As I think about mass movements and suffocating social circles, as I think about the claustrophobia of a shrinking world, as I fret about the possibility that we will be dominated by all that is banal and obvious, and leave no room for mystery, as I wonder whether it's possible for any agreed-upon social force to gain power without becoming precisely that which it opposed, I remember Weaver Marquez's words.

Surely not the only truth there is, probably not even the most central one, but something there feels profoundly important.

I've been thinking a lot about diaspora, and wondering how much of my worldview has been shaped, quietly and unnoticed, by my Jewish upbringing. The story of the New Testament is the story of a man saving humankind; the story of the Torah, by contrast, is a story defined by uncertainty and wandering, kingdoms rising and falling, peoples loved and then betrayed. The Jewish people are perennial outsiders, even to themselves; when they form kingdoms and empires, it is inevitable that those kingdoms and empires will fall to tragedy themselves.

My favorite childhood series, the one whose message reverberated the most deeply, was A Series of Unfortunate Events. Halfway through it, the Baudelaire orphans—till now merely victims of repeated attempts at kidnapping from a man who wants their fortune—are accused of murder, and must spend the rest of the series in hiding, wandering from place to place, fleeing not only their would-be kidnappers but the public at large, as the entire nation grows determined to punish them for their alleged crimes. Around the halfway point, too, they become aware of a secret organization, so furtive that even its name isn't known—only its initials, VFD—and they uncover its history only in fragments: hints of important symbols and rituals, suggestions that people they've met were members once, a slow reveal of something vast and extraordinary, half saintly and half sinister. VFD, too, is a diaspora, the byproduct of a schism between the noble and the craven, but even there it's suggested that the craven are byproducts of crimes committed by the noble, an endless history of treachery and tragedy and escape and fragmentation...

Daniel Handler, the author of A Series of Unfortunate Events, is himself Jewish. I wonder, too, how much that inspired him, and how much that drew me to him, long before I knew his particular faith.

To side with the oppressed, or even just to side against the oppressors, is to remain perennially mistrustful of power, and of the organizations which enable it. Perhaps it also means being suspicious of new movements, even good movements, in the awareness that people who seek power will co-opt anything, even the resistance against them and their ilk, in order to remain powerful. There is no such thing as infallible ideology—only a willingness to care about people beyond an in-group, and to see them truly as people. Often, the people who most value in-groups are those who began as outsiders, and never had a chance to truly belong to something, and are thus susceptible to those predators who are canny enough to offer them a chance of belonging, or who would appropriate their communities to gain leverage.

A book I enjoy a lot—Max Barry's Company, less transcendent than his debut Syrup but still pleasant for a quick read—has a bit in it about how all managers at a company are either selfless idealists or craven power-hoarders, and the former only survive until a single variant of the latter makes it to the top. How do you push against that, as an organization? How do you ensure well-meaning? And what do you do if you're not at the top of the tower, and are merely crowded at its bottom, huddling for shelter, simultaneously aware that one day it must fall?

When Frank Zappa critiqued the hippies and posited his own group, the "freaks", as a genuine alternative, there was a sense that the freaks were defined by their genuine commitment to avoiding consolidation. They didn't want their movement to "win out"—they didn't want to be a movement. The one kind of move that can't be stolen by the power-hungry is to eschew power, eschew influence, eschew everything but willful obscurity. There you may find others with similar values, and create a genuine sense of community. 

Though, of course, the moment that community gains any headway...