Let it be a Tale: Daring to Dream in the Face of Fatalism and Futility
Part two of two exploring the role of courage, faith, and creativity in overcoming fatalism and exemplifying social change
When we fill ourselves at the wellspring of courage, autonomy, and humanistic faith we lose our thirst for paternalistic power and fate. We emerge from their cool and reassuring waters with the awareness that we possess the ability to participate in, and not merely resign to, the making of our world. Through courage and humanistic faith, in a word, we enliven that most “divine” of human capacities: creativity.
As we refuse to submit to fatalism—the thinly veiled decrees of power—we would do well to turn our ears to the humanities. Namely, we ought to seek council with the philosophers, artists, and poets who guide us to rediscover the imaginative potency of our childhood; the power to both dream of a better world and to give birth to its realization.
Returning to Our “Childish” Ways
Power insists that being “serious” means strictly working within the existing state of affairs—the status quo. We are required to put away “childish” things and to think like short-sighted tacticians proudly refusing to perceive what predictably lies ahead in the not too far off distance. To be mature is to relinquish our toys and other childish things like idealism and imaginative thought. And as we artlessly disguise our faithlessness and fatalism as “reason” we abandon both hope and humanity.
English writer and social commentator, J.B. Priestly argued that we are mistaken to presume imaginative thinking ought to be left to children. Priestly wrote:
“Because most children are highly imaginative, it is supposed by some that to reach maturity we ought to leave imagination behind, like the habit of smearing our face with chocolate. But an adult in whom imagination has withered is mentally lame and lopsided, in danger of turning into a zombie or a murderer.”
To lose our imaginations is to lose moral awareness and a basic recognition of the possibilities that exist beyond the now. And anyone who lives strictly in the present without comprehending the possibility in tomorrow forsakes that uniquely human capacity to not only be but also become—to grow, to fulfill our potentiality.
Like Priestly, Russian novelist, Yevgeny Zamyatin refused a model of adulthood distilled of all “childish” qualities. “Children are the only bold philosophers,” declared I-330, the protagonist of his pioneering dystopian novel, We (1924). “Exactly, just like children, we must always ask, ‘And what next?’” In a literary essay,1 Zamyatin explained that children’s philosophical spirit was made possible by the fact they “enter life” free of “the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds.”
“This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naïve and so frighteningly complex. The new men entering life today are as naked and fearless as children; and they, too, like children, like Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, ask ‘Why?’ and ‘What next?’ Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise—because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has a well-furnished European apartment, with an excellent toilet, and a well-furnished dogma.”
Zamyatin is right to reference Nietzsche. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) we read that he who would forge a new beginning requires more than the will of the lion but also the innocent, life and potential affirming child.
“Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes.’ For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred ‘Yes’ is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who has been lost to the world now conquers his own world.”
The asking of “childish” questions—innocently and zestfully interrogating basic assumptions—sustains critical thought. Imagination makes it possible for us to truly understand the meaning and logical implications of our claims. Consider those claiming that a different economic or political system could not work because they have never worked in the past. With childish imaginations and questioning we would realize that such a claim implies that we would have been right to assert the certain failure of representative democracy and capitalism before their successful invention and enactment in the world. But this is preposterous since both exist, at this very moment. Thus it is simply untrue that what does not now exist is fated never to be. These are open questions subject to not only material social conditions but also our capacity for creativity.
Personal and social transformation have been made possible precisely through human creativity of thought. We should not be surprised that many with their hands on the levers of power would seek to discredit such ways of thinking and being. Those in power, argued feminist intellectual, bell hooks, purposefully promote the “killing off of imagination” in order “to repress and contain everyone within the limits of the status quo.” Imaginative thought is inherently threatening to a status-quo that seeks to foreclose change. Every great social change begins with a daring leap to imagine what if or, perhaps even more boldly, I will try.
We must learn to recognize the irrationality of those who deny the powers of human idealism. Such thinking is guilty of both Insisting on the Past and Ignoring the Past. We are told that the past is the only guide for the future—the fallacy of insisting on the past, and thus our dream of taking new difficult paths is fated to fail. How ironic that such a fallacy relies upon yet another: ignoring the past, particularly the past that power leaves out of its telling of history, leaves off of its map of reality. Such thinking, if universally accepted, would have long ago starved us of progress.
