Active Hope

Any situation we face can develop in a range of different ways — some much better, others much worse. Active Hope involves identifying the outcomes we hope for and then playing a role in moving toward them. We don’t wait until we are sure of success. We don’t limit our choices to the outcomes that seem likely. Instead, we focus on what we truly, deeply long for, and then proceed to take determined steps in that direction.

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Since Active Hope doesn’t require our optimism, we can apply it even in areas where we feel hopeless. The guiding impetus is intention; we choose what we aim to bring about, act for, or express. Rather than weighing our chances and proceeding only when we feel hopeful, we focus on our intention and let it be or guide.

Macy, Joanna and Chris Johnstone. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience & Creative Power, Revised Edition. New World Library, 2022. p. 37, 5 (italics in original)

Feeling in three waves

When I was very young, I learned that there are good emotions (loyal obedience, approval of authority figures) and bad emotions (anger, sadness, simply feeling down) and that I had to avoid expressing the latter.

That trains in incredibly unhealthy emotional reflexes. Before I have even properly felt what comes naturally, I have begun a frantic plan to behave the right way externally. So, for example, if I feel fear, even before I have fully felt it I am feeling guilt and shame about feeling the wrong feeling. Perhaps most oddly of all, when the underlying emotion is already more than I can handle, somehow the extra guilt and shame can be even stronger.

I have put years of effort into breaking that long-trained instinct to rapidly interrogate and suppress ‘wrong’ feelings. It has taken literally years of practice to simply be able to feel and identify my original feelings, holding back the impulse to jump immediately from feeling their beginnings to implementing an instantaneous response plan. Despite all this work, I struggle with a sense that all strong feelings are suspect or somehow the wrong ones, or that they are something that I can and should change. The ideas that emotions are good and bad and that they are controllable are both massively, tragically wrong but they are near-impossible to fully extract from yourself after being programmed in during childhood years.

That whole effortful process of questioning childhood training is a third layer. I don’t just feel my natural emotions with the destructive programming now removed. Instead, I feel the emotions that I have grown so much better at naming and teasing apart. Then I can’t help but feel the training from early childhood to never express the wrong ones, and to feel awful if I do or even for feeling those things in the first place. Then I have to go through all the memory and knowledge and experience about how damaging and inappropriate that training is, remember that emotions are a natural internal phenomenon not appropriately subject to the judgment and control of others, and work on experiencing emotions in a healthy way instead of through dismissal or short-circuiting.

Two things I suspect about this process are that it will never be entirely done, and that progress toward a healthier relationship to my emotions can be knocked back and derailed through exposure to people who assume inappropriate and authoritarian control over them. I can’t keep the old obedient mode available in a box for use with the people who demand it. The only way to get healthier is to commit to the gradual and irreversible erosion of that old trained mode, without reversing or abandoning course for the sake of demanding others.

Cause of stuggling

I think a root cause for why I have been struggling so much with everything in life is that I am desperately fearful and unhappy, and I don’t know what to do about it. Our civilizational crisis makes me feel more anger, sadness, grief, and isolation than I know how to cope with. Since I don’t have a stable emotional platform, everything else feels precarious and I am constantly both anxious and self-rebuking for having ended up in this situation and not knowing what to do.

This sense of profound and inescapable crisis traces back at least to my time in government, when I realized that it is in no sense capable, or even directed toward, solving our actual problems. Our government works for the car companies and fossil fuel companies, and hardly thinks at all about the long-term future. Life since has felt like more rejection by dysfunctional systems. These emotions are intensely alienating, since people are naturally drawn to and want to please people who seem to have it all figured out, while they are repulsed by those in despair.

The world in which our minds and emotions evolved bears little resemblance to the world which they are now trying to cope with, leaving us unbalanced and floundering. It is hard to even imagine what the way out could be, when it seems like we citizens collectively respond to each new challenge and setback with another round of self-destructive choices. We see the cliff edge approaching, and choose to jam down the accelerator even harder.

