There’s a moment in a novel I’ve been reading — one where the characters have just spent an ordinary chapter’s worth of narrative time inside a genuinely rare experience: something like unified consciousness, shared perception across several minds at once. And the thing that experience reveals to them isn’t mystical. It’s structural. It shows them that the system controlling their world doesn’t just control physical resources — it controls information about those resources. The asymmetry isn’t material. It’s epistemic.
Armed with that insight, they have a plan ready to go: a mass broadcast. Use the same technology that gave them the unified experience to give it to everyone, all at once. Enlightenment as a distributed event. And then they abandon it — not because it wouldn’t work, but because they conclude it would dissolve boundaries that are actually load-bearing while leaving the underlying imbalance completely untouched. A revelation, however total, isn’t an intervention.
What they choose instead is slower and less legible: each of them goes to work with a different peripheral community. One with the lake settlements to the north, one with research collectives to the east, one with transit networks to the south, one coordinating from a mountain outpost. No broadcast. No single dramatic reveal. Just cultivation, distributed, at the edges, over time.
I want to take that seriously as a strategic claim, not just a plot beat, because it turns out to be a real position with a real history and a real name.
The parallel polis
The term comes from Václav Benda, writing under Czechoslovak state socialism in the late 1970s. He wasn’t describing fiction. He was describing what a small number of dissidents — Charter 77 signatories, Havel among them — were actually attempting: build a second society inside the first one. Not underground resistance aimed at seizing the existing apparatus, but a parallel structure with its own culture, its own economy of reciprocity, its own institutions, existing alongside the official one and refusing to depend on it. He identified five pillars: constant monitoring of civic rights, alternative underground culture, a parallel economy, parallel political structures, and even a parallel foreign policy.
The logic is close to identical to what the novel’s characters land on. You don’t confront the center. You don’t even necessarily out-argue it. You build somewhere it doesn’t reach, and you make that somewhere durable enough that people can actually live inside it — which is a much higher bar than making it legible or inspiring. A broadcast is legible. A community that still exists in five years is durable. Those aren’t the same achievement, and the novel’s characters seem to know it.
Dual power, and where it goes wrong
There’s an adjacent and older idea — dual power — that names the same move with a sharper edge: parallel structures aren’t just a refuge, they’re a rival source of legitimacy, meant eventually to displace the one they parallel rather than just coexist with it.
But the historical record isn’t uniformly encouraging, and the failure modes are worth sitting with precisely because they’re not the failure the novel’s characters are guarding against. Political scientist Carl Boggs identified patterns of decline in prefigurative movements — Jacobinism, where popular forums get repressed or their sovereignty usurped by a centralized revolutionary authority, and Spontaneism, where parochial instincts prevent the creation of any broader structure of coordination and local successes never scale.
That second one is the interesting risk for the novel’s version of the strategy. Four people, four regions, no coordination beyond loose contact with a mountain sanctuary — that’s a structure almost perfectly designed to succeed locally and fail to link up. Real-world parallel-polis movements that worked eventually stopped staying purely peripheral — Solidarity’s underground unions in Poland eventually produced a president and thousands of self-governing communes with real power, transforming an alternative structure into official governance. At some point the parallel structure has to either connect into something that can act at scale, or accept staying small as the actual goal, not a stepping stone. The novel doesn’t resolve which one its characters are choosing, at least not in the part I’ve read.
Why the abandoned broadcast is the right call anyway
I don’t think the risk of fragmentation makes the broadcast the better plan. There’s a separate strand of this literature that gets at why: the useful version of this strategy isn’t prefigurative politics that merely models a future society — it’s the construction of genuine institutional power operating outside the dominant system, capable of meeting people’s material needs while building organizational capacity independent of it. A mass revelation gives people a new belief. A parallel institution gives people a place to actually stand while they hold that belief — food, shelter, decision-making structures, a way to disagree with each other productively. Beliefs without infrastructure don’t survive contact with Tuesday.
That’s the thing I keep circling back to, in the novel and out of it: an insight that arrives all at once, however true, is not the same achievement as a structure that’s still standing next year. I’ve caught myself making this mistake in miniature — reaching for the complete, satisfying, shareable conclusion instead of doing the slower thing that doesn’t look like an ending. The novel’s characters had to live through a mystical experience to learn that lesson. Dissidents in 1970s Czechoslovakia learned it under considerably worse conditions, with considerably more at stake, over considerably more time. Both arrived at the same shape of answer: not the dramatic reveal. The unglamorous work of building somewhere else to live.