Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [174]
But I’ll tell you something important: the Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, including those who went on what they thought were suicide missions, had a higher rate of survival than those who went along peacefully. Never forget that.
HOPE
Hope is the real killer. Hope is harmful. Hope enables us to sit still in the sinking raft instead of doing something about our situation. Forget hope. Honestly and candidly assessing the situation as it truly stands is our only chance. Instead of sitting there and “hoping” our way out of this, perhaps we should recognize that realizing the truth of our situation, even if unpleasant, is positive since it is the required first step toward real change.
Gringo Stars
Hope is the leash of submission.
Raoul Vaneigem
The cure for despair is not hope. It’s discovering what we want to do about something we care about.
Margaret Wheatley312
IT ISN’T MERELY FALSE HOPES THAT KEEP THOSE WHO GO ALONG ENCHAINED. It is hope itself.
Hope, we are told, is our beacon in the dark. It is our light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. It is the beam of light that against all odds makes its way into our prison cells. It is our reason for persevering, our protection against despair (which must at all costs, including the cost of our sanity and the world, be avoided). How can we continue if we do not have hope?
We’ve all been taught that hope in some better future condition—like hope in some better future heaven—is and must be our refuge in current sorrow. I’m sure you remember the story of Pandora. She was given a tightly sealed box and was told never to open it. But, curious, she did, and out flew plagues, sorrow, and mischief, probably not in that order. Too late she clamped down the lid. Only one thing remained in the box: hope. Hope, the story goes, was “the only good the casket held among the many evils, and it remains to this day mankind’s sole comfort in misfortune.” No mention here of action being a comfort in misfortune, or of actually doing something to alleviate or eliminate one’s misfortune. (Fortune: from Latin fortuna, akin to Latin fort-, fors, chance, luck: this implies of course that the misfortune that hope is supposed to comfort us in is just damn bad luck, and not dependent on circumstances we can change: in the present case, I don’t see how bad luck is involved in the wretched choices we each make daily in allowing civilization to continue to destroy the earth.)
The more I understand hope, the more I realize that instead of hope being a comfort, that all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as a belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular version of the same old heaven/nirvana mindfuck.
Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane.
I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying, “Hope and fear chase each other’s tails”—without hope there is no fear—not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is.
More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn’t believe—or maybe you would—how many editors for how many magazines have said they want me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to “make sure you leave readers with a sense of hope.” But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last