Related:

Controlling parents

I learned when I was very young — so young that I don’t even remember what age — that I needed to tightly control anything my parents knew about my life because, as soon as they became aware of something, they would decide what the right thing to do was, steamroll me, and insist that things be done in their way. I would explain my position, preferences, rationale. I would beg them not to take actions that would have predictable adverse consequences. Their implicit position was: “We know best, we have the power, and we get the final say”.

If I wanted to maintain any control over how a problem was solved, I had to solve it myself in secret. (Cue lifelong obsession with secrets, how they are kept and stolen.) Looking back, that did lead to a lot of cases where a bit of information could have helped me get through something tough far more easily. There were health issues where feeling ashamed of myself and unable to share anything sensitive with my parents led to me not finding effective treatments until late in adulthood. At the same time, my whole point is that such information was not available a la carte to be used or not based on my judgment. As soon as they were consulted, my parents took on final jurisdiction and authority. They would do what they thought was right, and often completely lie about it afterward when I brought up how I had understood the problem and what I had asked or begged them to do. If criticized, they would pout about it for a bit, and then assume they could go back to the normality of treating me however they wanted and expecting to be praised for it. To this day, they think most of my reactions are wrong and too strong and assume that normality is not just them getting to determine what should happen, but what I should think and feel as well.

Their dominating behaviour has not faded as I have grown up, and has had a massive effect on my psychology and relationships with others. I have a profound need for autonomy and control over my own life. It’s such a profound need that it eclipses the need to have relationships. It might be agonizing and sap my sense of self-worth, but I can endure with effectively no active relationships at all. I cannot function in situations where I never get space and autonomy to myself. Time with others is tiring, because I always need to be using a lot of my thinking power to run mental models of them and guess how they will react to words and actions (as my parents demanded of me in childhood and all through life, largely blocking me from being able to relax with them). I can do all that modelling and anticipation of others’ needs, but it drains me instead of recharging me. (Also unacceptable, since people who need praise always find it insulting if you experience their presence as a burden.)

These dynamics also shaped my view of authority as arbitrary and not grounded in practicality or ethics. People will exercise power to show people around them that they have power, or simply because of how it makes the person with authority feel, not necessarily for any good purpose or to achieve any good effect. Most leaders are substantially incompetent in many ways, and often use most of their time and effort to conceal this and mislead people about it. Most hierarchies operate to protect the higher-ups from the just consequences of their own actions, and to redistribute praise and blame so the heirarchy remains intact. With that perspective, I do not admire the institutions that dominate our society. Nor do I expect them to be able to resolve the crisis which our species is collapsing into more rapidly with each passing day.

There is a deeply engrained societal expectation that status equals goodness: if someone is a president or a king or a chief executive officer it means they act legitimately and with concern for the welfare of others. My experiences with governments and other institutions have created much the opposite expectation: leaders will put on a show of apparent nobility, but their moral commitments are always superficial and systematically de-emphasized in favour of ‘practicality’ or ‘efficiency’ or (behind the scenes) to preserve relationships with other powerful people. Our leaders are neither wise nor noble, but more like action movie stars who the public assumes are super tough because of what stunt men, editing, and computer graphics did.

I don’t understand why young people today are not in open revolt against our leaders, who are unambiguously destroying their prospects for the future. Part of that may come from the psychologically active remnants of the idea that status and nobility are the same thing. Part is a semi-apathetic assertion of the very opposite — that the system is so entrenched and exploitative that nothing can dislodge it or change things. Part is surely just that living through the catastrophe of our collapsing civilization has left young people less well equipped to understand their situation and take action about it.

