Belling the Cat is a fable also known under the titles The Bell and the Cat and The Mice in Council. In the story, a group of mice agree to attach a bell to a cat’s neck to warn of its approach in the future, but they fail to find a volunteer to perform the job. The term has become an idiom describing a group of persons, each agreeing to perform an impossibly difficult task under the misapprehension that someone else will be chosen to run the risks and endure the hardship of actual accomplishment… [Wikipedia].
Or, if you want to be cynical (cough, cough), not a misapprehension, at all, but an actual grift so that you can gain social status/money/professorships etc simply for stating the banal/obvious/vague. The beauty of the grift is that if you are called out on it you can either play whatever minority status cards you have and divert the discussion into a game of the Oppression Olympics, or else you can accuse your accuser of wanting to “wash dirty linen in public”, or say they “should be fighting the real enemy” etc etc. Most people observing are too scared or – sometimes – too thick to see what is playing out and to speak up. So the grifter continues to grift. “Progressive” movements, magazines and “progressive” academia is full of this crap. Conferences, keynotes, entire careers built on “the cat should wear a bell” dressed up with whatever buzzwords are buzzing at the time.
So, to destroy this and to usher in the New Jerusalem, I have… written three limericks.
The papers that they are all selling
Tell of cats in need of some belling
Oh the endless pages
Of poundshop sages:
All the trees for this they were felling?
and
The nonsense spreads like a cancer
Is spouted by many a chancer.
By grifters with tells
Of the cats and their bells
Are we human or are we dancer?
and
And the grifter will come with a list
And an artfully raised little fist
A litany of woes
Their reputation grows
But solutions? Like grabbing the mist.
Basically, when you encounter one of these grifters, the thing they won’t want you to ask is
What, specifically, have the “good guys” done WRONG these last 30/50/100 years? If we are morally right, and we are more in number than the “baddies”, how come we are losing? What are the comforting rituals that our side continues to wallow in? How come the “intellectual leadership” of the good guys, which includes people like you, has been unwilling to provide new strategic and tactical insights to help social movements etc persist, and innovate? Could it possibly be that you are actually nothing more than a spineless and brainless parasite, who has learned the right words to spout, to tell people how unfair the world is, while carving out a nice little smug niche?
What, concretely, have we done wrong in, say, the last five years?
What didn’t we do that we should have done?
What did we do that we shouldn’t have done?
What are we doing badly?
What are the barriers to “us” – which may or may not include you – to doing better and what could we do to cope with those barriers?
Given that it is so difficult to both recruit and to retain people in social movements, what do. we. need. to. differently. you. grotesque. preening. vampire?
Asking for a fiend.
No, I don’t have any issues at all with “authority”. Why do you ask?
marchudson.net 
Regarding Hudson’s take that ‘the thing they won’t want you to ask is’, IMHO, I think there’s some analytical merit in this interview/Q&A excerpted below with David R. Samson, an evolutionary biologist, about our species’ intense tribal instinct.
https://thehub.ca/podcast/audio/the-rise-of-the-meta-tribe-anthropologist-david-samson-on-how-modern-society-can-harness-tribalism-for-good/
Samson EXCERPT: ‘And that’s what the value proposition is. Donald Hoffman, a evolutionary psychologist, he said, “The truth won’t make you free; it will make you extinct.” ‘
FWIW, regarding this observation ‘they won’t want you to ask’ (above) in Hudson’s post above:
As I’ve mentioned in a recent previous comment, at the moment, after some years of amateur reading/exploration of what’s going on with our species, I’m currently persuaded by the research/literature examining our evolutionary history that argues we Homo Sapiens might, at bottom, be foundationally doomed by our species strong innate bias to stick with our tribe’s views on any issue despite evidence to the contrary, which is a bias that’s been driven into our genes by several hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary history. Because we generally will reject the arguments of anyone, and/or that person who might be pushing them, that contradict the beliefs our tribe, or an identity we affiliate with, we can be manipulated into believing and acting on nonsensical, non-factual arguments put forward by the leaders of our tribe. To the extent, that we won’t think there’s reason to act on existential threats like climate change.
This author excerpted below, David R. Samson, is convinced that if we don’t solve how to make this instinctual bias work for us, to figure out how to get past this conundrum, we’re fucked/doomed, as a species. Lots of other academics have identified this bias in our cognition. But this Samson guy, IMHO, pulls it all together in a way that is most persuasive to me. Our tribal bias, pretty much makes Hudson’s case, i.e. choosing to call out the ‘bell the cat’ situation with some questions pointed at the ‘leaders’ will most often, in practice, get you banished, i.e. you’ll go extinct in terms of any sense of being able to influence the thinking of your group. And this phenomenon stems from the pre-modern reality that to survive and reproduce and become the dominant surviving primate species over most of the last 300K years required extremely strong ongoing cooperation internal to the group to defend against all sorts of threats. IOW, don’t question the group choice as determined by the most elder/wise leaders is the default mode for the vast majority of us. Which is now something quite maladaptive for citizens to have any material impact on those who are actually governing modern mass societies. Getting marginalized if you call out the feasibility of ‘more of the same’ is actually entirely the norm for our species, in that it’s genetically embedded. Could corporations that use tactics such as generating/sponsoring thinktanks with ‘thought leaders’ pushing propaganda, and supporting/fostering opinion leaders of RW media/columnists, and astroturf groups, have a better weakness in us to exploit?
