The dead world of our present – the arrestation of historic forces, of trauma calcified into lifeless ideologies – is brought into being by a depraving, paralyzing way of thinking about ultimate potential and how we position ourselves towards the fundamental possibility for hope of better outcomes.
“To expect is to suffer. To hope is to be fooled.” has become the rallying cry of entire generations, that watched every last bit of trust they have put in this world betrayed, warped or strategically used against them. A life that has no sacred places, no venerated foundations, and can only be endured through fragmentation, irony, retreat, and detachment.
Systemic cruelty they cannot affect or address meaningfully – be it intellectually or emotionally. The erosion of the interpersonal realm into a transactional market of addicting dependency; where their intimacy is commodified and conditional, and sincerity exploited or ridiculed – seen as weakness worthy of shame in a dehumanizing act of self-abasement. The lifelong traumatized that have to build a web of interpersonal relationships with other traumatized.
A futureless future of climate collapse, ultra-nationalism, fascism, militarism, automation of all creative processes in the name of profit, absolute alienation, intense cruelty and the brutalizing conflicts that grind body and soul into the dust, have made the acts of sanguine anticipation and expectant planning themselves foolish. Collapse and its acceleration have become the baseline of history. A submission to misery became the default emotional state. Hope the identifier of the gullible, the ignorant and the doomed. Cynicism, nihilism and blunted affect have become a twisted enlightened realism of spiritual abiosis.
Here we have the world that dreams only of dystopias, that believes exclusively in decline and that reduced the processes of life to managed survival and explosive acts of violence as a spectacle and as an affirmation of their forsakenness. A world that is perceived as fundamentally controlled and owned by forces not by people. There is a distinct irreality to life and history. There is a comprehensive alienation to modern life and its many structures that even our most forward thinking intellectual and ideological ancestors could not have forseen.
This world has become anti-life, a negation of the consecrated promise of society to elevate all of humanity above the cruel indifference of nature towards our plight.
Radical Innocence is an existential optimism that refuses to be jaded by cynicism or paralyzed by realism. It is childlike in its nature. It is a radical reclaiming of elementary openness to all possibility; and most importantly of all: the possibility of the wondrous and unexpected that materializes only when one does not believe in one’s own limitations – when one is not bound to the charted realm of the strictly possible. It is a catalyst (an inital force) that disrupts the inertia of a totalitarian global system in motion towards its own annihilation.
Radical innocence is not compliance with abusers or systems of exploitation and harm. It is not submission into yet another form of selfish escapism. It is defiance that refuses to become what it resists. it is an act of transrational trust that ruptures the expected logic of systems and forces of a dead world. It is the repeated act of springing into action in the face of great, overwhelming or even fatal uncertainty and systemic rigor mortis. It is a relentless drive towards grand narratives and utopian outcomes; simply because inaction brings death and action is hopeful. It is the creative force of the intellectually and spiritually unbreakable, that refuse to be swept away into the void without clamour.
It is the fundamental unwillingness to accept inaction, even when reason and defeatist realism would suggest that nothing is left to strive towards. It is eternal hope as an obligation to the living world – a primordial remedy to indifference. A spell against the entropy of meaning and connection. It is defiant tenderness that believes in beginnings, even when endings seem most rational.
In a world so fundamentally broken and cruel such as ours, this innocent belief in better outcomes and new beginnings becomes a bright beacon to epochal forces that want to shape history and society towards empathy, enlightenment and a panhumanist civilization of peace. It is the conscious effort to use all of ones vital force towards the construction of possibility, and the commitment to renew this solemn vow tirelessly.
This innocence becomes a principled edge against the individual and collective shortcomings that breed distrust, turmoil, and schism within revolutionary movements of such aspirations – its simple promise and pledge being that there will always be a new beginning, a renewed effort to find common ground and understanding. It is an eternally outstretched hand to all forces, movements and people that choose to build a living world and a future for all.
It is important to not confuse this act of willing trust with credulity or naiveté. It is not an oblivious invitation to exploitation, deception or overreach. Those that try will be confronted with an unwavering volition – a will set on destroying those that bring about the dead world and its suffering. The person that engages in radical innocence is not blind to the realities of the world and the conduct of others. Quite the opposite, they are acutely attuned to the world and the human condition. They have explored the barrenness of cynicism, of selfishness and of atrocity and recoiled in disgust. It is the reclaimed innocence of the returned, that know of the self-fulfilling nature of universalized distrust, the corrosive influence of cruelty and the futility of egoism.
This radical innocence is a defiant call to build every day the world that is not; to choose love, to choose empathy and to endure the wound of existence until – through ones actions – the world can be healed. it is the deeply held belief of the possibility to interrupt the catastrophe with a gesture of redemption and a life in service to others. To keep moving forward in the face of almost certain defeat is the essence of radical innocence. To build anew every day, its expression.
For the revolutionaries of this 21st century and for the movements and structures they need to construct, this radical innocence will for all time be the most essential basic impulse and call to action. In their lifelong fight for the survival of our species, of nature and a better world dedicated to others this recurring homecoming to the first moving force – that of hope built on defiant belief and love – will be an inexhaustible wellspring for their willingness to sacrifice and to suffer.
PANUTOPIANISM 
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