There is, I believe, a dangerous propaganda grafted onto activism. It is identified by such memes as "raise awareness", "power of the people", "be heard". The deception is insidious. It diffuses meaningful action while imparting the feeling of acting. In that way, it removes the personal impetus for action and thus diminishes the likelihood a person will actually conduct meaningful action. This is a bit difficult to see from the inside because it is part of a mindset that has been present in our society our entire lives. I will go a bit slow to try to leverage a perspective outside the system so we may view its effects. The group mentality has, at its core the belief that given enough popularity, some issue will succeed. The premise, that opinion == action, is false. People are being conditioned to be in a way analogous to the crowds in a stadium rooting for a team. No matter how many spectators there are, or which side they are on, their effect on the actual game is vanishingly small. There is almost nothing in common between the role of a spectator and that of a player. The game is almost entirely decided by only the actions of the players.
At the core of 'raising awareness' lies an implorement that someone else do the actual work required to solve the problem. To see this more directly, imagine a company that happens to mine rocks. If the CEO behaved as activists do, (s)he would get some people in the company together and have a meeting to talk about it. At that meeting they would discuss how important it is to mine rocks and also how they could share that idea with more of the company. Other meetings would happen and they would get larger if 'progress' was being made. At no point would these people actually mine a meaningful amount of rocks.
Solution
Simple tasks can be completed by single individuals acting alone with a high success rate. As the difficulty and amount of work increases the success rate drops. While individuals may be able to construct shelters, no amount of shelters will become a pyramid. An abstraction barrier must be crossed. If no one person can complete a complex task, the task must be broken into parts small enough for people to handle. The people must perform specialized roles [1]. Corporations and governments have such specialized roles. To compete, each time an activism cause forms, it must evolve specialized roles that work together. The evolution of the eye is an example of complex differentiated parts working together. It is almost impossible to evolve under competitive pressure because failures of parts tend to cause failure of the whole.
Discussion
Since this is only a micro dissertation, I will leave it at this: To be productive, activism needs to place much less emphasis and effort on [advertising|imploring actors] and much more emphasis on actual actions. Implementing actual actions first requires creating a viable strategy of change that is defined all the way to what [roles|skills|actions] are required to achieve it. It then needs people with those skills that can actually produce the actions which it integrates into a solution.
