Paul Hawken on Tricycle: "Hope is a mental narcotic"

Word to the wise: our friends at Tricycle have a few recent articles up featuring fascinating and provocative insights from folks whose names you might recognize.Available to Tricycle subscribers, an interview with Joanna Macy called "Allegiance To Life: Staying steady through the mess we're in" explores relationships between embracing doubt and maintaining our convictions; avoiding dogma; and how "our power to act, our power to take part in the healing of our world, our power to bring things back into balance, comes from the same source as that devastation."  Macy also notes that "[the Buddha] was very interested in social change, even though our anthologies of the Buddha’s writings don’t feature that particularly.""Gary Snyder and 'The Most Dangerous Man In America'" describes how American military analyst Daniel Ellsberg's "decision to release the [Pentagon Papers] was, in part, a consequence of his conversations with the Zen Buddhist poet Gary Snyder in Japan more than a decade earlier."

And in an interview with Tricycle Features Editor Andrew Cooper, Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest, shares a handful of thought-provoking claims based on his study of what he calls "The Movement With No Name": a "pattern" linking millions of groups worldwide, though they share no formal association.  In no particular order, a few standouts, for me, from the interview, Upsurge:On representations of Occupy:

We have to be careful to not let our understanding about Occupy come from the very institutions that need to be occupied, among which are corporate media.

On nondual political understanding:

And if we are very fortunate [disillusionment] leads to the question about how we disaggregated justice, economics, and ecology. They are the same.

On the material (technological) basis for feeling interconnected

The upwelling of awareness and compassion—and anger and frustration—is different from anything humanity has done before because we are connected in a way that has never occurred.

And on hope:

I find hope uninteresting. Hope is a mental narcotic that masks our fears. Fear arises from attachment. We need a movement that is fearless, not hopeful. Fearlessness is free, active, vital, whereas hopefulness is an unending pit of disappointment and doubt. Kindness and transformative change arise not from hope but from our intention and practice.

Agree?  Disagree?  Got something to add or ask?  Head on over and add your voice to the Tricycle comment threads, or share here.  Happy reading!