Constant fear that anyone who you rely on will control and dominate you has many complex psychological effects. Most paradoxically, it creates profound fear about my own real self and its vulnerability to corrosion — the fear that complying with compulsion will erase me. It exhausts and infuriates me to have to mis-represent myself for social or pragmatic reasons, because it feels like giving in to the erasure of people who will me to be a certain way, whether I want it or not, and whether it is honest or not. This goes over really badly in an employment landscape where cheerful flattering deception of one’s bosses is the sine qua non of career progression. I can’t just ‘go along to get along’ or ‘tell them what they want to hear’ because that positions whoever I am placating as a kind of pseudo-parent with the same assumed right to control what I think and feel.

One weird historical echo is that my parents moved cross-continent from the east to the west coast to escape their controlling and disapproving parents. One advantage of my commitment to never having children is not having to worry about the next iteration of this progression from parental treatment in childhood to adult psychology.

Related:

Strong will

They had one too many divers. They had selected eight men and one woman, and the woman was unable to dive with a rebreather. This made her the weak link, the General and the Priest agreed. She needed to go. The Colonel wasn’t so sure. Yes, her participation would add a layer of technical complexity. She would be slower and burdened with more equipment. She would need more bottles for each dive […]

She had leadership qualities. He wasn’t sure if a sudden crisis would sap the motivation of the rest of the crew but something told him she would carry on in the face of any adversity. She was in her late 30s: feisty, funny, good-humored. On her resume she described herself as kind and happy. These were not the qualities of a person the Colonel would typically work with […]

Most of all he noted a trait in her that was rare in any of the operatives or proxies he’d worked with. He drilled his agents until they had a mechanical routine, because routine helps suppress fear when things go wrong during a clandestine operation. But the female diver didn’t suppress her fear. She was unafraid […]

The General re-watched her interview videos. He noticed one particularly intriguing exchange. In the footage, the Colonel was taking notes and occasionally reading out questions to her. After a while she became impatient: “Who is writing these questions for you?”, she asked. The Colonel looked up from his notes, surprised by the question. “Who is your superior officer? Is he the one writing you the questions? I want to speak to him”, she demanded.

The General leaned back in his chair. She does have leadership qualities, he thought. She’s very strong-willed. No one from the group thought to question the authority of the recruiter. No one, except her. And she not only challenged her superior, even before she was given a task, but she also wanted to go over his head. Her instinct was not to fit in, to become part of a team, but to test the limits of authority.

Pancevski, Bojan. The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions That Shook the World. Audiobook. Chapter 6.2. “The Divers: Cosmonauts of the Ocean” 15:50- 19:55

Proud Prophet and how nuclear wars end

The National War College is located inside the National Defense University, which is located just across the river from the Pentagon. Each day, to play the [1983 Proud Prophet war] game, the secretary of defense would pick up a red phone and call the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss various ideas in the different nuclear war scenarios put forth by [Thomas] Schelling. Schemes included everything from tactical nuclear strikes in a so-called limited nuclear war, to massive decapitation-event scenarios. There were exercises with NATO and without NATO nuclear forces getting involved. There were scenarios where the U.S. launched nuclear war preemptively, beginning with everyone at the Pentagon in a state of focused calm. There were exercises where nuclear war was launched in crisis mode. In full-on panic mode. With and without China entering the conflict. With and without the UK involved.

Paul Bracken, a professor of political science at Yale, was one of the civilian individuals invited to participate in playing the classified nuclear war game. The results were horrifying, Bracken says. Over the course of two weeks, in every simulated scenario—and despite whatever particularly triggering event started the war game—nuclear war always ended the same way. With the same outcome. There is no way to win a nuclear war once it starts. There is no such thing as de-escalation.

According to Proud Prophet, regardless of how nuclear war begins, it ends with complete Armageddon-like destruction. With the U.S., Russia, and Europe totally destroyed. With the entire Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable from fallout. With the death of, at minimum, a half billion people in the war’s opening salvo alone. Followed by the starvation and death of almost everyone who initially survived.

Jacobson, Annie. Nuclear War: A Scenario. Penguin, 2024. p. 174