When Hope Fades, Action Begins
Strictly speaking, this piece is not "original."
Parts of it are a direct translation of an essay called Beyond Hope from orionmagazine.org. But I have reshuffled the original author's content, order, and arguments, and folded in a lot of my own thinking along the way.
I have put the link to the source in the references at the bottom. You can click through to read it.
Losing hope is a good thing.
You have surely heard the story of Pandora's box. Pandora received a sealed box from the gods and was warned never to open it. But curiosity got the better of her, and she opened it, and out flew disaster, plague, and grief. Terrified, she slammed the lid shut, and only one thing was left inside: hope.
In that story, hope is humanity's one consolation in the middle of catastrophe. It is the reason we can grit our teeth and hold on through enormous suffering.
What strikes me is that the story says nothing at all about action. It never mentions that we might have to do something real to lessen or undo the misfortunes of our lives.
The more I sit with the idea of hope, the more it looks to me like a curse. A curse that keeps us from getting started. It belongs right where it was, sealed inside Pandora's box alongside disaster, plague, and grief.
Hope is our excuse to stand still and do nothing.
When we say we hope for some outcome, what we really mean is that we have given up on anything we could actually do.
I hope the world gets better. I hope there is no more violence or war. I hope the forests, the oceans, and the sky are protected. I hope for equality across gender and race.
What that means is that the world is still getting worse. Violence and war are still here. The environment is still being wrecked. The harm and the threat that grow out of gender and racial inequality are still loose on this earth.
It also means I do not want to lift a finger to change any of it, because some innocent fantasy still tells me things will turn around on their own.
I picture different cultures suddenly understanding one another, so there is no more war and no more harm. I picture everyone on the planet waking up as a feminist and a cosmopolitan, so nobody throws an insult or a punch over someone else's gender or skin.
But if you ask me how this fantasy actually comes true, all I can do is wave my hand and say I have no idea.
My fantasy is that the normal I live inside changes all by itself, for no reason I can name. Maybe the structure behind a structural problem just fixes itself overnight. Maybe everyone is suddenly "reprogrammed" into cultured, well read, peace loving, violence hating people. Maybe some new technology appears and solves in one stroke the thing that has plagued us for ages. Or maybe it is the deus ex machina: a mad genius, a charismatic world leader, a messiah, Santa Claus, an alien from the Three-Body world, showing up out of nowhere and miraculously saving us from our misery.
This false hope binds us tightly to the normal. And the normal is exactly stubbornness and indifference itself. We do nothing beyond keeping our small worldly lives running, naively expecting things to improve by themselves.
I would not say I hope to have food tomorrow, because tomorrow I simply will have food.
But I do hope my plane does not crash when I fly, and I do hope the bus I am riding does not lose control.
Hope and helplessness are the same thing. The moment I hope for some result, I have surrendered my own agency. I have given up every real effort to change the way things are.
The line environmentalists say most often is this:
"We're done for."
Do you really think that all our online appeals, all our pleas to stop clearing forests, stop poisoning oceans, stop poaching rare species, will actually keep those things from happening?
If we win the argument against these people, if we get behind the right legislation, will everything be fine?
Nonsense. Things will not be fine, and they are getting worse.
I often feel there is something despairing about environmentalists. They struggle and shout in despair. They reach for every legal tool they can lay hands on to try to protect nature, even when every one of those tools turns out, in the end, to be useless. Whatever they do, their very best is not enough.
They do not even mind becoming the target of everyone's anger. They do not mind looking hysterical, unreasonable, aggressive. They do not mind the accusations and the abuse raining down on them.
You will notice that public opinion online tends to despise certain people.
In environmentalism, she is Greta Thunberg, the Swedish girl who stood at the UN Climate Action Summit and cried out, voice shaking, "How dare you!"
In matters of race, they are the Black Lives Matter protesters who took to the streets with signs, hurled Molotov cocktails at everything in sight, and climbed the walls into the White House.
In labor disputes, they are the ones organizing marches and strikes, swearing they will hang every last capitalist.
In gender, they are the so called "radical feminists."
In LGBTQ+, they are the ones draped in rainbow flags, shouting "Love is love" on every street corner.
Doesn't it strike you as strange? The things they stand for are things almost everyone actually supports.
Very few people will say they are against protecting the environment, against racial equality, against labor law, against gender equality. Some may genuinely be against LGBTQ+ rights, but even that crowd keeps shrinking.
So why do we feel this pull to dislike them? Not because we disagree with what they are doing, but because we cannot understand why they are so extreme.
Sometimes we decide they have lost their minds. We struggle to explain why they are so aggressive, so combative, so unwilling to settle down.
