For many in this world, there is a profound sense of hopelessness regarding the conditions they live in. Why vote? Doesn’t change anything? Why protest? Makes nothing happen. Why speak your mind? You’ll only be punished, ostracized. And so on …
What can I, me, just one person do?
So most of us consign ourselves to the situation we live in. We put our head down and ignore the rights abuses, the corruption, the fact that the world is not being made better for “us”.
I’m here to tell you - what you are experiencing is normal. However, it isn’t the truth. YOU do count and you do matter.
I spent years in Eastern Europe speaking to dissidents, wondering how they kept up their hopes under the heavy boot of their totalitarian keepers. Yet, many did. And they knew something profound.
Vaclav Havel, I adore. He should get a hundred post-humous Nobel prizes. I’ve absorbed all that he’s written, he’s a western Gandhi in a way. One book and one stream of thought of his I’ve always dipped into his - “The Power Of The Powerless”. It’s not a long essay but it bears reading and presses upon our current times of shadow totalitarianism.
In it, he remains optimistic that individuals, lowly, poor, controlled citizens CAN change the system and succeed in bringing to life at least some of the world they hope and wish to live in. Here are a few of Vaclav’s thoughts.
The Problem
It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to that automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they too are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in post-totalitarian societies.
The Struggle Within
There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.
The Awakening
You do not become a "dissident" just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.
The HOPE
I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from ‘elsewhere.’ It is also this hope, above all, that gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.
Havel always maintained “we the people” have the power. It is an illusion that it rests elsewhere. We just first need to refuse to participate and do the bidding of those who seek our obedience.
I currently at times, fall into despair. Despair over the roughshod lies of mainstream media, its propaganda. The despair that so many, so easily dehumanize our fellow human beings and even would consign them to hell. Despair that there is little search for the truth and questioning of the motives of authority.
However, like Greenwald, talking about Snowden says - there is hope in those individuals who live through and by acting on their deepest convictions. He sums things up well - how you DO have power. You just need to decide to hold it, embrace it.