Having a Word with the Poets
Few have been so willing to behave and think with the courage and naivete of children as the poets and musicians. In “The Right to Dream,” Uruguayan author, Eduardo Galeano wrote,
“…although we cannot divine the world that will be, we can well imagine the one we would like there to be. The right to dream does not figure in the 30 human rights which the United Nations proclaimed at the end of 1948. But if it were not for this, or for the waters it gives us to drink, the other rights would die of thirst.”
Musicians like Lily Meola resound Galeano’s call to dream. In “Daydream,” Meola observes how flippantly we abandon our “big ideas” for life, and calls for us to persevere in the face of fear and resignation.
“Darlin,’ don't quit your daydream
It's your life that you're making
It ain't big enough if it doesn't scare the hell out of you
If it makes you nervous
It's probably worth it
Why save it for sleep when you could be living your daydream?”
The poets and musicians do more than beckon us to dream; they give us the rhythm and rhyme to steady our hearts and bodies as we work to bring the dream to life. In “Step Into Your Power,” LaMontagne calls on listeners to transform heart-inspired vision into reality by stepping into their power. The lyrics are simple enough:
“If you want it / You can have it / All you gotta do / Is reach out and grab it…. “Step on up, step into your power.”
The power of music, as we all know, transcends words on a page. LaMontagne’s deep, rich voice gives us the necessary confidence to suspend our fatalistic doubts and experience the often repressed currents of our inner potency.
“Now, listen to me / All you need / You already own / It was given to you / On the day that you were born / Anything that your heart can dream / You can make it reality.”
Life inevitably imposes limits on what is possible. But the heart, LaMontagne implies, knows the difference between known impossibilities and the uncharted potential yet to be explored. The humanities, more broadly, call on us to unleash not only our individual but also our collective human power to create.
The question remains what dreams are worth our devotion. For many, the “dream” is little more than conventional economic success and “achievements” that do little to satisfy our deepest longings for fulfilment. The best poets remind us of what humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow called the “Being” values of life such as truth, justice, aliveness, wholeness, originality, consummation, rightness, and joy.
Galeano honors these B-values by offering us a dream of cars being “run-over by dogs,” clean air, TV screens “treated like the ironing board or the washing machine,” cooks who stopped believing “lobsters delight in being boiled alive,” and people working “to live” rather than living “to work.” He also dreamed of a world where “boys who don't want to do military service will not be arrested—those who do will.”
Unfortunately, we have not yet molded the firm rock of reality into the shape of Galeano’s dream. This is clear from the arrest of 18-year-old Israeli-American conscientious objector, Tal Mitnick who refused to participate in Israel’s onslaught in Gaza. “I refuse to take part in this revenge war,” he explained in January 2024.2 Meanwhile, conscience-inspired U.S. students were mendaciously maligned as antisemitic as they participated in college protests and encampments, in May 2024, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. By the end of the month nearly 3,000 campus protestors had been arrested, while just one of those responsible for physically assaulting ceasefire protestors have been arrested.3
All the while Palestinian civilians like 24-year-old, Mujahid Abadi have been treated like disposable objects during the siege of Gaza. Abadi was shot and beaten by Israeli soldiers and then strapped to the hood of a burning hot military jeep. The soldiers released Abadi into the care of Palestinian medical services after they drove him to an Israeli military stronghold on the hood of their vehicle. At the same time human rights groups and news outlets including CNN and the New York Times continue to document numerous instances of violence and torture enacted against Palestinian detainees in Israeli detention. Multiple detainees who were later cleared by the Israeli military have described having their possessions confiscated, being deprived of food and sleep and being beaten, humiliated, and electrocuted during their “detention.”2
And this is to say nothing of the utterly nightmarish Israeli bombing, in late May, of displaced Gazans in a tent community that the military labeled a safe zone. We will all be haunted by the images of the distraught caretaker holding up a headless child, their body lifelessly dangling against the backdrop of violent orange flames. This violation of the sanctity of life is made all the more unbearable by the fact U.S. made munitions, including a bomb made by Boeing, were used in the Israeli strike.3
The courage to imagine a more just world and in our power to make such a vision real is never more necessary than in the face of such cruelty and moral hypocrisy. Our capacity to dream and labor on behalf of our visions steel us against the cynical lure of moral apathy and numbness.
