That’s not exactly how environmental activist Derrick Jensen puts it in the latest issue of Orion Magazine, but pretty close. There’s an online version of his essay “Beyond Hope” available here, and I urge everyone to have a look:
Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.
To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness… False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities.
This is powerful stuff and something you may not have considered. Jensen is saying that we have to embrace despair — despair being an appropriate response to the desperate situation we’re in — and then we’ll be free to act:
When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.
He’s speaking of the destruction of the planet, which obviously trumps everything else, including politics, but his argument speaks directly to something I’ve commented on at various sites in the progressive blogosphere, namely that the American experiment is over. I honestly believe it is. I have no hope that “netroots” or progressive politics or anything else will ever put the red-white-and-blue Humpty Dumpty back together again, if in fact it ever existed in more than myth. Stick a fork in us, we’re done, or rather it’s done, whatever it was. Once you accept that, change is possible. You’re thinking for yourself. Real possibilities appear.
You can visit site after site after site (“Zona Peligrosa” in the sidebar) and find huge quantities of energy being expended to promote hope in one more investigation, one more email campaign, one more general election, one more struggle to force the news media to report the truth — as if anyone would pay attention if they did — and I say this is bullshit. Furthermore, it ties us down. It keeps us docile and “civilized.” It promotes victimhood. To lose all hope is to die, but that’s a good thing, because what dies is false and ineffectual, and in “dying” we become free:
And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who thinks not what the culture taught you to think but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are.
We can’t afford to feel what the dominant culture tells us to feel because the culture is literally killing us and everything around us. You political junkies want to know despair? I’m one, and I can show it to you: Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden, etc. etc. Roll those around in your mind and you may understand what I mean when I say that hope keeps us bound to a culture of spiritual death. But beyond politics, after the full horror of what we two-leggeds have done and continue to do to each other and the planet sinks into your cells, WHAT DO YOU REALLY FEEL? Pointedly, I think the most important statement in Jensen’s essay is where he makes it very clear that love is the answer:
When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear. And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power.
If you can’t handle the apparent contradiction that we are well and truly fucked and that life is really, really good, then you’re not allowing yourself to be completely human. That’s what I take from all this. It’s what Jensen calls an “incapacity to love,” and I know exactly what he’s talking about, because the crippling trait runs right through my own life, yes indeed. Incapacity to love, rejection of love, denial of our own souls …
Hope sucks, love rocks. In this regard, George Bush may be the greatest gift humanity has ever known. Think about this for five minutes, and you’ll throw the teevee out the window. What happens next is up to you.
No related posts.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
John:
I’m a big fan of your writing who’s just recently rediscovered your site. I was particularly taken with this entry because I am tired of banging my head against the wall, hoping somehow, someway things will get better. I have a blog that pretty much does that.
But I enjoyed this different perspective so much I felt compelled to quote a little from it and link back to it. I hope this is okay, because it is my hope the few regular readers I have might really enjoy what you’ve shared here.
So strangely enough, by embracing despair as suggested herein, I find a new kind of hope has supplanted the old obsolete kind I was so desperately trying to rediscover sans success. Now if I can just get the wife to help me carry the TV out to the trash.
Excellent column. Thanks!
John,
True enough, but only up to a point. Even stripped of our illusions, we still have to live in the world. American exceptionalism may be over, but America is not.
What does that mean? To me it means that we have to make day to day choices, not all of them flattering to what we take to be our own righteousness. Much as we would like it to be, innocence isn’t really an option.
Perhaps love will do after all — as a governing principle. The devil, though, is in the details, which often get messy.
Well, America has always been more of a potential than a reality. Just ask an Indian or a black man or a trailer-park redneck. My point is that the current gang of pirates has blown the dominant culture’s cover to kingdom come. They don’t even pay lip service to equality and the Bill of Rights, they’re totally compassionless evil bastards, and there’s absolutely no one waiting in the wings to discipline them and set things right. It’s not just this country, either: corporate authoritarianism is a worldwide phenomenon. DESPAIR IS JUSTIFIED and ultimately healthy if it breaks the emotional dependence on Santa Claus, Jesus, John Wayne, and even ol’ Thomas Jefferson. My own current drug of choice, progressive blogs, is equally useless, and netroots are a joke, both of these mere dust in the wind of geological time.
This is where our ancient, outdated concept of reality has led us. It just don’t work no more. We either jump up to the next level, whatever the hell that is, or we disappear like mold drying in the sun, and the Universe won’t miss us even one little bit.
Oh, and thanks to both of you guys for your comments! I had no idea anyone was listening, other than the NSA. [snort] Wow, lotsa Johns here.
Onward.
Fuck hope.
“The decay and disintegration of this culture is astonishingly amusing if you are emotionally detached from it. I have always viewed it from a safe distance, knowing I don’t belong; it doesn’t include me, and it never has. No matter how you care to define it, I do not indentify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood, improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to. … Don’t confuse me with those who cling to hope. I enjoy describing how things are, I have no interest in how they “ought to be.” And I certainly have no interest in fixing them.I sincerely believe that if you think there’s a solution, you’re part of the problem. My motto: Fuck Hope!”
George Carlin
http://www.georgecarlin.com/brain/brain3.html
Thanks for posting this. I had no idea Carlin was this enlightened.
Hmm … what you’ve really described, John, is the ultimate Christian message.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!” Jesus cried on the cross. Then he released it all and died. Only by dying could he rise again in glory.
I may or may not believe this, but it’s nice symbolism.