In The Fight Against Tyranny, Don't Let Your Happiness Depend On Big Wins

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

If you stand for truth, peace and justice in this world then it’s important not to make your happiness dependent on large-scale wins. 

Because the deck is stacked so heavily against truth, peace and justice, your side will experience far more losses than wins. You will watch powerlessly as your government backs genocides, starts wars, and unleashes nightmare after nightmare upon the global south. Your heroes will disappoint you. Your protest movements will fizzle. Your civil rights will erode, your speech will be marginalized, the wealthy and powerful will amass more wealth and power while the poor and the powerless grow ever more so.

I say this not as an expression of pessimism or defeatism, but because that’s simply where we’re at as a society right now. Ours is a highly controlled dystopia where minds are continuously inundated with power-serving propaganda and tyrants enact their abusive agendas without much meaningful resistance. This doesn’t mean we can’t win, it just means we can’t realistically expect many big wins in the immediate future under our current circumstances while truth has so much difficulty getting a word in edgewise.

You can let all the human suffering depress you and let all your failed attempts to stop it drag you down, or you can look to some other source for your happiness which isn’t dependent on securing large-scale wins for humanity.

For me this is a no-brainer. It does nobody any good for me to be miserable all the time, and in fact letting myself get bogged down in depression and despair would make my efforts a lot less prolific and effective. A dissident voice choosing to be unhappy just because there’s so much suffering in the world would be like a revolutionary soldier choosing to be weak and emaciated and worthless on the battlefield just because there are so many people who are starving. A happy mind is a healthy mind, a healthy mind is an effective mind, and we need our minds to be as effective as possible while we work to awaken our civilization from the lies of the empire.

So don’t bind your happiness to the success of your efforts. As Chris Hedges has said, “I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.” Do everything you can to fight back against the lies, war and tyranny of the empire, but do it for its own sake because it’s the right thing to do, not because you’ve wrapped up your sense of wellbeing in the success of failure of your fight.

Instead, find your happiness elsewhere. In your love for your fellow humans. In the jaw-dropping beauty of this miraculous planet we get to live on. In the raw enjoyment of feeling the air in your lungs and the ground beneath your feet. In being present in the senses rather than immersed in the dull repetitive chatter of the mind.

Happiness is a skill that can be learned with practice, and it is worthwhile to learn that skill. The revolution doesn’t need a bunch of despondent, burnt-out minds, it needs vibrant minds full of zest for life on this planet, who really have something to fight for. 

By not allowing yourself to be happy, you’re not helping the needful, you’re just depriving the world of that much happiness. Any joy you can allow into your life will have beneficial knock-on effects on every life you touch, and any joy you shut out will deprive them of that.

And you deserve to be happy. You do. If this feels untrue to you, the happiness is hiding just beneath that feeling. See if you can get underneath it and unhook whatever beliefs are binding you to that pointless, unhelpful fixation. You are worthy of happiness and inner peace.

Find your happiness and continue to fight ferociously, without placing too much importance on whether your efforts will succeed or fail today. All we can do is keep throwing our own little bit of sand into the gears of the machine, knowing that one day, with enough sand, the whole thing will start grinding to a halt.

There’s no good reason to waste our time on this earth depriving ourselves of happiness in the meantime.

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