Strangely, we find proof of the power of dream and the potency of courage and humanistic faith amidst the very same horrific war. From the start of the war on Gaza, fatalistic naysayers insisted little to nothing could be done about Israel’s violation of basic rules of war and the U.S.’ government’s steadfast, bipartisan support for its ally’s unconscionable conduct. Yet millions around the world were, like Winston from Nineteen Eighty Four, moved to visceral opposition to the war as they embraced the ethical courage to bear witness to and oppose the livestreamed destruction of Palestinian life.
Courageously defying common sense, thousands have braved loss of friends, odious accusations of antisemitism, threats of job loss and social retaliation to give voice to their heart’s objections to the bloodshed. Thousands of students risked and many endured disciplinary action from their colleges. Students at Harvard and UCLA were even prohibited from receiving their degrees.
Some within the government’s ranks have also taken action. U.S. airman Aaron Bushnell self-immolated on February 25, 2024, in protest of his government’s participation in the killing. So far at least eight officials within the Biden administration have resigned from their posts in protest of the president’s Israel policy. They include four members of the State Department, a U.S. Army major who worked as an intelligence official, a member of the Education Department, another from the Interior Department, and a contractor for USAID.
Against the predictions of many, including noted scholar and advocate of Palestinian rights, Norman Finkelstein, the International Court of Justice issued a provisional ruling affirming that South Africa had raised a plausible case that Palestinians’ right not to be subjected to genocide was being violated by Israel’s onslaught. The court followed that January 2024 provisional ruling ordering Israel, in May, to halt its Rafah offensive. In yet another rebuke to fatalistic naysayers, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor issued arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders and Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant. The issuance of the warrants was made all the more significant when investigative journalists reported multiple sources’ accounts of the former head of the Israeli intelligence agency secretly attempting to influence the prior chief prosecutor of the court through threats and promises of financial reward.
Dreaming New Worlds into Reality
The poetry of thinkers like Galeano offers us something more than eloquent and entertaining sequences of words. Their work gifts us with vision and wisdom that deserve a place in our rational minds and political projects. It is vision that sustains us in the recognition that some values are worth dreaming into reality even when doing so means going to jail and feeling terribly alone, as exemplified by Mitnick and the U.S. college students. Those who travel with the humanities go to jail—or anywhere for that matter—in good company. The company of philosophers, artists, poets, musicians, dramatists, novelists, filmmakers can sustain our deepest human convictions while haunting and heckling our basest impulses and rationalizations.
A political society distilled of the humanities is not a society meant for human beings. It is a society meant for parts and machines, profits and algorithms. We can no longer afford to accept the careful quarantining of the humanities within the parameters of escapism and pure entertainment. The humanities—performing and visual arts, philosophy, literature, spiritual insight, and history —are not meant to be caged spectacle-makers, performed for pacification. They are meant to help us reveal, refine, and perhaps even reimagine our humanity. The humanities must be seated within the very soul of a society.
When all of the facts have been laid bare, all of the ethical arguments convincingly presented yet flippantly rejected, and all of the golden rules of international law betrayed, what else can we turn to so as to sustain our sanity and resolve, to stay our faith and courage, other than raw humanistic emotion—to poetry, song, and the wider arts?
Consider how Palestinian author, Mosab Abu Toha’s poem about a child killed during Israel’s siege of Gaza incisively cuts through politicized propaganda and ideological obstruction:
“You were so small in my hands
no shrapnel could hit you,
but the dust and smoke of the bomb
rushed into your lungs.
No need for any gauze.
They just closed your eyes.
No need for any shroud.
You were already in your swaddle blanket.”
A newborn baby dies in a swaddle blanket. Such a poem is immune to ethical rationalization. The argument against such violence is won with words and empathy; and our hearts simply cannot betray the truth that this was an injustice. And the experience of feeling what is true and refusing to betray such truth is the kindling that ignites human progress and social transformation.
Like Galeano, the Palestinian poet and professor of comparative literature, Refaat Alareer, urged us to deny hopelessness the victory it seeks over our hearts. One month before being killed by in a December 6, 2023 Israeli airstrike on a residential building, Alareer posted a poem to social media that he wrote in 2011. “If I must die,” he wrote, “you must live….” So that we might sell his things and make a long-tailed kite to give the children of Gaza hope and the prospect that love might return.
“If I must die, you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze-
and bid no one farewell...
