Refusing to Submit: Faithfully Revolting Against Fatalism
Part one of two exploring the role of courage, faith, and creativity in overcoming fatalism and exemplifying social change
There is no greater threat to social change than fatalism. Fatalistic thinking thwarts the faithful pursuit of creative transformation and fosters a self-regenerative defeatism. We are led to assume the worst, that nothing can be done or overcome, and this conceptual framing produces inaction. Our resignation to the nebulous “alien” forces over and beyond us ensures the outcome we are told is fated.
Lost upon us is the awareness that we are helping to generate outcomes the doomsayers of dominant culture fatalistically insist are already decided. By submitting to fate, we become alienated from our very agency as persons, and we unknowingly forge the bleak future we are convinced is foretold. But we don’t have to give fatalism this power over our lives.
The alternative is to revolt against fatalism by cultivating the creativity, courage, and humanistic faith necessary to honor human dignity and potentiality. We fortify these capacities by immersing ourselves in the spiritually rejuvenating waters of the humanities. Poetry, literature, art, philosophy, history, and spiritual insight offer us vital resources to preserve unalienated aliveness and stave off the apathy, defeatism, and cynicism wrought by fatalism.
The humanities bolster confidence in our individual and collective humanity. In doing so, they wash away the man-made damns of defeatism obstructing the potent waters of empathetic indignation, moral courage, and faith in our power to participate in (re)making the world. Through their affirmation of creativity—of the human capacity to dream of and build a better world—the humanities, furthermore, enable us to subvert inevitable feelings of doom and despair. Thus we might say without hyperbole that the humanities preserve the very wellspring of social transformation.
Courage to Forge Our Own “Fate”
The humanities remind us that intellectual capability is insufficient for fulfilling our human potential. We can “have” academic knowledge or impressive intellectual skill but lack the moral integrity, courage, or conviction to put our capabilities into action. More than having skills we must be particular kinds of people; specifically, people animated and activated by elemental values, beliefs, and commitments.1 The dominant education system has gone a long way in conflating academic success with wisdom—not to mention prioritizing having good grades over being knowledgeable. The truth remains that human fulfilment lies not in the mechanized implementation of this or that skill or belief, but in the genuine exemplification of virtue; of consciously internalizing and then organically living out habits of thought, feeling, and action that move us to be sensitive and responsive to the living—to full humanity.
Courage is the quintessential virtue necessary to combat fatalism. “To live into the future means to leap into the unknown,” wrote the existentialist psychologist Rollo May, “and this requires a degree of courage for which there is no immediate precedent and which few people realize.” Whether we are embarking on a journey with a romantic partner, beginning a new career, raising a child, or participating in a social change effort, we are forced to proceed without the guarantee of success and with the full awareness of the possibility of unanticipated failure or painful tragedy.
The inherently precarious and uncertain nature of the human condition establishes courage as a necessary virtue. The longing for definitive, predicable answers to the most pressing human questions leaves many a person in want of a settled picture of the world they can resign themselves to. Fatalism, in all of its various secular, religious, and even scientific manifestations, provides just such a solution, even if it comes at the expense of honoring human agency.
Social theorist, Erich Fromm, elaborated on the fatalistic worldview in his thorough analysis of fascism, Escape from Freedom (1941).
“It is fate that there are wars and that one part of mankind has to be ruled by another. It is fate that the amount of suffering can never be less than it always has been. Fate may be rationalized philosophically as ‘natural law’ or as ‘destiny of man,’ religiously as the ‘will of the Lord,’ ethically as ‘duty’—for the authoritarian character it is always a higher power outside of the individual, toward which the individual can do nothing but submit.”
Fatalism and with it the necrophiliac exaltation of dominance and death are elemental to what Fromm identified as the “authoritarian character.”
“The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation—and creation is always a miracle—is outside of his range of emotional experience.”2
Lacking the rational, interpersonal, and creative faculties to fully and non-coercively engage the world of the living, the authoritarian impotently bows down to a narrow concept of what is and has been.
Concentrated power is also all too happy to market fatalism to us at the expense of courage and the creative and principled spontaneity it gives birth to. From the vantage point of existing power, attempting to alter what already is or create that which does not yet exist in present actuality is inherently heretical behavior. This is why the Russian dystopian novelist, Yevgeny Zamyatin held that the creative thrust of life requires heretics. In his essay, “Tomorrow,” Zamyatin wrote:
“The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is inevitably heresy to today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust. Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow. This is the constant dialectic path which in a grandiose parabola sweeps the world into infinity. Yesterday, the thesis; today, the antithesis; and tomorrow, the synthesis.”
