Revolutionary hope.
the courageous radical freedom to hope and the power of poetry.
“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” ~ Maya Angelou
الشعب السوري عارف طريقه الذاكرة الإبداعية
‘If I die before you, I entrust you with the impossible.’
via The Creative Memory.
Perceiving processes more complexly like that, inductively from many bit experiences, dialectically transcending reactionary iteration loops, requires more tranquil reflection than is easy in crisis times like this, but that’s why we should practice and grow these strengths in easier times.
One reason I keep persisting in caring about poetry, although I’m more trained as a scientist and writing poetry doesn’t come easily to me yet, is because it communicates the qualities of tranquil reflection, personal interiority and independence of mind, acceptance of uncertainty, etc., needed to exit the endless loops of highly predictable inter-group reactions which preclude other possibilities than the false dichotomies they present.
Paradoxically, hypocrisy and cynicism reveal the possibility of their opposites. Realising that collective despair and apathy are strategically induced by authoritarian political actors (across all states/ regimes, whenever a person wants to claim the power to be arbitrary) and almost unconscious collective movements (unconscious of the big patterns and processes that people are actually participating in) to maintain the majority of the public in states of active or passive complicity, so that the number of radical dissenters is small enough to keep suppressed out of public consciousness, reveals the possibility and power of deliberately strategically opting to hope and keep on trying despite everything.
If we ever reached a critical tipping point of enough people realising that hope despite everything is a revolutionary, courageously free personal option, always available, and a power transcending our own deaths (see Levinas for explanation), the whole system would suddenly transition to something truly new. It’s a subtle kind of power, hidden in its gentleness.
Refusing to accept the apparent physical impossibility and statistical improbability of hoping and of radically other possible futures can symbolically and purposefully change everything, potentially much faster than the normal linear and additive causal processes which we normally expect.
Western mainstream culture makes social symbolic and purposeful reasoning and causality virtually invisible, or relegates them to the private sphere of ‘art’ as mere entertainment for rich people with the free time for it, partly because of the Enlightenment myths about the individual & rationality, since also built into the mainstream economic ideology. Those two myths were originally socially selected because they were useful for rationalising colonial & capitalist exploitation, premised on White individuals’ ‘higher rationality’, which required a bullshit version of what ‘rationality’ is and an ontologically unrealistic concept of how the individual exists. It’s not that there is no rationality or that it’s not very valuable, but the myth of rationality is an irrational account of how human reason actually works. It’s not that there is no individuality or that it’s not ethically important, but the myth of the individual is an unrealistic ontological imaginary of what a person is, and that’s ethically tragic.
I can expand on the explanation in philosophical terms and reference it to better explanations by Zeynep Tufekci (Twitter and Teargas, 2017, chap. 5), complexity scientists incl. Stuart Kauffman (Origins of Order, 1993), and Aristotle (four types of causality), but the argument in that form can hardly ever reach many people, whereas a poem can non-literally communicate the same meanings much more concisely and at deeper levels psychologically, more intuitively and therefore persistently. Throwing big thick philosophy books at people is much less effective than a poem which can communicate as much meaning in a minute or two & at more levels.
Poetry is what frustrated philosophers do to try to get through to more people when too many have the patience for understanding of jumping fleas.
Such impatience with the process of understanding is mostly due to:
1) low self-efficacy beliefs (a facet of despair/ non-courage, which is also social environmentally and culturally conditioned, not just an individual fault, as explained by Tillich in Courage to Be (1952)); x
2) low tolerance for uncertainty with paradigmatically new information; x
3) implicit descriptive social norms that interpersonal communications by individuals with no conventional public authority position must conform to the consumerist standards built into big commercial social media of easy reading and simplicity, must be more hedonic than purposeful, like consumer entertainment products.
(It’s the same point as in Irmos 9 of the Akathist of gratitude for all of Creation, but the theistic language there would be an obstacle for many people, so Maya Angelou’s version in all naturalistic language is better.)
