just because we know we belong to each other.
That’s what we’re reaching for. That’s the goal. And every time you show up not broken, you bring it a little closer.
If this resonated, the conversation continues on the Crunchy Anarchy podcast and YouTube channel. And if you want to be part of building this community, subscribe — that’s how we find each other.
— Stevie Lynn