Power comes armed with myriad justifications—rationalizations, really—for why those heretics pursuing new paths are doomed to fail. Yesterday dictates an inescapable tomorrow, they tell us, weaponizing the fallacy of “insisting on the past” while carefully omitting evidence in history for the ever-lingering potentiality for change and transformation.3 To insist that we can defy the weighty trajectory of the recent past and forge a new direction requires courage in the face of a confident status quo and the absence of guarantees.
Against the reductionism of mechanistic-technological thinking, the humanistic perspective reminds us that it is not enough to have the right “tools” or “resources” to live good lives. One cannot “engineer” potent human agency by merely stitching together arms and legs, muscle and brains. Courage is the spark that animates and gives spirit to our minds and bodies. That the word “courage” finds its etymological origin in the French word for heart—coeur—makes the point. As May elaborated,
“Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.”
Simply put, courage enlivens our fuller humanity. Through it we discover our potential for conscious, creative buoyancy atop the vast and turbulent ocean of life.
Faithful Rejection of Fatalistic Resignation
Courage is intrinsically connected to the frequently misunderstood virtue of humanistic faith. According to Fromm, the essence of faith is not submission to a set of beliefs dictated by a great power or deity. “Rational” faith, as Fromm characterized it, entails a basic confidence in the human potential for love, reason, integrity, and freedom, a potentiality that enables us to give the world a just and joyful design.
In The Art of Loving (1956), Fromm explained that such a rational and humanistic faith is derived from our experience and knowledge of “the growth of our own potentialities, the reality of growth in ourselves, the strength of our own power and reason and of love.” Rational faith is not dogmatic certainty that the unproven is true. Rational faith inspires a daring to believe in and imaginatively pursue genuine possibilities for growth; to work toward fostering a new reality vouched for by self-knowledge, understanding of human potential, direct experience, intuition, and creativity.
Writing after Fromm, Rollo May expressed the character of rational faith coupled with courage when he wrote, “Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. To believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment.”
The notion of faith most have in mind is what Fromm called “irrational faith.” Thought, belief, and action inspired by irrational faith, Fromm explained in Man for Himself: an Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (1947), is motivated by “fanatic conviction in somebody or something, rooted in submission to a personal or impersonal irrational authority.” This is lazy, passive orientation to life. Faith of this kind is used to take the place of independent thought, personal responsibility, and courageous self-examination.
Irrational faith and submission to fate is a vital characteristic of the authoritarian character. People who exhibit the authoritarian character tend to live vicariously through external forces of power and authority, which they, in turn, exalt and submit themselves to. “The authoritarian character loves those conditions that limit human freedom,” explained Fromm in Escape from Freedom, “he loves being submitted to fate.” Such irrational faith and exaltation of fate is not restricted to dogmatic religious belief but can also be expressed in virtually every domain of secular life. Fromm highlighted the possible fatalism of the solider and the businessman:
“For a soldier it may mean the will or whim of his superior, to which he gladly submits. For the small businessman the economic laws are his fate. Crisis and prosperity to him are not social phenomena which might be changed by human activity, but the expression of a higher power to which one has to submit. For those on the top of the pyramid it is basically not different. The difference lies only in the size and generality of the power to which one submits, not in the feeling of dependence as such.”
It is all too easy to identify a distinct embrace of irrational faith in, and fatalistic submission to, authority in contemporary politics. One example is the refusal of many on the political right to acknowledge the mendacious, unethical, and criminal behavior of former president Donald Trump.4 Many liberals, on the other hand, refuse to acknowledge the leading role Joe Biden’s played as a Senator in laying the ground work for the invasion of Iraq and voting to authorize the lethal and catastrophic invasion. One need not downplay serious concerns about Trump’s ethical fitness5 for the office of presidency to acknowledge the empirical fact that Biden’s decision-making played a consequential role in leading to the deaths of more than 600,000 Iraqis, most of whom were civilians, within three years of the invasion of Iraq and, more recently, has been responsible for materially and diplomatically enabling Israel’s onslaught in Gaza resulting in the deaths of thousands more innocent lives.
The U.S. electorate’s resignation to a politics of lesser-evilism is reflective of the fatalism and idolatrous deference to authority Fromm examined in Escape from Freedom. Though many agree that U.S.’s two major political parties fall significantly short of seeking the public good, the public is cajoled into conflating reasonable decision-making with fatalistic acquiescence to a choice between two bad options. Those who consider charting a third way are scolded on grounds that doing so will ensure the victory of a candidate who will undermine democracy. Such an argument is made even as the very party many identify as being the lesser-evil actively sabotages democratic efforts of alternative candidates to run within their party6 or outside of the two major parties.7 The contention is that any third way is a naive distraction from the “real” and “serious” political work of staving off one or another immanent political threat. And as political and social imagination are diminished as unserious and futile in the face of political fate, so our political futures are cast in fatalistic stone.
