NOTE: This is a bonus email, part of a great experiment called “how many emails is too many emails.” If you have strong opinions, let me know. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy learning about Satan and his thoughts on hope as a discipline.
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Let’s Ask TV About Our Organizing Problems is an advice column for organizers, answering our questions about work by looking at fiction.
The Question: I have this friend. They’re the person who got me into organizing to begin with. They’ve done so much for the movement, and for me personally. But right now… they’re really pissing me off. I work with a group that is all volunteer, and it’s clear my friend is burnt out. They’ve started being weird and power grabby about different projects, particularly pointless ones, they’re disrespectful and passive aggressive to others in the group, and they’re just… generally unpleasant to be around right now, man. I tried to bring this up once, but they got defensive and shut down. I really care about this person. How do I talk to them about it without them freaking out or shutting down?
Bewildered by Bad Behavior from BurntOut Bro
Sorry about your friend, B6. I’m sorry for your friend too. I think I’ve been your friend for long periods of time.
Mariame Kaba, prison abolitionist and organizer, says “hope is a discipline.”
You already know this because all anyone on Twitter ever fucking says is “Mariame Kaba says hope is a discipline.”
And it’s true!
It’s incredibly true, and uplifting and inspiring.
I’m not smarter than Mariame Kaba, are you kidding me?
But what’s usually missing from this quotation when out of context, especially when it’s being used to avoid having to explain yourself further (which I’ve often done) is that hope has to be a discipline. because
hope is fucking terrifying.
When you don’t believe anything can change, when nothing can surprise you, you are impossible to harm.
You are impervious to every type of shitshow, bureaucratic clusterfuck, oppressive system.
Because everything is just like you thought it would be. Case closed.
When you don’t have hope, you don’t have to be afraid.
bonus: you get to be the smartest guy in the room.
The Jaded Professional, says TV Tropes, is someone who used to love their job, but after working some time, started resenting it, if not outright hating it.
What TV Tropes doesn’t say is that the jaded professional stopped feeling like they were able to change things.
So they stopped trying to change things. They started focusing on what they could control, the things that weren’t terrifying. Usually: getting theirs.
And therein lies the issue with losing hope, B6.
The issue that unfortunately, you are subject to, probably more than your friend is even aware of. When you don’t have hope, and you don’t believe anything is going to change, you take every single little crumb of the status quo, of How Things Are and How Theyre Going To Be, personally.
It’s easy to get lost in petty politics, power grabbing, being the worst, when you think this is all there is.
Satan gets this.
In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan alludes to this whole deal with hope, reversing it: “So farwel Hope, and with Hope farwel Fear.”
Satan, of course, only started Hell, a real startup venture, when there was no fucking chance he was getting back into heaven.
He literally created an entire freaking hell scape… I mean, a literal hellscape, to avoid having to deal with hope, with the idea that maybe there was a way for God to let him back in. So.
Let it never be said that a lack of hope, despair, can’t be productive.
Avoiding Hope is really motivating.
It sounds like your friend, regardless of his intentions, has lost hope.
He’s so consumed by the way things are now, without perspective.
It sounds like your friend can’t deal with any version of hope, any hopeful reality realized, and so he’s taking it out on you guys. And not doing a great job of leading everyone to that hope realized, because he doesn’t believe it can exist. He can’t believe it exists because it’s terrifying. Yikes.
There probably isn’t a way to talk to him about this that won’t have… a lot of feelings involved, B6.
Nor is there a way to ensure he will be able to hear you, that you will be able to stop any projections and defense mechanisms he’s created to keep himself safe from hope.
That will either happen, or it won’t, and that’s out of your control.
But what you can do is tell your friend that his behavior isn’t working.
Not just for him, king of hell + desolation, but for everyone else around him.
And worse, his whole jaded professional act is actively a hindrance to the world he wants to create, in theory.
Because in practice, he hates that world for being so scary.
…This is the kind of advice column advice that’s always a little bit awkward to read. “Really dude? You really just want me to say something that might actively piss this guy off, destroy our chapter, and make my life worse? You want me to do the thing that is the most conflict oriented of all? Is that what YOU would do?”
I mean — I hope so.
So that’s what I gotta say to you.
Because hope is a discipline.
Originally published at https://notesonfeednet.substack.com.
