Sitting Apart, Standing Firm
A Feature Review of
How to Be a Dissident
Gal Beckerman
Paperback: Crown, 2026
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Reviewed by Harvey Woodford
I picked up How to Be a Dissident expecting something playful. The title suggests a winking, ironic handbook full of clever tips for troublemakers. What I found instead was far more serious and far more useful: a sustained act of moral excavation. The book does not ask how to perform resistance. It asks what kind of person resistance requires.
Gal Beckerman, a staff writer at The Atlantic, grounds his project in an urgent present-tense claim that authoritarianism is no longer a foreign problem. With 72 percent of the world’s population now living under authoritarian rule, the dissident tradition is not merely a subject for historians: it is a resource. Beckerman makes his case with a chorus of dissidents spanning two and a half millennia—from Socrates and Thoreau to Václav Havel and Edward Snowden, from the Warsaw Ghetto to Tiananmen Square.
The word itself comes from the Latin dissidere, “to sit apart.” A dissident, to Beckerman, is not necessarily a revolutionary or an activist. They are simply someone compelled to honor a set of principles their society is violating and who is thereby pushed to the margins. Its most important implication is that dissidents are not a monolith. They are a chorus, diverse in method and temperament, held together by a single organizing question that historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt articulated: Can I live with myself?
Arendt observed that the Germans most likely to collaborate with the Nazi regime were often those with the most rigid moral codes. They simply swapped one set of commands for another. It was the “perpetual doubters and skeptics” who most often held firm. The dissident is not made by ideology. The dissident is made when the gap between belief and behavior becomes unendurable.
Beckerman structures the book around ten qualities: Be Alone. Be Pessimistic. Be Funny. Be Rational. Be Watchful. Be Reckless. Be Loyal. Be Presumptuous. Be Human. Be Immortal. Each chapter assembles an array of dissidents illuminating one quality. The result reads as much like a survey of modern history as a philosophy of resistance.
Be Alone opens with the frank observation that human nature tends toward conformity. We are, as Beckerman puts it, sheep-like by default. The dissident resists that. Isolation is not incidental to dissidence. It is often the very condition that allows conviction to take root and harden. Solzhenitsyn illustrates this with force. Arrested after offhandedly criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend, he spent a decade in the Gulag. Alone and cut off, he eventually wrote a two-thousand-page account of Soviet corruption and dysfunction. That aloneness was not his defeat. It was his formation. Russian poet Osip Mandelstam’s story runs similarly. He composed a satirical poem mocking Stalin entirely in his head, sharing it only in fragments with a few trusted friends. When arrested, he admitted to the poem and refused every chance to recant. His dissidence was interior and solitary to the end, and no less real for that.
Be Pessimistic is, counterintuitively, one of the book’s most hopeful chapters. Beckerman draws a sharp distinction between pessimism and fatalism. Pessimism holds that things will probably get worse. Fatalism holds that they definitely will. In that word “probably” lives both urgency and possibility. The pessimist acts precisely because the outcome is not yet fixed. Optimism, by this logic, is actually the more dangerous posture because assuming things will probably work out most often leads to passivity.
The chapter on Be Funny may be the book’s most surprising. Humor, Beckerman argues, is not relief from the serious work of dissidence. It is one of its sharpest tools. Dissidents have long used parody and exaggerated imagery to throw audiences off balance, forcing a pause (a moment of recognition) that straight argument cannot produce. Czech-French novelist Milan Kundera aimed dark humor at what he called the kitsch of the totalitarian regime; that is, its compulsory optimism and its fraudulent gap between official declaration and lived reality. Diogenes of ancient Greece deployed outrageous mockery against power centuries before there was a name for what he was doing. And the authoritarians knew exactly how threatening laughter could be. Vladimir Putin shut down a puppet show that mocked him. Stalin sent Mandelstam to prison, in part, for a poem that lampooned his heavy mustache. Their instinct to silence parody was revealing. An emperor who cannot survive ridicule has already conceded something. The laugh, in this tradition, is not a retreat. It is a weapon.
Three other chapters feel especially weighty right now. Be Watchful is built around the Oyneg Shabes archive, buried in milk canisters beneath the Warsaw Ghetto, in which the historian Emanuel Ringelblum organized diaries, artwork, tram tickets, and ration cards into a comprehensive witness to a society the Nazis intended to erase. The contributors preserved a record for a future they would not live to see.
Be Reckless examines civil rights activist James Bevel’s decision, during Birmingham in 1963, to include children in protest marches. It was a genuinely risky choice, placing young people in the path of police violence. But footage of fire hoses turned against children proved morally devastating to a watching public and forced desegregation. The point notes that every dissident in this book accepted serious danger in order to stand firm for a cause. Recklessness, to Beckerman, is not impulsiveness. It is the calculated willingness to absorb real harm in order to capture attention and force change.
Be Presumptuous holds up Poland’s Solidarity movement as dissidence at scale. There, an entire society acted as if a freer future were already real. That boldness supplied the moral conviction to sustain hard choices when the costs mounted.
Readers from a faith tradition will find How to Be a Dissident unexpectedly resonant. Beckerman writes from a secular intellectual perspective (Arendt, Camus, Weil, Murdoch), but the moral architecture he is describing has deep biblical roots. The dissident who sits apart is the prophet who speaks from the margins. Havel’s call to “live in truth” echoes the New Testament’s insistence that truthfulness is a form of allegiance, not merely a virtue. And Be Immortal, the book’s final quality, invites the reader to think about legacy by keeping the record, doing the work, and trusting a future you will not inhabit. That posture will feel familiar to anyone shaped by the long view of Christian hope.
What Beckerman ultimately offers is not a how-to guide. Dissidence cannot be learned from instructions. What he offers is a gallery of witnesses: anxious, flawed, often isolated people who, at the defining moment, could not pretend.
Dissidence, Beckerman concludes, is not a decision to act. It is a way of being. This book will not tell you what to do, but it will introduce you to people who, when the question Can I live with myself? pressed in close, discovered they could not look away. Instead they chose, at real cost, to sit apart.
Harvey Woodford
Harvey Woodford is a Seattle-based attorney, board advisor, and faith and justice advocate. He serves on the board of Christians Seeking Justice and is the founder and writer of The Micah Walk — for people serious about faith beyond performance. themicahwalk.substack.com
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