So we cook up reasons for them: "foreign forces, cultural invasion, vested interests, either stupid or evil."
A human being is a creature that needs reasons. We need to give ourselves reasons, and we need reasons to make sense of what other people are doing.
When we look at the activists shouting fiercely online, we know they are educated, rational people. They are not mentally ill, and they are not bored troublemakers who love a good fire. So we cannot fit their rage and their wildness into anything we already understand.
That is why, when someone says these activists are just in it for themselves, when someone points out how they apply "double standards" and contradict themselves, we feel a small wave of relief. Oh, so they really are either stupid or evil. Got it, got it.
But the truth may be simpler than that. They have just lost hope.
Because they have lost hope, they know that if they do not do something themselves, nothing will get better.
At that point the social problem stops being "society's problem" and becomes, truly, "my problem."
If I hold out hope, I figure I only have to wait and things will sort themselves out. Someone will come along and fix it.
But if I have no hope left, I get restless. I feel a fear that reaches into the bone. I start shouting, running from door to door to spread the word.
A few days ago I listened to an episode of the podcast On the Media. The host and the guest were talking about mass shootings in the United States.
The episode worked through gun violence and gun policy in a clear, accessible way, with thorough analysis and some fresh thinking about the role the media plays in these events.
But the thing that moved me most was the title:
"Again and Again and Again and Again (and Again)"
A mass shooting does not happen once. It happens once, and again, and again, and again.
The previous episode was called "Again and Again," and it too was about mass shootings.
In the few short days between episodes, another shooting happened. More than one, in fact.
We didn't do new interviews, because honestly, we'd already said everything, and then it happened again.
Even through a screen, I could feel the despair behind that title.
We investigate and analyze. We cry out. We lobby the government. Our theory is just about perfect by now. We have done everything. We have nothing left to say. And the thing we are fighting to stop keeps happening.
Not once, but again and again and again and again.
Something wonderful happens when you give up hope: you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that letting it go did not kill you.
It does not even make you less effective. If anything it makes you more effective, because you stop relying on someone or something else to solve your problem. You simply start solving it yourself, whatever it costs.
I often say that when we face a social issue, we need a sense that it is happening to us, personally.
Lu Xun once wrote: the endless distances, the countless people, all of them have something to do with me.
Real harm and real suffering are happening in the world. We are the bystanders, the perpetrators, and the victims, all at once.
We cannot just stand there watching it happen and hoping it gets better. Someone always has to do something real.
When I look at a social issue and reduce it to a matter of government and the economy, there is a subtext hiding underneath:
Economic growth and cracking down on crime are the country's job, the government's job, the police's job. What does any of it have to do with a nobody like me?
Which also means I am still holding on to hope. I figure that under the current normal, I do not have to do anything, and the problem will be solved.
So the real question is this: under the current normal, will the problem actually be solved? Can we wait patiently until the day it is?
There is no objective answer to either question. People know different facts, carry different identities and histories, and so they answer differently.
Those who say "yes" still have hope, so naturally they go quiet and content about their own small duties, waiting for the problem to dissolve on its own once society develops far enough.
Those who say "no" have lost hope, so they start to act. They roll up their sleeves and tackle the problem themselves, defending and fighting at any cost.
The fights over social issues online are usually not contests of "right versus wrong." They are contests of "hope versus no hope."
The only question that matters is this: do we just maintain the normal, or do we have to change it before the problem can be solved?
"In my eyes, the two opposing positions are not equals. 'No hope' matters far, far more than 'hope.'"
A society cannot possibly be made up entirely of people without hope
Because it simply could never happen.
A society of nothing but the hopeless is impossible. If enough people lose hope, real action begins. Either the problem actually gets solved, or solving it gets put on the agenda. Either way, some people start to hope again.
And if even that cannot solve the problem, then I suppose the sun has exploded, or an asteroid has hit the earth, or a godlike alien civilization has invaded. If we ever ran into a disaster so vast that the combined strength of all humanity could not fix it, we would just have to accept that the society is finished.
(There may have been cases like this in human history, primitive tribes with no power to resist the arrival of modern civilization. But that is clearly outside what we are discussing here, and not a problem that arises in modern society.)
A society must not be made up entirely of people with hope
Because that would get the society wiped out.
For an individual, hope is what causes procrastination. It is precisely because I have hope that I keep waiting, expecting some ideal version of myself to show up in the future and finish my work. Scale that up to the group and the society, and collective hope becomes collective procrastination. But no social issue can be put off forever. If we shrug at the destruction of the environment, shrug at the gap between rich and poor and the inequality between men and women, then BOOM, the tension erupts into uprising, protest, revolution.
