As Albertans grapple with how best to deal with the chaos and uncertainty engulfing our province, I suggest we make use of the famous inversion technique. Instead of asking ourselves how to win against the forces that threaten us, we should ask ourselves how to lose — then do the opposite.
The inversion technique works because our brains are often better at figuring out what won’t work than what will.
Identifying the Goal
The first step is to identify the goal, which should be to stop our province from becoming a permanent northern MAGA outpost (or even worse, the 51st state in U.S. President Donald Trump’s America).
Top 10 Ways to Fail
Here’s my top-10 list of ways we could fail to achieve this goal:
- Remain quiet and complacent, even as our discomfort with the direction of our province grows.
- Let the separatists speak for all of us.
- Allow ourselves to be paralyzed by Trump-style “flood the zone” tactics.
- Say nothing about tactics aimed at getting us to fight among ourselves, including efforts to whip up anger against immigrants, Indigenous people and members of the LGBTQ community.
- Shrug off concerns about foreign interference and co-ordinated disinformation.
- Downplay the influence that separatists wield within the governing UCP and the links those separatists have to American MAGA operatives.
- Continue to let our government blame our problems on someone else (specifically, Ottawa).
- Continue to believe that the only economic issue that matters is getting a pipeline built, while ignoring the deteriorating material conditions of many working Albertans.
- Accept the notion that elections are the only way we can bring about change.
- Let the Opposition NDP get away with being too much like Hillary and not enough like Bernie.
Based on this list, it seems we’re on the path to failure. Using the inversion technique, what should we do instead?
What We Should Do Instead
First and foremost, we should be protesting. Not just on single issues, but on all of it. And the protests need to be big, loud and growing.
Just listing the outrageous government policies, tactics and scandals is like trying to drink from a fire hose — separatism, two-tier health care, threats to pull Alberta out of CPP, coal mining at the headwaters of our rivers, attacks on the courts and our constitutional rights, including the right to strike, gerrymandering, data centres, data leaks, allegations of corruption, book bans, gagging teachers and cruelty to the people with disabilities.
What we need is a protest movement to unite them all — like the worker-led Solidarity movement that helped end Communist rule in Poland or the Orange Revolution that did the same in Ukraine.
This will require Albertans to get out of their comfort zones. Groups and individuals who aren’t used to working together will have to find ways to do so.
Equally important, we need to address the pressing concerns of ordinary working Albertans. As long as working-class people feel threatened by things such as the affordability crisis, stagnant wages and the job-killing potential of AI, they will be susceptible to the culture-war tactics of the Maple MAGA movement.
