8.1 Post-hope activism
It’s just a fact…
We’re living in a time when it’s getting harder and harder to hold onto hope about our future.
The crises we’re facing are multiplying and deepening, and the political shifts in our country and around the world are so very dangerous.
I remember when I started out as an activist back in my twenties, we thought we were saving the world. We actually believed we could do that.
But despite the victories we won along the way, the big picture kept getting worse until now here we are facing the very real possibility of extinction.
Activists have come up with hundreds of strategies and solutions that in theory could save us, but not enough of us are actually going to do enough of those things.
Which begs the question…
What happens to you if you lose hope?
And lose it so completely you can’t imagine it ever coming back.
Well…
You might get surprised.
That’s how it was for me.
I know what it’s like to drop down through the ninety-nine stations of hope from one hundred percent all the way down to one percent.
But that long, slow, ratcheting descent is nothing compared to the sudden shock of losing the last little bit of hope, because if you have even one infinitesimal shred left, that means hope still might live. Hitting absolute zero, though, that final extinction, was a crossing over.
I had been scared that if hope died, I’d turn into a despair zombie, hollowed out inside, just going through the motions day after day, doing nothing better than watching my soul die. But not so.
Here I was…
Caught between the impossible and the unacceptable.
I couldn’t go back to hope. It was dead and there was nothing to be done about that.
Yet…
I couldn’t let despair take me.
I just couldn’t. Life is supposed to be binary—hope or hopelessness, one or the other, take your pick.
But when hope was utterly gone, when I had nothing left to lose, a new story started, a third way emerged, and…
The death of hope turned into a generative death.
How did this happen? I can’t tell you because the sense of fight that showed up in me came on its own. I don’t feel like I had a hand in it. Something in me rooted and muscular, something all elbows and urgency, simply refused to surrender.
I remember the last time I saw a two-year-old discovering “no.”
Her determined pout and tough-guy posture made me want to take a step back. And yet there was this self-delighted hint of a smile that played across her lips from the beginning of her n-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o through to the end. She made the most of the moment. Her refusal was a stubborn self-affirmation coming from some place inside herself she didn’t understand and didn’t need to understand.
In moments now when despair swamps me, I hear a voice inside which plants its feet and stands its ground and says…
“Despair is not me. I do not choose for the world to be the way it is. If I were the Creator, hope would be real and love would be winning. That’s who I am. That person.”
It’s been decades that I’ve lived without hope. I’ve created a rich and resilient post-hope life for myself. It’s not an easy life, but this is where I’m at home.
And I’m still an activist. Though it’s different now.
I had thought if hope disappeared I’d have to give up on activism because what would be the point. It would become irrelevant, and then I’d have a big hole in my life.
But instead of doing without activism, I did an upgrade…
I traded in my old salvation activism on post-hope activism.
Which is the perfect match for my post-hope life.
It’s not a consolation prize. It gives me a deeper sense of meaning than my old version of activism ever did. It’s something I’m deeply grateful for every single day.
Now let me tell you what I love about it.
1. We get to replace hope with fight.
It was summer in San Francisco. We had marched, hundreds of us, to City Hall for a protest. As the afternoon was ending and our rally was winding down, a cold fog blew in. The final speaker jammed the mike against his mouth to blast out a warning…
“If you don’t have hope you won’t do anything!”
His tone of contempt implied…
“And if you don’t do anything, you won’t be anybody, not anybody worth caring about.”
I shrank into my jacket, not wanting him to spot me because I don’t have hope. Cheers broke out all around and I shrank more, then checked myself, “Wait, he can’t mean me because I don’t believe in doing nothing. Maybe that’s just his fear talking.”
I remembered that fear…
If hope dies, everything dies.
That’s how it looks from the scared side of hope. But that’s not what life is like on the far side.
So what if hope is gone…
You don’t have to stop being yourself.
You feed the hungry because that calls to you. You help victims of abuse because you want them to be okay. You try to change the government because you can’t abide policies that cause mass suffering. You organize against war because you hate it. You work to save the planet because you care about the next generation. You build bridges across the divisions of race because that nurtures your soul.
We’re told we’ve got two options—believe in hope or drown in despair. But there’s a third way. Just because hope disappears, that doesn’t mean we have to stop fighting for what we believe in. Even when we’re left utterly without hope, we still get to refuse, absolutely refuse, to surrender to despair.
