I've been bouncing around with this for the last few weeks, ever since I read a couple of quotes from the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. The book overall had some interesting ideas about reframing the idea of trying to get everything done. Even though there were a couple of things that made it clear the author was not approaching things with an eye toward neurodivergence (his discussion of distraction, for example, only talks about the "choice" to be distracted, and not how some people's brains simply don't focus the same way others' do), I was feeling generally positively toward the book until I got to the last chapter, and read this:
"Hope is supposed to be 'our beacon in the dark,' [environmentalist Derrick] Jensen notes. But in reality, it's a curse. To hope for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment - the government, for example, or God, or the next generation of activists, or just 'the future' - to make things all right in the end...[It] means disavowing your own capacity to change things..." (Four Thousand Weeks, p.230-231)
This, in my mind, is beyond untrue - it's actively harmful. Hope isn't some passive idea of "maybe things will get better" - it's a force. It's an active verb - a person hopes for things, putting energy into the world by that action.
Hope is a tool. Sometimes you have to destroy the obstacles in front of you in order to build something better, and hope is what you use to do both.
There's a reason why some of the worst situations are referred to as "hopeless" - the idea of being without hope, being beyond hope, having no hope left, is terrifying. It's where despair lives, and despair is a power all of its own, with an agenda of destruction. Hope is what keeps it at bay.
Telling people to give up hope is telling people to give in to despair. In the book, Derrick Jensen is quoted again as saying "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." (Four Thousand Weeks, p.231) Why can't we do both? Why can't we both hope that the situation will not get worse, AND work to resolve it?
I understand that Jensen and Burkeman are pushing people to do more than sit back and wish for things to get better without acting on that desire, and that is something that can be frustrating when the world is on fire. Telling people to give up hope, however, isn't telling them to stop being passively optimistic - it's telling them to stop being optimistic at all. If there's no hope, then why bother trying to make things better?
Now is not the time to give up on hope. Hope powers revolutions.
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