Criticality and Hope

Critical people have always been hit for being pessimistic about the world, for being 'negative,' seeing only what's wrong. They're told to 'look at the bright side, for once' or 'you should be happy with what you have,' 'you're lucky,' 'count your blessings.' Yet the critical people are happy, do count their blessings, yet would want to improve the world they're gonna leave for the next generations - if it isn't too late already. Being critical is being cognizant of the impediments to progress, of the war-mongering obstacles to just peace, of the policies and laws - economic and political - that incrust many people to lives of hunger, poverty and oppression.

Critical people are in one sense fantasy-breakers, since many would rabidly cling to such fantasies with the fanaticism of one whose only happiness is to maintain that dependency. While it is more comfortable to live in such a world, it is nevertheless the Matrix, a configured/reconfigured trap for the human soul. Thus critical people also have to act and articulate further the workings of the real world - to become organic intellectuals.

In the end, struggle is soul-searching, scraping and realizing the human potential out of a tarnished humanity. Thus, it is not the responsibility of organic intellectuals to sing praises to arbitrary power; their responsibility to the people is to criticize it. An honest and decent person would be ashamed to turn a blind eye against the world, and instead turn to an inward-looking religion or personal asceticism. Being fulfilled individually is intricately tied to social upliftment. While one may be happy alone, it is empty, devoid of content, since a person, to become human, has to develop social interaction. In seeing problems that exist and trying to overcome them, one finds oneself climbing the hill towards one's humanity. This is the essence of hope.