The Virtue of Hopelessness [1]

(This essay was written more than a year ago. I couldn’t get it published other than on my blog; people apparently did not want to hear about hopelessness.  Reading recently George Monbiot’s essay, “The Earth Cannot Be Saved by Hope and Billionaires”, reminded me of it and I offer it again with a fresh editing.)

“The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term “inverted totalitarianism” in his book “Democracy Incorporated” to describe our political system. <…>

“The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.””

(Chris Hedges: 2011: A Brave New Dystopia, Dec. 27, 2010)

As “pleasant” as it is to read something real compared to the typical corporate media bullshit, I grow tired of these descriptions that are intended to be prescient, but are actually ordinary.  As Hedges points out, these are ideas from Orwell and Huxley written in the previous mid-century; hashed and rehashed thousands of times in the last 80 years. 

We have the tools, and the clear necessity, to understand these processes – for they are processes, not just the gathering speed of runaway human idea and action; though they are that also.  Our position is not improved by flinging up our hands in exuberant excitement at the recognition of our excesses and dangers, at the details of the insanity that goes for the governance and control of our lives.  Absorption in the details is also a method of control: it is arguing over the correct method used to turn the corner of a maze rather than creating a mental image of the structure of the maze itself.

Without understanding the processes that move the human experience, the most essential questions can get only the most cursory and arbitrary consideration: “Why would the systems of power develop as they have toward dominance and control of the majority population?”  I suggest that we are disposed to an intuitive understanding of status, self-interest and authority, but that these very basic, very human practices have grown as complex and difficult to comprehend as the intricacies of things like modern economics and transportation, once also simple and manageable with intuition.

The basis of my explanation is that normal human expectation and practice has gone mad.  I don’t mean beyond understanding, but that a disease or disorder model must be used for the understanding.  Seeking to find normalcy in the majority of our actions is like studying the dayroom inhabitants of a mental hospital for schizophrenics to establish baselines for normal human behavior.

We all (most of us anyway) have worked hard to be human.  That means expressing first our genetic potential of body and mind as we mature from zygote to infant to juvenile, and then actively struggling to be like those around us; but what does it mean for our efforts if those around us have as a goal to defeat the expression of our genetic potential?  What does it mean if those around us act in contradiction of the behaviors that would describe and define ‘human’ in any natural world? 

We know that people are more influenced by the people that surround them than by any other information source or design.  What is not clear, but has been the source of philosophical inquiry for thousands of years, is: What are the best or most appropriate ways to be?  That some ways are better than others has never been in doubt.  Our options, however, are constantly changing and by observing this fact, one basic principle is disclosed: much in the manner of ecological niches, humans will act to fill and extend available options to the greatest extent possible under the energy regime available. 

What, if any, option has humanity not pursued to extreme?  Stone tools? From rocks flung at rabbits, to the ceremonial obsidian knives of the Aztecs, to the uses of stone cutting edges in modern surgery no imaginable possibility has been left wanting.  Paper:  writing surface, missile casing, dishes, housing; the list would be long indeed.  Metal bladed tools?  No need to enumerate.  I think the point is made.

How about skills?  Surgery began, most likely, with removing surface-living parasites, worms and such (using exquisitely sharp stone knifes), proceeding to cutting holes in skulls and has arrived at the repair and replacement of just about every organ of the body at even the microscope level. 

Or human social habits, the expressions of which have had to adapt to the extremes of material changes and skills? The manifestations of status began with knowing grunts and a confident air, to which were added some difficult-to-acquire feathers and other trappings and now include personal jets and new knowing grunts.  Wealth was once twice as much as your neighbor – when your neighbor was everyone around you.  Today wealth is inconceivable accumulations measured against other inconceivable accumulations in an attempt to “have everything.”  Having everything has become a very complicated habit.

The point is that for all the struggling with the ideas of equity and justice, the maximizing of these habits is in direct conflict with the maximizing of status, wealth and power.  We have to realize that humanity will always fill the niches created by our pursuit of every process and discovery to the extreme.  And wealth and power are processes of pursuit; equity and justice are processes of restraint: there is just no symmetry here.

The solution, if that is the right concept, is to have both less concentrated and total wealth, more local economies and communities sized and organized by the capacity of human intuition to be an accurate tool for understanding them.   “If you build it, they will come,” is a deep truism. But there will always be some humans who will collect to themselves, no matter how crazy they have to become to do it, the power and confidence to raid stores of wealth, when they exist, and then use that wealth to raid again and again.  The depths of the distortion of humanity, the insanity, in this processes is incalculable. And it will not end until concentrations of wealth are reduced to levels that anybody and everybody can see, comprehend and protect.

An option (we always look for options) might seem to be to lock away wealth in some way; to make all wealth common property; for example, with each person getting some share that meets needs, yet not overexcite the acquisitive impulse.  But humans are deucedly clever and would in no time at all find their way into wealth stores.  It didn’t work for the Soviet Union, it seems like it will not work for Social Security given the present assault on that institutional concentration of wealth.

Universal privatization is simply giving in to the insanity and would be that last step before the fall: since we cannot prevent inequity or deliver justice, just put the peddle to the metal and go – an unwinnable game of chicken with biology and physics.

My answer is that it is hopeless, but hopelessness has never been a reason to quit.  I wrote, a while back, an essay in a similar vein that contains the story of the Battle of Missionary Ridge in the Civil War and how it was the very hopelessness of Thomas’ troops that won the battle for the north and changed the course of the war.  I think that is where we are in this time.  We must marshal our hopelessness, be of good cheer and get on with the struggle.

Hopelessness is not helplessness.  Hope, however, if it is required for meaningful action, can lead to passivity.  When real hope is not supported by reality, yet is considered necessary, then false hope, fantasy, is often attempted only to end up poisoning the human capacity to understand and act.  The virtue of hopelessness is not so much in the possible recognition of Reality, this may or may not be the case, but with the direct connection of the need to act with the action, regardless of the possibility of success.

One method of controlling people is to try to make them helpless through hopelessness.  But is possible, actually natural to the human mind, to use hopelessness as a source of strength.  It is my argument that we are in a hopeless time; the crumbs of hope are all illusions.  People grasp at them and are made even more impotent.  It is time to embrace our hopelessness and, like the men looking up at the cannons and muskets aimed at them from the top of Missionary Ridge, make it the source of our resolve.

[1] The reason that I am appealing to hopelessness is the depth of our troubles; humanity has never been in such trouble (at least not in 70,000 years).  One element of our trouble is the great divide between the economic elites and the masses; this way of formulating social structure has been with us for thousands of years, but has taken on new dimensions.  The human capacity to make biophysical changes in the earth’s basic systems has reached substantive levels and, without inhibitions, is exacerbated by social divisions.   The concentrating of power into objects and into economic designs is also unprecedented: bombs, machines and transportation systems. 

We literally cannot continue on as we are and we literally cannot stop.  Accepting the hopelessness and acting in defense of the species and the earth is about all that is left to us other than just watching it all happen from the audience.  If you want to wait until there is hope, you will wait in vain.