A society survives as a kind of organism because it can sense and solve the problems that matter to it most fundamentally. A society that cannot do this gets weeded out by natural selection, whether by invasion from outside or revolution from within. In the societies that survive, the members deemed "important" are the ones who, to a greater or lesser degree, carry out that function of sensing and solving the fundamentally important problems. We call them "the elite."
A society gets weeded out either because it is too dull to sense its problems or because it is too feeble and hesitant to solve them. And there is a frightening case in between: the members who can actually sense and solve the fundamentally important problems are not regarded as important members, so their voices go unheard. This is usually called elite displacement, where the true elite never reach the social standing of the elite.
Žižek put it this way about Greta Thunberg: "I support this movement. Greta's stubbornness and her refusal to be polite are themselves part of the message she is trying to send."
We need some people to stand up and keep telling us, over and over, that we have to act, that we have to change, because only then do the problems get solved and the society move forward.
Once we actually have some power to solve a problem, we no longer need hope. We only need to act.
We no longer hope the giant panda survives.
We make sure the giant panda survives.
We no longer hope for world peace.
We make sure of world peace.
We no longer hope for gender equality.
We make sure of gender equality.
We stop hoping for help from outside. And once we stop hoping the bad situation will somehow right itself, we are finally free to do what we can.
"When hope fades, action begins."
References
[1] Beyond Hope by Derrick Jensen
[2] Beyond Hope | A Strange Journey Through Life 49 by Weichen
[3] Fundamental Questions of Behavioral Social Science by Wang Dingding
当希望破灭时，行动就开始了
严格来说，这篇文章并不是「原创」的。
文中部分内容是 orionmagazine.org 的文章《Beyond Hope》的直接翻译，但我对原作者的内容、顺序、观点都进行了调整，参杂进了大量我自己的观点和理解。
我把这篇文章的原文链接放在了文末「参考资料」处，你可以点击那个链接来访问。
希望破灭是一件好事。
你一定听说过潘多拉魔盒的故事，潘多拉从众神手中得到了一个密封的盒子，并被告知永远不要打开它。但是，在强烈的好奇心的驱使下，她打开了这个盒子，灾难、瘟疫和悲伤飞出了盒子。惊恐万分的潘多拉急忙关上了盒子，而盒子里只剩下一样东西：「希望」。