FWIW, I’ve no ideas on what to do about this that I feel very confident about, at the moment.
Sam
https://thehub.ca/podcast/audio/the-rise-of-the-meta-tribe-anthropologist-david-samson-on-how-modern-society-can-harness-tribalism-for-good/
EXCERPT: ‘And that’s what the value proposition is. Donald Hoffman, a evolutionary psychologist, he said, “The truth won’t make you free; it will make you extinct.” ‘
Excerpt: This is about being connected within a social environment, in a social network where I feel valued, where I have some station, where I have some status, and I am an honoured member of this group.” And that’s what the value proposition is. Donald Hoffman, a evolutionary psychologist, he said, “The truth won’t make you free; it will make you extinct.” And so it really is the case that for most of human evolution, it wasn’t about figuring out what was true; it was about figuring out how can we become a tightly bonded group so we can survive an incredibly hostile environment that includes threats from our ecology, it includes threats from just natural disaster and includes threats from other people. So that’s why all this signalling is so critical to what it is to be a Homo sapien.
https://thehub.ca/podcast/audio/the-rise-of-the-meta-tribe-anthropologist-david-samson-on-how-modern-society-can-harness-tribalism-for-good/
excerpt:
SEAN SPEER: If tribalism is about ingroups and outgroups, how does it work imperceptibly? Don’t we need to decide who’s in and out and then, therefore, make it abundantly clear to others?
DAVID SAMSON: Absolutely. The value proposition here of doing that is really, it’s not about necessarily stating a condition of truth or veracity. The value proposition of doing that is signalling the strength that you have for that particular coalitionary alliance. So in this instance, it’s really interesting because you can believe in something that’s untrue and it’s rational. Let’s take flat earth for example. So I don’t know if you’ve seen the documentary Behind the Curve. It’s a beautiful documentary about the flat earth movement, which had been gaining steam relatively recently. And there’s an individual character in it called Mark Sargent. And he’s the leader of the flat earth movement. He’s got a podcast. He’s got this massive community and massive following. And this really fascinating thing happens with one minute left in the documentary, where in a candid back and forth with the producer, the producer asks, “Well, what if you one day just decided that the world was round?”
And you can see this existential terror in this character’s eyes, in Mark’s eyes? And he goes, “Actually, I could never do that because my community, they wouldn’t let me go.” And it was just this candid behind-the-scenes moment where it was like, “Okay, this isn’t actually about flat earthism. This is about being connected within a social environment, in a social network where I feel valued, where I have some station, where I have some status, and I am an honoured member of this group.” And that’s what the value proposition is. Donald Hoffman, a evolutionary psychologist, he said, “The truth won’t make you free; it will make you extinct.” And so it really is the case that for most of human evolution, it wasn’t about figuring out what was true; it was about figuring out how can we become a tightly bonded group so we can survive an incredibly hostile environment that includes threats from our ecology, it includes threats from just natural disaster and includes threats from other people. So that’s why all this signalling is so critical to what it is to be a Homo sapien.
I was planning to link this to a previous post, but this one seems even better. Consider:
“The seemingly innocuous terms “viewership,” “listenership,” and “readership” subtly socialize us into a passive-consumer posture—one that classical democratic theory warned against. As social media inherit broadcast’s one-to-many model, they amplify this passivity under the guise of “networking,” rendering public discourse more entertainment-driven than educational. To revitalize democratic agency, we must challenge both the language of media and the architectures that perpetuate passive consumption, fostering instead a culture of active co-creation.”
This is a summary of a critique generated by iTAIM/AI and this prompt:
Critique and expand on how the terms “viewership” relative to TV, “listenership” for radio, and “readership” concerning print publications, represent a promulgated cultural passive social psychology regarding duties and responsibilities inherent to democratic institutions. Due to the broadcast media affect of the tools of social media, explore how this passivity is applicable to the alleged social “networking” rendering it functional entertainment rather than education.
Please be aware that the Verdantia fable – but not the 2003 slideshow intro – is iTAIM/AI content. Consider that mentoring an education community rather than entertaining an increasingly, and systemically, a segmented one is what is RIGHT that is NOT being done/juggled https://gumlet.tv/watch/681ba8a0a31559f0bc0300cd.
…or a “what say you?” paradigm that is not ‘broadcastable’⁉️
>