We don't need hope. We need relationships that are worth fighting for.
“if we are to live with the fierce force of knowing anything that is sacred is worth fighting for..
bienvenido a la lucha..
WE are worth fighting for!”
— aja monet, the perfect storm (2023)
We often get caught up on ideas of ‘hope’. At this point we’ve probably all heard and read so many different angles on how this ever-elusive feeling, emotion, thought, construct, or concept can be imagined or approached. Everyone seems to go on about it and have their own individualised take on it. Some have resonated with me more than others. Some are radical and grounded. Some are pure projective fantasy. ‘Hope’ has also been heavily commodified. It comes to us pre-packaged, pre-formulated, and prescribed. But what is the emotional appeal or necessity of the concept of ‘hope’? What work is that doing for us, and why? Or, what work is ‘hope’ standing in as a substitute for? Is it a ‘privilege’ to sit and think about being hopeful or hopeless? Why do we tend to think of being ‘hopeless’ as a bad or undesirable thing that we need to expel from our beings with inoculations of ‘hope’ or elabourate ‘wellness’ regimens and rituals?
There really is a whole lot to feel hopeless about. It seems to me like an understandable and even healthy response to the conditions of our lives, the state of our worlds, and the over-arching trajectory of things towards the destruction of life on Earth as we know it. Is there even revolutionary potential in being hopeless? I feel hopeless that anything worth ‘saving’ can be ‘saved’ through the institutions of ecocide and genocide that preside over us, or through any continued investment of our beings, imaginations, and emotional worlds in their circumscribed systems of knowing and being.
Does our obsession with ‘hope’ even matter in the ways we think or want it to? It feels like a society-wide exercise in navel gazing that we’ve somehow agreed is worth a deal of collective-individual attention. It feels like the kind of self-indulgent myopia those of us who have been conditioned into de-communalised modern societies and further fragmented into isolated individualities sit at home worrying about until 3AM. We hope ‘hope’ will carry us through the night. I don’t think it will, but I know in my heart that if anything will, relationships and coming back together will.
“Our ceremonial offerings of hopelessness become the destruction of faith in the transformation of a social order manufactured on our destruction..”
— Klee Benally (paraphrase), No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred (2023)
Our hope or hopelessness only matter in how they enable or disable us to act in the world. Hope or hopelessness are fleeting and ephemeral qualities one way or another. They are not at all something reliable to hang the work of social and cultural change or the smashing of colonial systems of violence and control on. But relationships matter. They’re tangible. They are life. They are the fundamental means of change, not ‘hope’. They are worth obsessing over: how to care, how to tend, how to love, how to build, how to maintain, how to show up, how to bring together, how to be responsible, how to leave nobody behind, or indeed how to prevent them from dominating others. ‘Hope’ can unmoor us, relationships can ground us. ‘Hope’ doesn’t require any skill, ethics, or responsibility. Relationships require a constant development of various kinds of skills, ethical frameworks, and considerations and enactments of responsibilities. These are the difficult and messy fundamental building blocks required to create what hope’s allure falsely promises.
‘Hope’ will not win us back worlds founded on care. So why would we be sitting around merely hoping that something is going to change for the better towards caring societies, or hoping that it will be handed to us? We know that’s not going to happen! The storm of modern progress will leave nothing in its wake. Have hopelessness that worlds ‘otherwise’ will suddenly emerge from the entrenched systems of power of modern/colonial civilisation. Anything worth hoping for is not coming from on high. Hopelessness is dignity in the face of this annihilation. We create the ‘otherwise’.
‘Hope’ orients itself on a deceitful compass that knows no north. It points toward the promises of utopia inherent in the construction of modernity. Utopia is somewhere we will somehow finally arrive at by continuing to do all the things we do now that require, reproduce, reinvest in, and expand the power of social systems that erode life. There is no utopia, never was, and never will be. There are, were, and will be the realities of all kinds of earthly relationships.
Where ‘hope’ can quickly fade, relationships remain regardless of what side of the bed you woke up on that day (unless you go out and tank your relationships based on temporary states of internal weather!). Relationships are what can actually get you out of bed in the morning in the first place. If you’re mired in your individuated hopelessness, it can be hard to find a reason to get up. I say this without judgement, I can often find myself in that place of sluggish hopelessness. But I know the remedy for my hopelessness is not hope, nor do I necessarily want or need it remedied to face or take action for what gives us life and against what destroys us.
Relationships are the actualisation of what we want ‘hope’ to do for us. If we want to build ‘hope’, we need to deliberately refine our relational skills and build and deepen relationships of all kinds: social, ecological, ancestral, spiritual. Nothing will make us feel more hopeful in our bones than actively rebuilding the basis of communal being. Communal being, with all of life, is what makes us so fundamentally who we all are. It’s the absence of which that creates the kinds of bottomless voids we hope ‘hope’ will satisfy.
Why do you feel you need hope so much? What would you do with ‘hope’ if you finally got it?
We don’t need hope. We need relationships that are worth fighting for.
If you’re feeling deathly hopeless, please do not read my words as a diminishment of that state of being, or a discouragement to feel hopeful if that is what you need at this time. It’s normal to feel hopeless. I often do. Please seek support in some way. Don’t go it alone.
I once read that in POW camps, those who clung to the hope of rescue often didn’t survive, while those who accepted the harsh reality and focused on surviving day by day, through relationships and living in the present moment, found a way to endure. thank you for sharing the article.