Fréderike Geerdink
Do you know that look on a person’s face when you talk to them about politics and you say something that bewilders them because it strikes them as detached from reality? This look right before they change the subject because they know the two of you won’t meet? Maybe I have a similar look, but then being bewildered because what they say strikes me as too attached to reality – very well possible. Now I know that the element that complicates the conversation, is hope.
One of the most important things about political struggle I have learned in the last decade or so, is that it is the home of hope. Hope is not just some superficial or even void concept about the fulfilment of petty wishes for tomorrow or the day after, but an important driver in the social movement for change. Big changes for the better have always come from people who gave their lives to the struggle, from the abolishment of slavery and apartheid to the struggle of the suffragettes and the LGBT community.
Inevitable
It’s not politicians that make change. Politicians function within the status quo and in general work to preserve that status quo. Yes, eventually they formalise change into law, but only after it has become inevitable. After it has been made inevitable by a social movement that imagined that apartheid could be abolished, that chattel slavery would one day end, that women voting would become normal and being queer one day wouldn’t mean a life in the closet anymore.
It’s telling that when the goal of a social movement is reached and formalised, it’s not the movement that gets the credit for it from the establishment. Apartheid is a good example. The Nobel Peace Prize went to both Mandela and Botha after apartheid had been abolished. Why hadn’t the prize been awarded to the ANC, led by Mandela who was locked up for so many years on a prison island, years earlier? Because the establishment is so attached to reality that they resist change. That perspective makes them blind to even the possibility of another, more just world.
Smoothly
The people I talk to about politics and society are not in positions of power. But the people with whom conversations turn awkward, are more often than not functioning within the system rather smoothly. They have a certain level of wealth, often partly inherited, they have fulltime jobs in established organisations, a good house – sometimes two – and ditto car(s), they don’t belong to a marginalised group. Western society is more or less ‘finished’ in their eyes.
“Imagine”, I said some time ago to a small group of people, “we lived in a completely different society. People cared for each other in their communities, we all had a roof over our heads and enough to eat, nobody was very poor or very rich, technological advance was used for the greater good and the environment was preserved. Then imagine somebody proposed to introduce a system that produces extreme inequality, with most people being exploited by a small group of ever richer people. Starvation, pain and violence would be omnipresent and on top of that, the planet would be on fire. Would anybody get enthusiastic about such a change? Of course not: everybody would think it’s an outrageous idea. Yet this is the system we live in, and we accept it as normal.”
One woman said: “Oh please stop it! Don’t plant these thoughts in my brain, I can’t bear it.”
Utopia
Nobody can bear it. So what do you do? You turn it into struggle, and it gives hope because you have started to imagine another world.
This week, I am reading a (Dutch) popular-philosophical book about time which includes a chapter about hope. It focuses on the philosophy of Ernest Bloch (Germany, 1885-1977) and his most important work, The Principle of Hope. Hope is connected to time in the sense that the passing of time is a continuous approach towards new beginnings. Towards, no less, utopia. Imagining a world that doesn’t exist yet, changes your perspective on the world you actually live in, making you aware of suppressions.
In an interview in the 1960s, the author of my book writes that Bloch reflected on societies on either sides of the Berlin wall, which had just been built. Both the socialist and the capitalist societies – and Bloch had lived in both – have banned utopian desire, he said, rendering them mechanical, technocratic and inhumane, unable to change abuses and injustices. Utopian thinking, in other words, keeps us alive and without it we die. Even more so: Utopia may be an unrealised future which we can’t even describe yet, but as humans we are driven by the inkling of it and the desire for it.
Humanity
Isn’t that beautiful? Hope is in the struggle, but it is actually in all of us and together we must keep it alive to give the survival of humanity a chance. We struggle to achieve a utopia we can’t even imagine yet, away from suppression and pain, and we struggle against the mechanisms of power that want to destroy our longing for utopia for short-term profit – they are successful by pulling common people into the system just enough for them to stop seeing the need for change. Especially the idea that time is not running out in our lives at all but that time is pushing us towards new beginnings resonates with me.
Doesn’t it with you? Stop staring at me with that look! Will you join the struggle?
* Fréderike Geerdink is an independent journalist. Follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her acclaimed weekly newsletter Expert Kurdistan.
