Hope-Stealing Will Not Rob Us of Our Climate Change Victory
Introductory Series Post #11
We must be empowered by hope to fulfill our vision, purpose, and Major Goal: to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything. These eighteen words capture our vision-hope, which inspires our action-hope.
We need both types of hope to work together in a virtuous circle. We are inspired by our vision-hope, which leads to action-hope that keeps us moving forward to create our vision, which creates more hope and inspires more action.
But alongside or even intersecting with this virtuous circle can be a spiral of despair that steals our hope; it can rob us of our vision and stop action in its tracks.
We must call out and guard against hope-stealing.
This we cannot tolerate. We must recognize and call out hope-stealing so it can’t take any more from us, so it can’t lead to inaction from despair. We must stop hope-stealing before it can create such spirals that impede or even prevent us from overcoming climate change.
There can be all kinds of hope-stealing, especially since it can be different for each one of us. I currently see three basic categories:
hope-stealing personas;
hope-stealing ideas;
hope-stealing emotions.
This post is more of a heads-up about hope-stealing, a recognition that it exists. Once I have sufficiently established the hope we have from the Four Catalytic Sources of Transformation or the Catalytic-4 I’ll provide more posts on hope-stealing. We must have hope first. Then we must guard against hope-stealing.
For now, I’m flagging five hope-stealing personas to be aware of so that they can’t steal hope from you. The good news is that people who assume these personas can stop; they can even become allies. People are not personas; they may assume them, but they don’t have to be them. They can take them off and leave them behind. It is the messages that are the problem.
Five Hope-Stealing Personas
Doomsters — This persona hypes doom, fancying itself a “realist.” It can fool even itself into thinking that to wake us up we must all be scared to the point of paralysis. Or it can cynically hype doom to get ahead. And, of course, there are Doomster personas that are all points in between these two and mixtures of both. Here’s the truth: the reality of climate consequences and possible catastrophic tipping points don’t need to be hyped. As hope-makers and beauty-creators every step on our overcoming climate change journey creates a better reality and brighter future. Doom is not inevitable; it is not even likely.
Pessimizers — This persona looks at a glass that is three-quarters full and say it’s three-quarters empty instead. It has a pessimist bias, which is rampant in certain parts of academia and the intelligentsia, where it is falsely equated with realism and intelligence. These are fashionable, lazy assumptions that need to be called out. The pessimizer persona may cloak itself in the mantle of skepticism, but that’s because it doesn’t know the difference: skepticism remains open, but the pessimist bias shuts the mind since it arrogantly thinks it already has all the answers.
Fatalists — This persona genuinely believes our fate is sealed, whether because things have already gone too far or because we simply can’t stop climate catastrophe — it’s inevitable. We prove this fatalist persona wrong every moment of every day.
Deniers — The climate denier persona steals hope because realistic hope, the kind we must have, is based on the fact that the climate crisis is real. And for us to overcome climate change we must have sufficient numbers of Climate Movement Member-Athletes and Climate Action Supporters who move our societies to action at the speed and scale necessary. The denier persona can impede our growth, slowing down change, stealing hope. But as denial is proven wrong it can help lead to our growth.
Grifters — This persona attempts to con us with misdirection and false promises. Fossil-flacks are the most obvious examples — with BP’s “beyond petroleum” ad campaign as the poster child. As one of the disillusioned advertising gurus who came up with their campaign ruefully concluded: “They didn’t go beyond petroleum. They are petroleum.” Whether you are fooled by or recognize the con, either way these efforts can be quite anger-producing and potentially dispiriting. This persona is morally and emotionally toxic. The antidote is climate action with others as part of the Climate Movement.
Even as we need to be aware of hope-stealing so we don’t let it steal our hope, we cannot have an undue focus on it. We must not spend one more moment than is necessary to deal with hope-stealing. Every unnecessary millisecond is one less we have to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything. Every millisecond wasted is one less we have to make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful.
Awareness and action together are the antidote to hope-stealing, and this response can lead to even more action-hope. We must choose to overcome hope-stealing with action-hope as we make our future come faster and our world more beautiful. Join us!
If you are new here, check out the other posts in my Intro Series. If you like this post, please “like,” comment, and share. And thanks for all you’re doing.