在这个故事里，希望是人类在灾难中唯一的安慰，是我们面对极大的苦难仍然能够顽强坚持的原因。
有意思的是，这个故事里丝毫没有提及到「行动」，没有提到我们需要做一些实际的事情来减轻或消除生活中的不幸。
我越了解「希望」，我越觉得它是一种诅咒——阻止我们开始行动的诅咒。它应该一直和灾难、瘟疫、悲伤一起被关在潘多拉的魔盒里。
「希望」是我们固步自封，无所作为的理由。
当我们说希望得到某些结果，这就意味着我们放弃了任何你能做的事情。
我希望世界变得更好， 我希望不再有暴力和战争， 我希望森林海洋和天空得到保护， 我希望性别和种族的平等。
这意味着世界还在变糟、暴力和战争还存在、环境仍然遭到破坏、由性别和种族的不平等导致的暴力和威胁还存在于这片大地上。
这还意味着我不想做任何事情来改善这个局面，因为我对于局势的好转还抱有一份纯真的幻想。
我幻想着不同文化突然理解了彼此，所以不再有战争和伤害了；我幻想着整个世界上的人都成为了女权主义者和世界主义者，不再会有人因为对方的性别和肤色出言不逊、大打出手。
但如果你问我：这个幻想如何成为现实呢？我只能摆摆手，说不知道。
我的幻想是我所身处的「常态」莫名其妙地发生改变。或许是结构性问题的那个结构突然之间就变好了，或许是所有人突然都被"洗脑"成了有教养、有知识、爱好和平、厌恶暴力的人，或许是出现了什么新的科学技术突然一下子解决了困扰我们已久的问题，或许是机械降神（deus ex machina）——一个科学怪才、卡里斯马型的世界领袖、弥赛亚救世主、圣诞老人、三体人外星人，突然出现而且神奇地救我们于苦难之中。
这份虚假的希望把我们和「常态」紧密连接在一起。「常态」就是顽固不化和无动于衷本身，我们除了维持自己的世俗生活之外什么都不做，天真地期望事情会自己变好。
我不会说我「希望」明天能有饭吃，因为我明天就是「会」有饭吃。
但我希望我坐飞机的时候飞机不要坠毁，我希望我坐的公交车不会失控。
「希望」和「无能为力」是一回事情，我希望得到一些结果的时候，我放弃了我的主观能动性，放弃了一切实际做些什么去改变现状的努力。
环保主义者最常说的一句话是：
「我们完蛋了。」
难道我们天天在网上呼吁不要砍伐森林，不要污染海洋，不要盗猎珍惜物种，这些事情真的就不会发生吗？
我们在言论上打败这些人，我们支持那个立法，一切就会好起来吗？
胡说八道，事情不会好起来的，而且情况越来越糟。
我常常觉得环保主义者们身上带着一些绝望的气质，ta们绝望地进行着抗争和喊叫，ta们拿着手上能找到的一切法律工具来试图保护自然，哪怕任何法律工具最终都是无效的。但无论环保主义者做什么，ta们的最大努力都是不够的。
ta们甚至不介意变成众矢之的，不介意让自己看起来歇斯底里、无理取闹、咄咄逼人，不介意漫天飞舞的指责和谩骂。
你会发现互联网舆论会讨厌特定的一些人。
在环保主义上，ta是在联合国气候行动峰会上情绪激动地高喊 "How dare you！"的瑞典环保少女 Greta Thunberg 。
在种族议题上，ta是举牌走上街头，拿燃烧瓶砸向视野所及一切，爬墙攻入白宫的 Black Lives Matter 运动者。
在劳工矛盾上，ta组织游行罢工，扬言要把所有的资本家全都吊死。
在性别议题上，ta是那些所谓的"极端女权主义者"。
在LGBTQ+上，ta披着彩虹旗在街头巷尾喊"Love is love"。
你不觉得很奇怪吗？ta们所支持的东西，其实绝大多数人都是支持的。
很少有人说自己不支持环保，不支持种族平权，不支持劳动法，不支持性别平等。或许有人真的不支持LGBTQ+，但现在也越来越少了。
但是为什么我们会有一种讨厌ta们的倾向呢？不是因为我们不支持ta们正在干的事情，而是我们不理解ta们为什么如此极端。
有时候我们觉得ta们疯了，我们很难解释ta们为什么这么咄咄逼人，为什么这么具有攻击性，为什么这么不安分。
所以我们会给ta们找很多理由——「境外势力，文化入侵，既得利益，非蠢即坏」。
人是需要理由的生物，不仅自己需要给自己理由，也需要理由来理解别人在干的事情。
面对那些在网上激烈发声的 activists ，我们知道ta们都是受到过良好教育的理性人，没有精神疾病，也不是看热闹不嫌事大的乐子人。所以我们无法在既有的认知里去理解ta们的愤怒和疯狂。
所以当有人说ta们是为了自己的利益的时候，当有人批评ta们如何"双标"，如何前后不一致的时候，我们会得到一种安心的感觉——哦，原来ta们非蠢即坏呀，懂了懂了。
而事实上，ta们可能只是丧失了希望而已。
因为失去了希望，所以ta们知道，如果自己不做些什么的话，事情就不会变好了。
这个时候，社会问题不再是「社会的问题」，而真正变成了「我的问题」。
如果我对事情抱有希望，我会觉得我只要等待，事情就会自然变好，会有人来解决它。
而如果我对事情没有希望，我就会焦躁不安，我会感到深入骨髓的恐惧，我就会高声大喊，奔走相告。
前几天我听了一期「On the Media」播客节目，主持人和嘉宾讨论的话题是美国的大规模枪击案件。
这期节目深入浅出地讨论了枪支暴力和持枪政策，对媒体舆论在枪支暴力事件当中的作用和影响有详尽的分析和新颖的观点。
