A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is
that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that
giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In
fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or
something else to solve your problems — you ceased hoping your
problems would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the
Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the
Earth itself — and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those
problems yourself.
When you give up on hope, something even better happens than
it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And
there’s a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they — those in power
— cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats,
not through violence itself. Once you’re dead in this way, you can still sing,
you can still dance, you can still make love, you can still fight like hell —
you can still live because you are still alive, more alive in fact than ever
before. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope
was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who
believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who
believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you in order to
facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized
you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.
Derrick Jensen
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