We don't have to live like this

Imagining - and building - the world we long for

We face a crisis of imagination. Our capacity to dream is atrophied, un-nourished. Poet Diane di Prima explains: the ultimate famine is the starvation of the imagination.

Last year I wrote about the pressing need for radical imagination. I want to take another swing, and this time try to frame the needed shift as moving from sacrifice (self-destruction for possible future benefit) to joy (self-expression as present manifestation of the future we desire). Perhaps this can be one formula:

Imagination + hope + action = the futures we long for

Here’s the TL;DR:

1) In order to get out of our current paradigm, we need to understand not only how it harms us, but also how it serves us. We need to understand what needs our current system meets. This is the explanatory power of the ideology of sacrifice.

2) Our capacity for imagination is key to our liberation: we cannot think our way out of this crisis; we need to dream our way free.

3) Yet it’s not enough to dream: it’s what we allow ourselves to dream about. Liberation flows from desire, not from fear; what Kahlil Gibran calls “life’s longing for itself.” Our dreams are a place to center joy and imagine abundance.

4) Allowing ourselves to dream, and to do so from a place of joy, requires hope. Without hope, there can be no justice.

5) We must build as we dismantle. This is the work of “future architects”: creating what Czech dissident Vaclav Benda called a “parallel polis” as a way to embody our imagination in action.

This thread holds together in my head… barely. I hope it holds together in this post; let’s get to it.

Understanding the ideology of sacrifice

Before we can build a new world, we need to understand why we accept the current one. Kim Stanley Robinson explains the paradox:

We know that our accidental alteration of the atmosphere [the climate crisis] is leading us into a mass-extinction event, and that we need to move fast to dodge it. But we don’t act on what we know.

I’m reminded of that line attributed to Fredric Jameson:

It has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

The most compelling explanation I’ve found for this imagination gap is a concept called the ideology of sacrifice, introduced in a dense and utterly profound 1979 essay by political theorist William Connolly. In short, the ideology of sacrifice holds that people justify doing a job they dislike (he builds the argument around white heterosexual working class men, but I believe the concept applies universally) as a claim to dignity and respect: from their wives primarily, by virtue of their sacrifice to give their children a better life. Mike LeFevre, a steelworker interviewed in Studs Terkel’s 1974 classic Working, makes the point simply:

If you can’t improve yourself, you improve your posterity. Otherwise life isn’t worth nothing.

We can also understand this sacrifice in service of something larger than our own families, e.g. the country or the church; the very notion of martyrdom valorizes paying the ultimate price for something larger than ourselves (Jesus died on the cross…). And it goes beyond a single job: it’s about participating in an entire system. As with all great ideologies, the ideology of sacrifice responds to our deepest human needs: significance (gained through sacrificing for something important) and belonging (that sacrifice is recognized/honored by a group we feel allegiance to).

I believe it is this ideology that has preserved our allegiance to a system that we can plainly see doesn’t serve us. It offers us a way to make sense of our suffering, and to go farther: to make a claim to dignity, honor, and purpose in our toil. And it applies at every level of society: yes the coal miner, but also the Wall Street banker, the stay-at-home mother, the housecleaner; each of whom makes a different set of sacrifices based on the same underlying logic. As Victor Frankl famously observed, channeling Nietzsche:

He who has a ‘why’ to live for, can bear with almost any ‘how.’

It also offers a powerful way to understand this moment of crisis and unraveling. It is a cruel reality that fifty years of neoliberalism have rendered that sacrifice increasingly meaningless (our sacrifice has no significance): we millennials are the first generation in modern times who do not have a reasonable expectation that our children’s lives will be better than ours. At the same time, the logic of globalization undermines our sense of belonging — if not our children, on whose behalf are we sacrificing?

We can no longer turn to the ideology of sacrifice to endow our lives with meaning.

Remembering how to dream

On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, two months after the assassination of Medgar Evers, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. hesitated in his delivery of a keynote address. He had initially intended to speak about policy and structural change, but sensed from the crowd that something else was needed. Longtime friend and confidante Mahalia Jackson saw him hesitate, and called out a note of encouragement: “Tell them about the dream.” Dr. King set aside his planned remarks, and extemporaneously delivered what would come to be known as the “I Have a Dream” speech (it’s a full 10-second pause at the 12:03 mark).

As Audre Lorde wrote in Poetry is Not a Luxury:

It is our dreams that point the way to freedom.

Now more than ever, we need to reclaim our dreams. Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us:

Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images of our heads.

In my last post I talked about the limitation inherent in the notion that “we can’t be what we can’t see.” Of course we can: this is the power of imagination. Walidah Imarisha amends the notion to say instead:

We can’t build what we can’t imagine.

But of course, it’s not enough to say what we don’t want. We must breathe life and feeling into what we do want. We must criticize by creating. Ruha Benjamin puts it beautifully:

Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.

The most powerfully imaginative work happening today leads from this place, and serves as inspiration for us all. Micah Herskind makes the point beautifully, in the context of the prison abolition movement:

Abolitionists are builders… “abolition” is a verb: it is the dual-pronged project of tearing down and building up, the dismantling of life-sucking systems alongside the construction of life-giving ones.

Dreaming from a place of joy and desire

As I thought back on the key megatrends of 2020, I kept circling back to this one. Our deep need for joy, for pleasure, for community, and simply for fun. It’s a concept that has gained traction in social justice circles with the publication of adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism, and in popular culture with Marie Kondo’s provocative question: does it spark joy?