And when we do that, we discover that our hearts are bigger than our despair. We realize that…
Who we are matters more than our fate.
We find out that no matter how doomed the world, no matter how close death comes, we don’t ever have to stop caring, because…
Love does not depend on hope.
And…
Activism does not depend on hope.
I remember the last time I saw a two–year–old discovering “no.” Her determined pout and tough–guy posture made me want to take a step back. And yet there was this self–delighted hint of a smile that played across her lips from the beginning of her n-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o through to the end. She made the most of the moment. Her refusal was a stubborn self–affirmation coming from some place inside herself she didn’t understand and didn’t need to understand.
In moments now when despair swamps me, I hear a voice inside which plants its feet and stands its ground and says…
“Despair is not me. I do not choose for the world to be the way it is. If I were the Creator, hope would be real and love would be winning. That’s who I am. That person.”
Sometimes people call us names, those of us who believe that extinction is coming. I used to call myself those names, but not anymore. I never think of myself as a pessimist, a cynic, or a naysayer, even though I have such a dark view of the future…
I’m not a nihilist—I’m a fighter.
At least in my own way. At least on my best days. And even on days when I can’t find my fight…
I still wish to be a fighter.
2. We get to upgrade our love.
My book, Asking More of Love Than We’ve Ever Asked of It, which is about upgrading love as the strongest, most sustaining response to the death of hope.
It’s such a sweet idea—to ask more of love—so why wouldn’t you want to go for it? Why wouldn’t you want more love, and richer, and deeper, if you can get it?
Except I’m not talking about doing better at conventional love bit by bit. I’m talking about taking a quantum leap, and…
Upgrading love itself.
Which is…
As profound a thing as humans have ever done
And as big a challenge as we’ve ever taken on.
Evolution teaches us that we humans are developmental beings. Other animals rely on instincts, but we have to learn and grow and develop in order to become fully functioning adults. Some of this learning is fun, but some of it is hard work. Even painful work. Really painful.
Still, if we humans are developmental, that means…
Human love is developmental.
And if that’s so, then…
It’s possible for us to upgrade our love.
Which means…
We can make of love something way better than the default which evolution gave us.
And I started thinking maybe I should stop trying to make conventional love work for me and play a bigger game.
Then finally, thankfully, quietly this question came and settled in…
What if I ask more of love than I’ve ever asked of it?
And now I had a project, a life project, a mission, and…
This mission was me.
Like nothing else had ever been before.
And now…
I had an altogether different relationship with love.
Proactive and hopeful instead of defeated. Now I could be an explorer instead of a schlemiel.
I wanted better love for myself. I admit that came first. But my happiness put me in a generous mood, and I wanted better for everybody.
And soon I found myself becoming…
An advocate for love itself.
I became ambitious for it. I wanted to be its champion. I wanted love to be the best it could be…
For its own sake.
3. We get to know the game we’re really in.
Radical means getting to the root of a problem so you can really fix it.
Post-hope activism means going down to the bottom of the human OS so we can understand how we have been made and therefore why we are in such trouble.
It’s in our OS that we find the deepest roots of our behavior, and there’s nothing more radical than that.
So I think of post-hope activism as…
Genomic activism.
Meaning we are designing our activism around the way the human genome actually works. We start from that deepest reality, rather than strategizing from wishful thinking.
How much do we want to know about who we really are? How much can we stand to know?
For most of our time on earth we humans have been…
A mystery unto ourselves.
We tamed fire, invented tools, developed language, created agriculture, and domesticated animals, all while knowing next to nothing about our inner workings.
We made our most important breakthroughs with big brains that were black boxes. We felt so familiar to ourselves in everyday ways, yet we each had a stranger living inside us.
But…
Maybe we’ve done well precisely because we’ve known so little.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors depended on the robust cooperation of the whole group. They needed everyone to follow the same set of social mores, and that being so, individuals taking deep dives into their personal psyches would have fractured that precious, precarious social unity and put the survival of our species in jeopardy. And maybe we’d have disappeared long ago and wouldn’t be here now agonizing over our fate.
But while knowing too much can be a problem, not knowing enough can be a problem, too.
St. Paul gave scads of earnest advice to his followers about how to behave, yet when it came to himself he wrestled with his puzzling lack of self-control…
“For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”
And now we’re experiencing St. Paul’s despair on a global scale. We say we want to survive but our behavior contradicts us…
The things we need to do to save ourselves, those we do meagerly, but the things which are killing us, those we do abundantly.