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up
above”
Alareer’s poem challenges us not to allow death to have the final say, not to allow despair drown out the song of our deepest values, commitments—the song of love. Alareer’s possessions are of no matter so they are to be sold off to fund humanistic defiance of power, to fly a kite of hope and faith in new, just possibilities. The poem reminds us that we are members of a community and even as one dies we must not forget that there are many more worthy of our love, support, and solidarity, many more worth saving.
“If I must die
“let it bring hope
“let it be a tale.”
Following Alareer’s death, Scottish actor, Brian Cox, known for his role as Logan Roy in Succession, shared a now widely viewed performance of the poem.
The long-tailed kite of Gaza has traveled the world over, telling the tale of Palestinian humanity across the world. This kite, stitched together by Palestinian journalists and poets alike, has given wings to the courage, humane conviction, and ethical imagination of millions who are right now disobeying power’s dictate to turn away from Palestinian suffering. And just now more have decided to let compassion guide their speech and make their dissent felt. The kite’s beautiful tapestry of humanity now flutters boldly in the hearts and daring of people young and old alike. We see it in the rekindling of the passion for peace and justice felt in those who had retired their peace signs for a compromising politics of lesser-evilism, one which numbed their righteous indignation with cold, spiritless calculations. Many are now wondering, how might the warm breeze of compassion help our politics blossom into something visionary and good?
Like Alareer and Galeano, U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell understood that the truly human world is sustained by humanistic faith and our creative power to dream new worlds. In a March 2023 Reddit post, Bushnell wrote, “I've realized that a lot of the difference between me and my less radical friends is that they are less capable of imaging a better world than I am.” Inspired by visions of “free, post-scarcity communities,” he wrote that he was “much more prepared to reject things about the current world, because I've imagined how things could be and that helps me see how extremely bullshit things are right now.”
“What I'm trying to say is, it's so important to imagine a better world. Let your thoughts run wild and idealistic dreams of what the world should look like, and let the pain and anger at how it's not that way flow through you. Let it free your mind and fuel your rage against the machine.
“It's not too late for you or anyone. We can have the world of our dreams tomorrow, but we have to be willing to fight today.”
One of the reasons those in power have insisted on the “insanity” of Aaron Bushnell is precisely because he refused to sacrifice his moral agency to the false idol of their “fated” tomorrow. But we need not self-immolate to divest ourselves of power’s plan—be it for economic exploitation of workers, the denial of women's reproductive rights, denial of climate catastrophe, or funding a war upon a poor, oppressed, stateless people. We need only burn away our cowardice, rationalizations, and self-deception; and awaken our idealism, integrity, and courage. We need only “step into our power” — into our fuller humanity — and reject the fatalists who would have us disown our human birthright as creative beings.
By turning to the humanities—history as well as poetry, music, and philosophy —we recognize that the very architecture of our contemporary world, technologically, socially, artistically, and ethically, is the result of unbridled, radically free revolutionaries and visionaries who refused to believe the lie that all that is possible is what has already been achieved.
Was there not a time in which people were governed by monarchs without the consent of the people? Was there not once a time in which slavery was accepted as a fundamental reality of society? Weren’t working people, children, and women subject to systematic oppressions? Are we really so naïve as to believe that the mitigation of these injustices is the result of appeals to the existing structure of power and its recommendation for improvement, that all our foremothers and forefathers had to do was deposit a suggestion in the political suggestion box of power? Are we not aware of the daring, the vision, the disobedience, and conviction required for these radical breaks with dominant social traditions?
The rights we today live upon are fruits of the labor of idealists, idealists who refused to mutilate their humanity by denying their heritage as the children Eve, Antigone, and Prometheus. Will we deny our heritage as the children of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, the Knights of Labor, Susan B. Anthony, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Will we permit fear and fatalism—the worship of the false idol of power—to rob us of our courage and creativity, our humanity? I for one refuse.
We would do well to recognize creative vision as the originator of our most cherished freedoms. Those who ridicule imaginative thought and the idealistic endeavors they conjure, laugh in the face of their own mother; she who bore liberatory fruit from daring, faithful, and creative labor—struggle—for change.
