Politics as Hope: Towards the Elpidology of the Oppressed from Paulo Freire's Political Realism

Abstract

ABSTRACT

This dissertation problematizes hope from Paulo Freire’s political realistic perspective. It delivers the basic principles of what I have named the Elpidology of the Oppressed. Domination, oppression and power asymmetry are concrete realities. They all play a role in shaping our sense of hope. In my opinion, hope is perhaps one of the most suitable human attitudes to be either controlled or obliterated by political regimes seeking domination. An oppressive regime seeks to domesticate hope through a system of organized hopelessness; a scheme that negates a group of people the opportunity of desiring, imagining and seeking a feasible path towards a future or a futurity different from the oppressive circumstances they experience in the here and now. Problematizing hope is about grasping temporality and futurity as realities that humans create and re-create collectively and not as things that are pre-determined. Thus, I aim at demonstrating how crucial is for all people, but especially for the oppressed, to understand, to apprehend, to take care and to cultivate the human sense of hope from a political realistic point of view, a key perspective given that some people are excluded from history, and, therefore, also excluded from freely creating their own futures. Nonetheless, in exploring these matters, I inevitably collide with a longstanding polemic regarding the nature and value of hope. While some may argue that hope is illusory and dangerous, others see it as a strong and positive asset in human life. I elucidate this issue by putting this notion through a deep process of demystification, which includes acknowledging its illusory nature, while working a theoretical stance that reconstructs its value as a crucial, but paradoxical political asset. Hope is a multidimensional human faculty that tends to create illusions. It is a complex force associated to what I term the human elpidic mind—our persistent, inescapable and anxious preoccupation with the future. It is a sort of an illusion characterized by a confident, yet uncertain expectation of achieving a good future that is meaningful and thought to be realistically possible by the thinking individual. Now, from the standpoint of oppressed people, whose concrete resources of hope are limited, and whose sense of hope is distorted through fear, among other mechanisms, hoping realistically becomes a practice of political resistance against oppression. Realistic hope is about desiring futurity and also about concretely planning for, and actually trying to attain this future by finding actual pathways toward its consecution, despite possible obstacles. Hoping has a collective dimension that turns politically subversive as soon as people gather together and organizes in order to imagine, plan and strategize about how realistically bring actual social change in the future. Yet, the oppressed realistic practice of hope is meant to clash face on with the hope and visions of the future of their oppressors. The power élite’s political project includes freezing time and stopping history from happening as part of their ambition to own and secure perpetually the future for its social class. The politics of resistance as hope is a praxis of freedom within conditions of oppression that seeks emancipation through the creation of concrete conditions that allow oppressed people to become true agents of history and genuine agents of hope.