但最打动我的，却是它的标题 ——
「Again and Again and Again and Again (and Again)」
大规模枪击的发生不只是一次，而是一次、又一次、又一次、又一次。
上一期节目叫做 「Again and Again」，也是聊大规模枪击事件。
节目更新间隔的短短几天时间里，又有枪击案发生了，而且不止一起。
我们没有去进行新的采访，因为说实话，我们什么都说过了，然后事情又发生了。
隔着屏幕，我都能体会到这个标题背后的绝望感。
我们调查分析，我们大声疾呼，我们游说政府，我们的理论已经臻于完美了，我们什么都做了，我们已经没有什么可以讲的东西了，但我们所反对的阻止的事情还在发生。
不止一次，而是一次一次一次一次又一次。
当你放弃希望时，就会发生一件美妙的事情，那就是你意识到你从一开始就不需要它。你意识到放弃希望并没有杀死你。
这甚至没有降低你的效率。事实上，它让你更有效，因为你不再依赖某人或其他东西来解决你的问题，你只是开始不惜一切代价自己解决这些问题。
我常说，面对社会议题，我们要有「切身感」。
鲁迅先生有言：无尽的远方，无数的人们，都与我有关。
世界上正在发生真实的侵害和苦难，我们是旁观者、施暴者、也是受害者。
我们不能眼巴巴地望着事情发生，希望它变好，总有人需要做些实际的事情。
如果我面对一个社会议题，我仅仅把它归结于政府经济问题，那么暗示着这样的一个潜台词 ——
经济发展和扫黑除恶是国家的事情，是政府的事情，是公安机关的事情，和我一介草民有什么关系？
这也意味着我还抱有「希望」，我觉得在现有的「常态」下，我不需要做什么事情，问题会被解决。
所以真正的问题是：在现有的常态下，问题真的会被解决吗？我们可以耐心等待到问题被解决的那一天吗？
这两个问题没有所谓的客观答案，对事实的了解情况不同，个人身份和经历的不同，都会导致答案的差异。
那些回答 "是的" 的人，抱有希望，ta们自然就安静而心安理得地做好自己的分内事，等候社会发展之后问题的自然解决。
那些回答 "不是" 的人，希望破灭，ta们会开始行动，亲自上手解决问题，不惜一切代价进行保卫和抗争。
网络空间中的社会议题纷争，往往并不是「对与错」的竞争，而是「有希望和无希望」的竞争。
唯一有意义的议题是：我们究竟是维持常态就好，还是必须进行变革，才能解决问题？
「在我眼里，两种对立的意见并不是对等的关系，『无希望』远远比『有希望』重要得多。」
一个社会「不可能」全是无希望的人
因为这根本没有发生的可能性。
全是无希望的人是不可能发生的事情。因为如果足够多的人失去希望，那么真正的行动会开始。要么问题真正被解决，要么问题的解决被提上日程，总而言之，一部分人会重新抱有希望。
如果这都没有办法解决问题的话，看来是太阳爆炸了，或者一个小行星撞上了地球，或者神一样的外星文明入侵了，如果真的遇到这种集齐了全部人类的力量都没法解决的大难题的话，那就只能接受社会被淘汰之事实了。
（人类史上或许确有这样的案例，原始部落面对现代文明的入侵毫无抵抗之力，但这显然超出了我们的讨论范围，也不是现代社会中会出现的问题。）
一个社会「不可以」全是有希望的人
因为这会导致社会被淘汰。
对个体而言，希望是拖延症的成因，正是因为有希望，所以我仍然翘首等待，希望一个理想的自我在未来降临，完成我的工作。到了集体和社会的层面，群体性的希望导致的是集体性的拖延，而没有一个社会议题是可以被无限拖延下去的，如果我们漠视对环境的破坏，漠视社会中的贫富不均和男女不平等，BOOM！矛盾爆发成起义、游行和革命。
社会作为一个个体之所以可以存续，是因为它可以感知并求解具有根本重要性的社会问题，无法做到这一点的社会会被自然选择所淘汰（外部入侵或内部革命）。存续下来的社会中那些被认为"重要的"社会成员，或多或少地履行了"感知并求解具有根本重要性的社会问题"这一社会职能，ta们被称为"精英"。
因为愚钝而无法感知社会问题，或因为无能和迟疑无法求解社会问题，都会导致社会被淘汰。有一种很可怕的情况是：有能力感受并求解具有根本重要性的社会问题的社会成员并未被认为是重要的社会成员，因此ta们的声音不被社会倾听。这一现象，通常被称为「精英错位」（真正的精英不能获得精英之社会地位）。
齐泽克这样评论瑞典环保少女 Greta Thunberg ："我支持这个运动，Greta 的固执和不通人情正恰恰是她想传达出来的信息的一部分。"
需要有一些人站出来，时时刻刻告诉我们必须要行动，必须要做出改变，这样才能解决问题，社会进步。
当我们真的有一些能力来解决问题的时候，我们就不再需要「希望」了，我们只需要去「行动」。
我们不再「希望」大熊猫存活，
而是我们「确保」大熊猫存活。
我们不再「希望」世界和平，
而是我们「确保」世界和平。
我们不再「希望」性别平权，
而是我们「确保」性别平权。
我们不再希望获得来自外部的援助，当我们不再希望糟糕的情况会以某种方式自行变好，我们终于可以自由地做我们能做的事情。
「当希望破灭时，行动就开始了。」
参考资料
【1】《Beyond Hope》 作者：Derrick Jensen
【3】《行为社会科学基本问题》作者：汪丁丁