#richforredistribution: The Pedagogy of Hope

There’s no two ways about it, humans: if you follow the neoliberal capitalist conclusions to their ends, there will be an end. That’s the problem. There’s little value to imagination, ingenuity, or creativity in the closed-loop of profit-as-life; it’s too difficult to tax serendipity. So, keep the 99% busy non-living in the doldrums and keep the money coming in for the 1%…

… sounds hopeless.

It is.

Change it.

If you were a dog, you’d know that the best things in life really do just sort of “happen” to us. You wouldn’t already be sorry about tomorrow. You wouldn’t be mired in yesterdays. You would simply be happy to be running… and “even if only on three legs” wouldn’t enter your mind.

I can hear some human’s fatalistic reply, “But dogs need money to live, Ada, and where do you think your food comes from?!” This one-uppedness certainly underscores the whole point of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Hope. In the end, all arguments cease when the reality of our neoliberal capitalist existence slam the door on alternate possibilities. That’s the problem.

Most of the 99% has trouble imagining what an alternative could even look like. In the end, it’s the neocapitalist conclusion that mayhem will probably ensue.

And that’s why hope screams the loudest… the door is shut to all but mayhem and fatalism. “Speak friend and enter” happens next in the storyline. Beyond the world of the already-written, beyond tomorrow’s gadgets and the best shock collar ever invented, beyond the world as we now know it– out there is everything else, the everything that can only be imagined… and only by a human who has come to know that not all of existence has been written already.

daydreaming... not a sin. jus sayin.

These are the fruits, the nuts. (Humans are fond of using healthy foods as pejorative terms for other humans, I’ve noticed.) Freire calls them the dreamers. The ones who don’t care so much about whether utopia exists as they do in the struggle that it takes to just become aware that it could exist. For who hopes for that which he or she already has? 

It is the fact itself– the fact that life is not finished–which gives us hope. Or, for BSG heroes, “This has all happened before, but it doesn’t have to all happen again.” And, for the record, this isn’t a no-holds-barred humanism. It’s an honest, radical acceptance that we have something to be optimistic about if we indeed decide that we have something to be optimistic about.

Even the most oppressed person cannot have the time-space continuum taken from them. There is always the certainty of hope because there is always the certainty of one more moment yet to be.

And, as the 99% know, it’s that awareness of something more which actually drives hope. The greater the gulf, the more potential hope has of existing, and the greater its intensity can be. But what about the 1%? Can they hope, too? Is there an chord of sympathy that can be struck?

Perhaps. Freire says it this way: “the hope of remaking the world is indispensable in the struggle of the oppressed…” The oppressed can hope for a world of solidarity in which the rich for redistribution go beyond statements… to the point of trust. Hope and trust are so intimately linked, but Freire says little of trust directly. A dog has got to wonder why!

trust can be so hard...

To trust, you must believe that the other party has your best interest in mind and that they are competent. It makes hope so much easier when you have allies you can trust. Cheers to those within the 1% who are willing to trust enough to go beyond what Freire calls “false generosity.” If you can trust no one else, trust us underdogs.

Cheers to those who want to make it The 99.1% vs The 0.9%.

It’s not about expulsion, it’s about creating something new. It’s about liberating even the oppressors. Can even a few of them liberate themselves? We’ll see what happens with #richfordistribution. This dog’s watchin’…