Grounds for Hope
Michael Lerner
It is possible to get the wrong idea in the first part of this book. Because I try to describe the multifold ways that we are ensnared into a process of Surplus Powerlessness, you may become overwhelmed by how powerful the forces are that work towards disempowerment. Yet my conclusions actually lead me to be very hopeful.
My reason for hope is this: both Surplus and Real Powerlessness require a repression of our fundamental human essence. But this is impossible, at least for any length of time. Our desires for fullness and joy and community may get repressed, but they can never be fully extinguished. If the society can manage to make people feel that they should participate in work that is humanly destructive, it's not as if the basic needs that have been thwarted simply disappear. There are some Marxists who think that human needs themselves get fully constituted by the nature of the society, so that what they actually come to is radically plastic. I have no such view. Human beings have needs which, when they are not met, cause problems that cannot be ignored. It is true that sometimes the problems will not lead to a revolutionary movement -- and the contradiction in basic human needs may show up in the form of a societal wide epidemic of cancer. But people can't live with cancer, and eventually they will begin to ask whether this sickness is not itself related to a sick society. Intuitively they understand what later research may yet prove in greater detail, that the diseases dominating modern society have a lot to do with how we live, and cannot be reduced to the pre-eminence of some new bacteria or virus. Or the contradiction may show up in crime waves, or in mass hysteria, or in wars. My general point is that we may succeed in mystifying ourselves about the cause of our pains, but as long as we are engaged in repressing our fundamental human needs, the pains will show up in some form that cannot be ignored, and will eventually force us back to dealing with the central issues.
In our historical moment, the unhappiness and tension and alienation created by living in a repressed society shows up in family life, in our personal relationships, in our crime figures, in the way that we treat each other at work and in our neighbourhoods, at sports events, at the movies, in our PTA's, and in our churches. The alienation in this society is overwhelming - and it cannot be ignored. Precisely because denial of our fundamental human needs hurts so much, there is continual hope that we will break through our isolation and connect with each other in a deeper way and find ways to change the larger situation.
This is not merely a prophetic hope. Every day we can read about people who have broken through passivity and mutual distrust. Be it in a church organization suddenly championing the poor or opposing the military budget, or in a union in which people have moved beyond "bread and butter issues" and have gone on strike around the quality of work life, or in the untold acts of human kindness and generosity that often go unnoticed in the media, people are acting. Our basic humanity is continually reasserting itself and demanding to be taken seriously. While individual acts are not sufficient by themselves to change things, we should remember that each act of human kindness and compassion is also a statement of the deeply shared need that this society can neither obliterate nor fulfil; the need for a loving community.
Our need for that loving community pushes us all towards overcoming our powerlessness. And when we immerse ourselves in understanding the ways that powerlessness has become internalized, we become more powerfully equipped to combat it. We discover that things can be changed, and that the cynicism that surrounds us can be defeated. I don't want to oversimplify or be Pollyannish -- the forces arrayed against us are formidable, and it is critical to understand them in detail. But read on past the analytic sections of this book and you will find my reasons for optimism and hope and my sense that we can right now begin to adopt a strategy that could, within our lifetimes, actually produce a social transformation.
Excerpted from Surplus Powerlessness: The Psychodynamics of Everyday Life... and The Psychology of Individual and Social Transformation. Published by The Institute for Labour and Mental Health. 5100 Leona, Oakland CA 94619