Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world

July 24, 2022 5:27 PM

Angry optimism. The "never give up" frog. Harm Reduction. Octavia Butler. Stalemate. Etc. Examples within. Please add to my collection.

- I was in a class in elementary school that had a poster that said "Never Ever Give UP" and it had a drawing of a frog being eaten by a bird, except the frog was choking the bird.

- this comment

- If you put two people who don't play much chess together, the one that's winning will encourage the one that's losing to give up. But the losing opponent can usually force a tie.

- pretty much anything by Octavia Butler

-

I do think it’s important, but you do have to begin and hold on to the idea that this is a massive problem, that there is going to be suffering and disaster. Then, the optimism involved in there is just a very angry optimism. Slavoj Žižek and other people have talked about cruel optimism: “Oh, things will be alright.” And then you ignore the poor, the disasters, it’s a prosperous person saying “things will be alright.” This simple optimism that they call cruel optimism, of course makes me think, “Maybe I’m part of that. Maybe my positive science-fiction stories are part of a cruel optimism, and we’re heading towards a disaster so black, so bad, that I’m just part of a false consciousness, part of the zombies walking to the edge of the cliff type of thing.”

I’ve had to think about that and I think there is a difference between cruel optimism and angry optimism, where you have the Gramscian pessimism in the intellect but also optimism of the will. Use the optimism as a club, to beat the crap out of people who are saying that we are doomed, who are saying let’s give up now. And this “let’s give up now” can be very elaborated academically. You can say: “Well, I’m just into adaptation rather than mitigation, there’s nothing we can do about climate change, all you can do is adapt to it.” In other words, stick with capitalism, stick with the market, and don’t get freaked out. Just adapt and get your tenure because it is usually academics who say it, and they’re not usually in design or architecture, they aren’t really doing things. They’re usually in philosophy or in theory. They come out of my departments, they’re telling a particular story and I don’t like that story. My story is: the optimism that I’m trying to express is that there won’t be an apocalypse, there will be a disaster. But after the disaster comes the next world on.

-Kim Stanley Robinson

posted by aniola to Grab Bag (19 answers total)

This book is based on a real change in a committed racist, in Durham NC in the 1970's. It came about because of a confluence of the efforts of a number of good people, including the central figures.
posted by amtho at 6:32 PM on July 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Watch the documentary Crip Camp. It's about the summer camp that spawned the small group of activists who built the disability rights movement in the US and got the ADA passed.
posted by meemzi at 6:52 PM on July 24, 2022 [9 favorites]

James Baldwin:

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.

The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

posted by earth by april at 6:54 PM on July 24, 2022 [8 favorites]

Mariame Kaba's statement that "hope is a discipline." This is not quite optimism, but she talks about hope as a practice rather than emotion. And about taking the long view and the freedom that can come from that perspective.

Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark is very much about this.
posted by earth by april at 7:02 PM on July 24, 2022 [7 favorites]

Marge Piercy's The Low Road:

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again and they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean,
and each day you mean one more.

Vaclav Havel:

Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpromising the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, 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.

posted by zamboni at 7:36 PM on July 24, 2022 [5 favorites]

This Tumblr thread.
posted by foxtongue at 8:01 PM on July 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

I tend to go with a simple, fuck off the future isn't written
posted by philip-random at 8:17 PM on July 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future, because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.

Noam Chomsky
posted by armoir from antproof case at 8:52 PM on July 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

This blog post.
posted by foxtongue at 9:36 PM on July 24, 2022

"As long as you’re fascinated and as long as you keep on fighting the things you think are wrong, you’re living." --Edna Ferber, Giant
posted by humbug at 5:06 AM on July 25, 2022

Slavoj Žižek and other people have talked about cruel optimism

Just to make sure that credit goes where credit is due, "cruel optimism" was coined by the late Lauren Berlant
posted by Morpeth at 5:29 AM on July 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

I read Oliver Burkeman's "What if this situation is even worse than I thought?" piece a few weeks ago and has powerful 'actually, the fight's lost, but we will keep fighting anyway' energy.
posted by punchtothehead at 9:19 AM on July 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

“TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.
If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
~Howard Zinn
posted by mareli at 2:32 PM on July 25, 2022

Terry Pratchett. In general, there's an element of what my friends and I call militant kindness. "Good ain't nice" and "Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world's greatest creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge" because “You hold that anger...Cup it in your heart, remember where it came from, remember the shape of it, save it until you need it. But now the wolf is out there somewhere in the woods, and you need to see to the flock.”
posted by geek anachronism at 4:13 AM on July 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

There's a song on Peter Gabriel's album Us called "Fourteen Black Paintings" which may work here. Here are the lyrics in full:

From the pain come the dream
From the dream come the vision
From the vision come the people
And from the people come the power
From this power come the change

posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:22 AM on July 26, 2022

The concept of hopepunk might help in your search, perhaps
posted by librarina at 12:40 PM on July 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Stacey Abrams (Stacey Abrams on Twitter (alternative link), Stacey Abrams on Instagram (alternative link)) and Rev. William Barber II and Moral Mondays.
posted by kristi at 4:48 PM on July 26, 2022

Response by poster: “If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a room with a mosquito.”
posted by aniola at 8:20 AM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks for all these, everyone. I really enjoyed reading them.
posted by aniola at 8:20 AM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]