How to Resist in Times of Chaos: Lessons from Tolkien on Truth, Kindness, and Everyday Courage

Galadriel: “Mithrandir, why the halfling?”
Gandalf: “I don't know. Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check. But that is not what I have found. I have found that it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.”

I love this scene and this quote. I love Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

There are periods when everything feels distorted. Conversations become aggressive, people stop listening, and it gets harder to tell what is true and what is simply repeated with conviction. You sense that something is off, but you cannot always name it clearly. What used to feel stable starts to slip.

In those moments, the instinct is to look for something strong enough to restore order. A clear authority, a decisive act, a powerful response. It feels logical. If things are getting out of control, then force should bring them back.

And yet, Tolkien suggests something else. Not through theory, but through the way the story unfolds. In The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, the decisive movements rarely come from power alone. They come from hesitation, from doubt, from restraint, from small gestures that do not look important at the time.

Gandalf’s answer is unsettling because it does not match what we expect. He does not speak about strength or strategy. He speaks about ordinary people doing ordinary things, and about fear, even his own. There is something disarming in that. It lowers the level of abstraction. It brings the question back to a scale where you are involved.

So what does it mean to resist when everything around you, the collective, feels inflamed?

It may start in very simple ways. In how you speak when others exaggerate. In whether you repeat something you have not taken the time to check. In your ability to stay with a conversation instead of turning it into a position to defend.

These are not grand acts. They do not change the system overnight. But they affect the tone of the space you are part of. And that matters more than it seems.

What is difficult today is not only conflict. It is confusion. Information circulates quickly, but understanding does not follow at the same pace. You end up reacting to fragments, to impressions, to emotions that have already been shaped by someone else.

In that environment, clarity becomes a form of resistance. Taking the time to think before reacting. Accepting that you do not know everything. Asking a question instead of making a statement. These are modest gestures, but they push against the drift.

The uncomfortable part is that none of this feels sufficient. When the situation is tense, small actions seem almost irrelevant. You want something more direct, more decisive. But large reactions often feed the same dynamic they are trying to oppose. They escalate. They reduce complexity into opposing camps.

What Tolkien’s story keeps suggesting is that the opposite movement matters. Not withdrawal, but a different way of being present. Less reactive, more attentive. It is not heroic in the usual sense. It is quieter than that.

And maybe that is why it is difficult to take seriously. Because it does not look like power. But if you look closely, these small acts do something essential. They interrupt automatic reactions. They slow things down. They reintroduce a margin where thinking and choice can exist again.

That is not everything. But it is not nothing either.