But such fatalism does not deserve our allegiance nor our submission. Even amidst the horrors of the ongoing dehumanizing onslaught against the people of Gaza we find evidence of the possibility of new, untold tomorrows. In an interview published June 5, 2024, globally renowned scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
said that the global shift in defense of Palestinian humanity was unpredictable and defied even the most hopeful of expectations. “There was no way on God’s earth that I could have predicted nearly everything that’s happened in reaction to the Israeli genocide.”Finkelstein said that nothing the Israeli military has done in Gaza since October 7, 2023 has surprised him given the documentation of their targeting of hospitals, ambulances, journalists, and civilian populations during Operation Cast Lead in 2009, Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, and Operation Protective Edge in 2014. But he never expected the global outcry against Israel’s most recent campaign, which has resulted in more than 36,000 deaths including 15,000 children,
“In fact, very soon after October 7th ideas were circulating on the web to bring Israel to account under the Genocide Convention. I was the very first person to dismiss it…. I said, you’ve got to be kidding. That any country would go to bat for a poor, stateless people, a powerless people in Gaza, half of whom are children, that anyone would go to bat for them, I said no possibility. Because that would mean coming up against the United States. So it came as complete and total shock when South Africa not only went before the court but the professionalism of their application to the court, the quality of the delegation of the South Africa team. And then there was another shock, the vote the first time was 15 to 2! That was totally unpredictable.”
Equally compelling is the fact additional nations including Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Nicaragua, Libya as well as the Palestinians have asked the International Court of Justice to be added to South Africa's genocide case against Israel. Finkelstein also identified the U.S.-led student protest movement against the onslaught in Gaza as a profound development that defied expectations.
“Now I would say, also, the student demonstrations were totally unpredictable. Because you have to remember young people, today, they’re faced with a future of climate change, high unemployment, no real prospects in the economy, no real prospects in their lives…. There were 10,000 different issues that the young people could have seized upon in their protest and their demands. And of all the horrors confronting young people, nowadays, from the whole array of causes they could have seized upon, they seized upon Gaza.”
To this, let us consider the significant and unanticipated shift in global public opinion against Israel in light of the government’s unconscionable actions in Gaza. Over just four months, Israel's favorability rating dropped by an average of 18.5% across more than 40 countries. Though a majority of people in the U.S. view Israel favorably, that majority has shrunk from 68% in 2023 to 58% in 2024, the lowest figure in more than two decades. In a sign of further changes to come, Israel's favorability rating has plummeted from 64%, in 2023, to 38%, in 2024, among adults under the age of 34. Meanwhile, 58% of Americans now disapprove of Israel's actions in Gaza.”
Of course the spokesmen for fatalistic power are all too happy to accommodate unanticipated changes into their worship of the status-quo. These outcomes were all quite foreseeable, they will soon enough begin saying. But they are nevertheless inconsequential; a fleeting snapshot of a pendulum swinging back to its static and fated position. But those with a humanistic eye will contemplate the infinite collection of egoless efforts made by scholars, human rights workers, musicians, poets, journalists, activists, and the enduring humanity of the ordinary people of Gaza themselves.
Listening to Orwell: Courage, Humanistic Faith, and the “Spirit of Man”
Through courage and rational faith in humanity we are fortified against fatalism’s false idols: cynicism, despair, and defeatism. We are further convinced of the human capacity to forge non-supernatural miracles of social transformation, against all odds, from creativity, reason, solidarity, and love. These profoundly human characteristics help guard us against the insidious seduction of “security.” As Fromm explained in The Art of Loving, wrote,
“To have faith requires ‘courage,’ the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner.”
Many are attracted to fatalism because of its perceived offering of security, namely a sense that all is as it should be. There is an idolatrous holding on to the present, a clinging to “security” even if it means self-destruction. As a father I was struck by the clear lesson of the folly of clinging to security given in watching my children learn to float on their backs for the first time. It takes courage and some degree of rational faith in one’s own buoyancy to vulnerably stretch our bodies out across the surface of the water. I’ve watched many times as a child spreads himself out over the water only to fearfully fold up like a dead spider and sink, just for a moment, below the water. The irony, of course, is that this was exactly the result the child wished to avoid by clinging to the familiar security of being upright rather than stretched out. And this is the paradox of security: that we often lose it when it becomes an end unto itself and supplants the courageous love of life as our highest priority.
The possibility of love itself necessitates courage and the prioritization of our greatest values. “To be loved, and to love,” explained Fromm, “need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern—and to take the jump and stake everything on these values.” This courage and conviction to resolve ourselves to defend and act upon fundamental values is equally essential for personal and social-political growth and fulfilment.