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Zamyatin, “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters” (1923)
Patrick Kingsley and Bilal Shbair, "Inside Sde Teiman, the Base Where Israel Detains Gazans," New York Times, June 6, 2024. Aaron Boxerman, "U.N. Report Describes Physical Abuse and Dire Conditions in Israeli Detention," New York Times, April 17, 2024. Simon Speakman Cordall and Veronica Pedrosa, "Not just the UNRWA report: Countless accounts of Israeli torture in Gaza," Al Jazeera, March 13, 2024
The existential necessity of dreaming is clear enough from the all-too-common experience of the 12-year-old, Nimer Saddy al-Nimer. The boy was shot five times by Israeli soldiers as he attempted to secure food from an aid-delivery early in the invasion of Gaza. Medical records reviewed by NPR show he was shot in the foot, leg, hand, back, and stomach. He was left with shrapnel in his abdomen and backside, no feeling in his foot, and an injury to his sciatic nerve. After his treatment in an Israeli hospital, the boy was returned to the war zone that is Gaza. Due to Israel’s blockade, doctors there lack the necessary supplies to treat the child’s injuries or to even provide adequate pain relief. So Nimer endures what thousands of Palestinians, from the young to the old, have collectively enduring for months: unyielding pain caused by Israeli leaders’ refusal to allow supplies into the country to tend to the wounded like this boy. On March 2, 2024, CNN reported that Israeli officials in charge of accessing the Gaza strip have prevented humanitarian aid groups from bringing in "anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems." Officials have also made it difficult to bring “dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.” The flow of medical aid was further restricted on May 7th when Israel seized the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt. According to the World Health Organization’s Director-General, Israel was preventing the flow of lifesaving medical supplies. Even children spared injuries from bullets and bomb shrapnel face starvation. Before the end of May, seven-month old, Fayez Abu Ataya, became the latest child in Gaza to die of malnutrition due to Israel's siege.
After this remarkable piece, no more words can adequately express its profound ingenuity and originality. It transcends mere words; it is a documented doctrine of our free will, consciousnesses, and awareness of moral goodness. As you mentioned, fatalism and its false idols - cynicism, despair, and defeatism- hinder our dreams' realization. Manipulators, the ultimate "dream hunters" and destroyers, also uphold these false standards. "Manipulative personality disorder" is among the most severe mental illnesses, not due to the danger they pose, as they are powerless, but because they are unseen and operate in secrecy; their biggest fear is being exposed and found.
They persistently employ narcissistic tactics to impede our dreams, such as emotional abuse, gaslighting, and bullying. And because of their hate and disregard for boundaries, they regularly invade our privacy and resort to blackmail by exposing our personal information. Their eagerness to maintain us as followers leads them to keep us mentally, emotionally, socially, and digitally enslaved, using any means required to confine us within the fabricated maze of lies and deceit that they have spun.
Regrettably, many of us find ourselves detained by fear of social judgment, afraid of feeling humiliated, ashamed, or ridiculous - a condition known as "Catagelophobia." And because we often lack self-compassion and emotional courage to confront our fears, pain, traumas and weakness , we easily lock ourselves into the maze. Instead of proudly revealing our scars, we remain trapped in a labyrinth of our own making. To overcome manipulation, we must have the courage to admit that we are all just humans, sinners, and lack completeness; we must embrace our imperfections and dismiss the unattainable dream of perfection. None of us are flawless; we all experience failure, brokenness, and moments of darkness. As the King poignantly stated in his final words: "We are all beggars," each of us is blind and yearning for the truth to open our eyes.
Nothing can be more deeply shameful than allowing the largest genocide and ethnocide in history for eight months; nothing can be more humiliating than repeatedly voting for the same leaders, and most of us are fully aware that they can't be the real ones. They are nothing but manipulation 'tools. They aim to observe us as we argue, fight, and harm each other while diverting our attention from uncovering the manipulators' true identities. They are like clowns, distracting us from the leading actor who holds the key to our escape, permanently keeping us chained and imprisoned in their trap.
We need the courage to break our silence, not just with words, tears, and sympathy, but with action. We need the courage to dream and confront the unflattering truths about ourselves, our real enemy and oppressor who reside within our minds and hearts, and that is where great 'revolution' always begins.
Your superior knowledge, transparency, and wisdom inspire us to dare to dream amidst the darkness. Your guidance is truly invaluable. Thank you.
Everyone that has children must remember this. We are afraid but we must not let this limit what they can imagine.