If we don’t justify our existence through sacrifice… what’s left? The late anthropologist David Graeber, in an essay on evolution playfully titled “what’s the point if we can’t have fun?” offered this:

Life is an end in itself. 

What if the highest expression of life is simply being? Not sacrificing, not justifying, just fully living into our selves and our potential? Graeber again:

To exercise one’s capacities to their fullest extent is to take pleasure in one’s own existence, and with sociable creatures, such pleasures are proportionally magnified when performed in company.

That to me is the beauty of competition, of sport. And its fullest expression is indistinguishable from joy. Watch Katelyn Ohashi express her full capacities… and it’s impossible not to smile. Joy in action.

I love everything about her performance, but it is her teammates’ reactions that really do it for me. They speak to the second half of Graeber’s observation: joy is best expressed when shared. In community.

“Hopelessness is the enemy of justice”

The late Myles Horton — Civil Rights activist, founder of the Highlander Center, and one of the people I admire most in the world — identified two theories of revolution. The first is born of desperation and despair: it focuses on what we have lost. This is cynicism; it produces resignation. It leads people to seek a savior, and tends to enable authoritarianism and fascism. I had this in mind listening today to Krista Tippett’s beautiful interview with Bryan Stevenson, where he offered this line: “hopelessness is the enemy of justice.”

Horton explains that the second theory of revolution is born of rising expectations, a growing belief that we deserve better. We deserve better not because of what we do, or what we’ve sacrificed… but because of who we are. Because we are humans. Because we exist. A revolution of rising expectations inspires us to take action; we realize there will be no savior, and come to understand that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

This form of hope is distinct from optimism. Where cynicism is a bias that presumes that nothing will work out, optimism holds the opposite bias: that everything will be just fine (I have very little patience for the techno-utopians). As Maria Popova notes:

Blindly believing that everything will work out just fine also produces resignation, for we have no motive to apply ourselves toward making things better.

This is a recurrent theme for me in these posts: the necessity of what Joanna Macy calls “active hope.” If we are to offer another path capable of competing with the authoritarian appeal of easy solutions and clear enemies, one that invites us into taking responsibility for building the world we desire amid conditions of great uncertainty… we need hope. John Meyer concludes:

In a world with no guarantees, it is this hope that might motivate us to change the world—in a way that neither despair nor optimism can.

Building the “parallel polis”

I’m influenced here by two strands of praxis (where theory and practice connect). The present space that I find most inspiring is the work to abolish the prison industrial complex… AND create a world that doesn’t require caging humans. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes:

Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life affirming institutions.

This is in dialogue with a concept coined by Czech activist Vaclav Benda called “parallel polis,” as elaborated in this beautiful essay from Anne Focke (hat tip to Anne Stadler for the share). I’m attracted to the deliberate use of the word “parallel” rather than “alternative”; the latter carrying connotations of fringe or marginal, somehow unserious, and thus paradoxically lending credibility to the very thing the alternatives seek to critique.

Mariame Kaba talks about re-centering: instead of saying “alternatives to incarceration” (which inadvertently centers “incarceration” in our imaginations) we need to center on what we are for, what we are building. In the context of abolition, Micah Herskind channels Elizabeth Hinton and Mariame Kaba:

Practicing abolition means creating — creating — communities of care… abolition is in the present. We are doing it every single day in multiple kinds of ways. It’s not just a horizon we’ll arrive at some day. It’s constantly being made.

This is why I talk so much about building a world where everyone belongs: it’s an affirmative vision. It’s something we can feel and imagine: we all have a visceral relationship to belonging (sadly, mostly through the experience of not-belonging). It’s not abstract (like pluralism, or democracy, which sound good but require a dictionary). I’ve struggled with the verb that precedes belonging, and remain uneasy about the metaphor of “building.”

I felt something click reading about the parallel polis. It felt like the necessary next step that is too often missing from the project of imagining utopias: making them real, right here, right now, in a way we can touch and feel and be part of. I see it as the infrastructure that supports what John Lewis called “beloved community.” It’s putting in place the structures that support the kind of relationality we want: it’s the systems and structures that enable and encourage belonging. This is building from a place of imagination.

And it’s a welcome reminder to pair our imagination with hope, to imagine the worlds we want, not only the ones we think are likely. I recently subscribed to a Substack newsletter called Radical Reimagining: Visioning a World Beyond Dystopia that springs from this premise, and I’m here for it. We need more of this… and we need to connect the visionaries to the architects to the builders. Everyone has a role to play. This is the work of building a world where everyone belongs.

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What does this mean practically? It means that anything you can do to cultivate joy, to reconnect to pleasure, and to stretch your imagination is an act of liberation. The image that kicked off this post takes the line “joy is an act of resistance.” Which is true, but it’s so much more than that: resistance is still defined in relationship to what is being resisted. It gives away too much power. Joy is life expressing itself. We deserve to feel joy. We deserve to feel pleasure.

In that spirit, I want to close with a nod to the viral anthem that is WAP, an unapologetic embrace of our bodies and our pleasure. If you haven’t watched the music video yet, I invite you to take a moment to do so. It’s a reclamation not only of what we have lost, but of what has been taken from us. It centers black women as protagonists in their own story, declaring that pleasure is their prerogative, too.

It’s a radical claim in the face of a system predicated on denying the prerogatives — and especially the right to pleasure — of women, and people of color. The fact that it registers as transgressive is a reminder of how far we still have to go: the music video is difficult to listen to without blushing. But it’s liberating at the same time: wouldn’t it be nice to own our pleasure so unapologetically? What if instead of trying to suppress it… we embraced it? That’s the world I want to live in. “I’ll have what she’s having.”