In just the last two hundred years, we’ve learned magnitudes more about our inner workings than in the preceding two hundred thousand, the entire life span of Homo sapiens.
It’s ironic that we’re getting this burst of self-knowledge just in time to say goodbye to ourselves.
What Darwin and his successors have discovered about human evolution and what therapists and researchers have discovered about human psychology is breakthrough stuff. It’s not that every bit of it has been accurate or helpful, but enough of it has been that we’ve got an unprecedented opportunity to know ourselves in the deepest way…
Down to the level of our operating system.
But do we really want to know? Because if we go down to the bottom…
What we will find there is the scariest place in the world.
The place where we come face to face with the source of human evil, and where we experience full-force the death of hope.
And why would we want to do that?
The ancient Greek philosophers urged their fellow citizens to “Know Thyself!” They inscribed that exhortation over the doorway of the temple of Apollo, where seekers went to find the famous Oracle of Delphi.
Some of those ancient guys were not really into self-knowledge. To them, “know thyself” meant you should know your place in society and stay there.
For others, though, it meant more like what we mean by it today—figure out why you do what you do and what might make human community work better.
But those intellectually ambitious Greeks could be happy in their pursuit of self-knowledge only because they weren’t delving down into the deepest wellspring of human behavior.
These days we’ve got New Age teachers who urge us to know ourselves, but they say it like this
“Know your true self.”
And what they’re actually telling us to do is cherry-pick…
Take all the things you like—caring, kindness, creativity, compassion—gather them together in a bouquet, add a bow, and call that your true self.
But…
Anything you don’t like—envy, greed, gossip, hatred—call that your false self, cram it into a garbage bag, and dump it.
The one thing I like about this reframing is its aspirational flair. You imagine the person you wish to be, then do your best to live up to that wish. If, however, you start believing this invented “true self” is the same thing as the whole of the real self that evolution has given you, you’re going to get into trouble because those rejected parts don’t go away. You can suppress them, but only for so long. Eventually they will leak out or break out and sabotage you.
But maybe that doesn’t sound so bad when you realize that if, by contrast, you venture down to your source…
What you will find there is your too-true self and it will shake you to your core.
So why would we want to go deep? Two reasons. The more we understand how hard it is being us…
The more compassion we will have for ourselves.
And the more we understand this damnable game we’re in, the better we’ll know how to fight for ourselves.
There’s the old saying, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
Our operating system is our first and greatest enemy.
Knowing it intimately gives us the power, not to play the game better, but…
To play against the game.
4. We get to replace tribal fundamentalism with trans-tribal values and actions.
Our tribal nature is what made us. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in small bands within relatively small tribes. And within our tribes we were super-cooperators.
That cooperation is what made us a grand success. That’s what gave us dominion over the earth.
But when we were dealing with other tribes, we became super-competitors. We considered them less than us, less than human. At the extreme we believed they were demons and we were demigods. We believed that other tribes were an existential threat.
And now in our time, this tribalism has become tribal fundamentalism. It’s an ideology, a compulsion, and it’s gone crazy. Mass authoritarian movements are using the form of tribalism, but are missing the substance. In hunter-gatherer days, at least tribes took care of everyone in the tribe.
But not these modern mega-tribes. They’re filled with hate and nihilistic rage. They’re bad for the people inside them and for the people outside them. They’ve become instruments of destruction. They’ve surrendered to death. They’re helping to drive us into extinction. They’re that serious.
So in the end, the tribalism that made us is now breaking us. And a key feature of post-hope activism is that we do our best to…
Transcend tribalism.
We do our best to reach across the compulsive divisions that keep our species fractured and contentious and battling each other.
We do our best to create a…
Trans-tribal way of life.
5. We get to adopt a new mission.
Instead of working on the impossible goal of saving the world, we get to focus instead on…
Taking the best possible care of ourselves and each other on our way out.
And if we did have a chance to save ourselves, taking care would still be the first step on that journey. So we’re not losing anything by shifting our mission.
Want more?
This page is just a quick summary. If you want more depth on post-hope activism, you can check out my book…
And my short book…
Both are free. And I consider each to be an incarnation of my my own personal version of post-hope activism.
