How Institutional Scaffolding Unlocks Social Change

I'm leaving San Francisco to join a seminary. Here's why.

One of the most neglected measures of the decline of human civilization is the number of us who now eat our meals alone. Humans depend on one another in food production, including foraging (“Where are you finding those berries?”), hunting (“You scare them, and I’ll kill!”), and cooking (“Can you maintain that fire? Nature’s calling…”). We thus evolved to share what we eat; eating alone, through most of human history, was a good way to eventually starve. It is not surprising, then, that data shows that sharing meals has a large impact on happiness, akin to the effect of high income or respectable employment. And yet, in modern America, 1 in 4 of us, on any particular day, eats all our meals alone. This is a 52% increase from just two decades ago.

The problem of decreased food sharing is one example of a broader decline in social institutions.¹ Churches that once dominated human social life now have empty pews. Universities that are older than America have seen a stunning drop in public trust. Even the most essential of social institutions, sex, is disappearing from modern life, with one survey showing 38% of people aged 18-30 having no sexual partners in the last year – an all-time high. The decline in institutions is not just a threat to human happiness. Without functioning institutions, nations fail.

The percentage of Americans with confidence in higher education has declined by 40% in less than a decade.

But for those who are seeking change, the fall of institutions also presents an opportunity: building things anew. One of the primary lessons of social movement research is that change happens during periods of institutional crisis, a school of thought called “political opportunity” theory. Crisis breaks down barriers to new ideas and creates motivation for reform. It creates opportunities for institutions to evolve.

But how do movements seize these opportunities? In a word: disruption. The distinguished political scientist Sidney Tarrow has called disruption “the strongest weapon of social movements” because it forces attention to an institution’s failings. When disruption spreads, it creates rapid change.

This has been demonstrated by recent history. The Civil Rights Movement used waves of civil disobedience in the 1960s to transform the institution of racial segregation. The environmental movement became a political force through direct action, including an attempt to disrupt a nuclear test in Alaska. Most recently, the MAGA movement was seeded by mass protests during the Tea Party era; evidence suggests that, for every person who participated in those protests, around 12 voters changed their minds to vote for a right-wing candidate in the next election.

The fundamental problem with disruption, however, is that it is as unstable as it is powerful. Sidney Tarrow wrote about disruption’s fragility in the same breath as his discussion of its immense impact. The energy of disruption can quickly dissipate – whether due to repression or infighting or sheer boredom. And this is an even bigger problem in modern movements, where (due to technological change and social isolation) mass protest is easy to mobilize but hard to sustain.

So what is an institution-focused activist to do?

The answer is to work within existing institutions, even as we disrupt others. Looking at the most transformative changes in human history, they are almost always seeded within existing institutions. The Civil Rights Movement was born from the Black church. MAGA metastasized from the Republican Party. Even the great religions in history, such as Buddhism and Christianity, are just offshoots from another institutional branch of human social life (Hinduism and Judaism, respectively). The political scientist Hahrie Han has noted that right-wing movements have become increasingly powerful because they’ve focused on working within these existing institutional structures even as they seek to disrupt others. Look, for example, at our current President. He has achieved radical change in one institution (American democracy) by working within the scaffolding of another (the Christian church).

Institutional scaffolding of this sort solves a number of problems for activists. First, it reduces opposition from the status quo by aligning the proposed change with existing institutional identities. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was less threatening to many Americans precisely because he was a Christian minister.

Second, it allows movements of disruption to offload some of the hardest organizing problems to existing structures. Buddhists didn’t have to reinvent all of morality when they launched 2500 years ago because essential ethical norms, such as nonviolence, were defined by Hinduism; Tea Party activists did not have to invent a system for nominating political leadership because the Republican Party already had that process (roughly) figured out. This allows movements to focus on the key areas they seek to change.

Third, scaffolding allows a movement to build over time by creating a receptacle for general support to grow. Disruption is explosive and generates attention and participation. But most of this energy is lost because participants don’t know where to fit in. An institutional scaffolding gives supporters a place to park themselves even if there’s no specific tactic or organization that captures their immediate fancy.

We can see the problem caused by a lack of institutional scaffolding in recent protest movements. For example, in 2019, Extinction Rebellion (XR) mobilized thousands of activists to get arrested and created unprecedented attention and change. The UK government declared a climate emergency and ended the issuance of new licenses for oil and gas. But most of that energy was lost under the weight of infighting and repression in the years since. XR canceled their own co-founder Roger Hallam, who now sits in a UK prison. Today, the climate movement in the UK, and globally, is a greatly weakened force.

Roger Hallam was ousted from Extinction Rebellion in 2021, just two years after its launch.

The theory behind XR was sound. Use disruption to get attention. Use attention to get participation. Then harness the participation for even greater disruption. Eventually, the cycle of disruption, attention, and participation will hit a tipping point that changes the world. For XR, the theory nearly worked. The missing piece was the institutional scaffolding; XR inspired millions of people but couldn’t manage the conflicts that erupted at scale, or allocate its supporters to productive and sustained purpose over the long run.

The same has been true of animal rights. Exponential growth in participation was triggered by the disruption and narrative appeal of open rescues spreading across the nation from 2015-2018. By 2018, Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) had around 1000 people participating in open rescues, garnering unprecedented media attention and building towards real political power. We took on the $600 million fur industry in California and won.

But that energy was hard to sustain at scale without institutional scaffolding. As we grew, people began fighting for power and resources. Key leaders were taken out by legal repression, and decision-making slowed to a crawl. We needed something to stop the forces that were pulling the movement apart. In short, we needed institutional scaffolding.

It is possible that movements like XR or DxE would have sustained their exponential growth and achieved 100x impact if they had organized within an existing institutional scaffolding.

It is probably the mistake that I regret more than any other in my life. And now I am trying to correct it.

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I have done some hard things in life. I’ve faced off against a mob of dog meat traders. I’ve gone to trial against powerful industries accusing me of terrorism. I’ve been jailed and torn from the people I love. But the hardest thing I’ve ever done was to eat meals at school alone. In a sea of school kids in the lunch cafeteria, I was often the only person sitting by myself. I have never felt shame and desperation like the shame and desperation I felt on those days.

But there was one place where I did not have to eat lunch alone: the Chinese church in Indianapolis. The potlucks after Sunday service were filled with nerdy, culturally-maladjusted kids who didn’t care that I ate with chopsticks, wore girlish clothes, or confused the word “condom” with “condo.” I didn’t really understand who Jesus was, or why we were singing songs about him. But it didn’t matter because, in this place, we were a community. And as a community, we never ate alone.

I have spent most of the last 20 years of my life understanding the power of disruption. But one cannot disrupt, effectively or sustainably, when one stands alone. The next chapter of my life will be exploring how to create the scaffolding that helps people stand as a community. And for that purpose, you may see me soon in a surprising place. My journey is taking me across the country into the ministry. I’ll be joining a seminary in New York City next month. I hope to see some of you in NYC, or on the East Coast.

Maybe we can even share a meal.

1. By “institution,” I mean not just formal organizations but the rules and structures of human social life. For example, marriage is an institution. So too is high school sports.