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) offers a profound representation of courageous, rational faith in the face of apparent futility. Near the end of the novel, the story’s protagonist, Winston, is captured after attempting to help overthrow the totalitarian state. He is tortured mentally and physically and utterly demoralized. The leader of the state shows him the futility of his efforts; that the resistance he had joined had been defeated. The facts present in that moment cast doubt on any belief in justice and social change. At that moment, with all hope lost, Winston turns to a humanistic faith, declaring:
“I don’t care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces…. I know you will fail. There is something in the universe—I don’t know, some spirit, some principle—that you will never overcome…. I don’t know. The spirit of Man.”
Winston defiantly refuses to bow before power’s god, fatalism. He refuses to resign himself to their status quo. Even as he faces execution, he retains a fundamental faith in values that transcend his individual existence, values rooted in a visceral comprehension of human creativity, love, and integrity. Consequently, he refuses to accept doublethink, no matter the muscles or guns enforcing it. Though violence and killing can accomplish much, neither can execute a universal truth.
Beyond literature we find human history affirms faith in humanity. Each instance of social progress—from workers’ rights to women’s rights to the undermining of slavery and segregation—is achieved in radical, even shocking defiance of the supposedly “fated” past. We must thus not allow ourselves to become captives of the status quo’s ideology of resignation; of an alienated idolatry in which we bow down before the “existing state of affairs” as though it “came” into existence without cause and remains on its own accord. No! The status quo exists only insofar as we allow it to exist.
For we must remember that we are not only consumers but also creators of culture. Great energy is expended to convince us that human-made cultural products, from the social norms that govern worker-employer relations to the structures of our economy, are beyond the reach of human hands and decision making. They are as determined as the law of gravity—they are natural, we are told. The humanities and cultural studies challenge such attempts to obscure power’s agency behind the curtain once labeled “God” and now called “natural” or even “science!” Looking closely, with courageous and perspicacious sight we see the seams that reveal these structures as artifacts of human construction.
Honest historians teach us that the future is mapped out only after being created by those human beings who exercised agency. The contention that the future is preformed, and that “reason” demands reverent obedience to a foretold tomorrow is power’s secret weapon. What has been attributed to God, nature, and fate is often, ironically, the product of our own passive acquiescence. The supposedly fated tomorrow comes to fruition when we dispiritedly disbelieve in the human power of courage, creativity, and unanticipated transformation.
For the ideas and ideologies that shape our lives are like the balloons we played with as children.8 For them to survive they must be kept aloft, prevented from touching the ground where they may pop! And as we believe in and circulate them between ourselves—reverently diving to the ground or jumping over chairs to keep them in the air—we make them sacred and keep them from bursting. Strengthened and sustained by courage and humanistic faith we may find the courage to let these false idols fall to the ground. And the sound of them bursting may also trumpet our fuller creative autonomy.
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The vital conceptual-experiential distinction between having and being is thoroughly explored in one of Erich Fromm’s most visionary books, which was also his last: To Have or to Be? (1976).
Fromm goes on to write, “One of the ideological fathers of Nazis, Moeller van der Bruck, expressed this feeling very clearly. He writes: ‘The conservative believes rather in catastrophe, in the powerlessness of man to avoid it, in its necessity, and in the terrible disappointment of the seduced optimist.’”
The fact that history has so often been treated as a chronology of “great men’s” actions exemplifies power’s weaponization of the past to reproduce itself. There can be little wonder as to why many in power are quick to undermine those historians who wish to concentrate on social movements, radical agents of change, and the marginalized.
Associated Press, "Trump Investigations: Tracking the Cases."
BBC, “Elizabeth Warren agrees Democratic race 'rigged' for Clinton,” November 3, 2017. Victor Hagan, “Marianne Williamson lashes out at DNC, accuses party of trying to undermine her campaign,” USA Today, May 28, 2024. Ashley Mason, “Florida Democrats robbed of vote: A wake-up call to rethink incumbent support,” Alligator, January 29, 2024 .
Brianna Kraemer, “NC Democrats forced to pay Green Party for ‘frivolous’ intervention,” The Carolina Journal, April 5, 2024
I am still playing with balloons.
And yet how exciting it was to have the agency to let the balloon go [into the sea, perhaps, or into the sky].
This was a thoroughgoing affirmation of the human spirit as lensed into our shared species-essence. This is the one thing all iconoclasts share: they embody the 'being-aheadedness' that is the futural aspect of resolute being. Even in seemingly bleak literature this ipsissimous faith is affirmed. Surely, if 'religion is society worshipping itself', as Durkheim insightfully noted, then faith is equally, humanity affirming itself. Well done.