Beyond Hope
The most common words spoken by environmentalists anywhere is, we’re fucked. Most of these environmentalists are fighting desperately, using whatever tools they have to try and protect some piece of ground, to try to stop the release of poison or even just to protect one tree.
The truth is no matter what we do, our best efforts are insufficient. We’re losing badly, on every front. Those in power are hell bent on commercial gain and most people don’t care.
But still there is so much false hope. That the system will suddenly change, or technology will save us or a spiritual being. These false hopes lead to inaction and blind us to real possibilities.
Does anyone really think that Shell will stop selling oil because we ask nicely? Or that DuPont will stop selling toxic chemicals because we ask nicely? If we only get the Labour party in parliament things will be okay. If we only pass this legislation. Nonsense. Things will not be okay. They are already not okay and they’re getting worse, rapidly.
Author Derrick Jensen encourages us to consider hope as really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line. Something that serves the needs of those in power.
He explains that if hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless. You wouldn’t say I hope I eat something tomorrow, you just will. By expressing hope, you assume something will continue and step away from agency.
I don’t hope that businesses stop using fossil fuels. I just do whatever I can to make this happen. If it doesn’t happen then yes, that’s terrible – but I’m not going to stop trying. Whatever it takes.
When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation, we are in will sometimes resolve itself, then we are finally free – truly free – to honestly start working to resolve it. When hope dies, action begins. It frees us up to realise life is still really good.
He has no patience for people who use our situation as an excuse for inaction. They will always have an excuse to call upon, revealing nothing more or less than an incapacity for love.
A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope. You realise you never needed it in the first place. You cease hoping problems will be solved and just get on with doing what it takes.
When you give up hope, you die. And there’s a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that those in power cannot really touch you anymore. You can sing, you can dance, and you can fight like hell because you are still alive, more alive than ever. The socially constructed you is gone.
The person left is the animal you, the naked you, the vulnerable and invulnerable you. The you who think not what culture taught you to think but what you think. The you who will fight (or not) to defend the land which your life and the lives of those you love depend on.
When you give up on hope, and by virtue are really alive, you make yourself no longer vulnerable to the fear that Nazis’ inflicted on the Jews or that the dominant culture inflicts on us all.
When you break the exploiter/victim relationship you become like the Jews in the Warsaw uprising. When you give up on hope you turn away from fear (and dangerous to those in power).
My reflections on Derrick Jenson's, Beyond Hope https://orionmagazine.org/article/beyond-hope/