Personal despair of social change agents

Implication of Personal Despair in Planetary Despair (Part #4)

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Faced with recognition of such despair in the lives of others, in whatever form, individuals (possibly acting through one or more groups) may dedicate years of their lives, with associated resources and enthusiasm, to responding to such conditions. This may well be framed as an effort to "make a difference", to "save the planet", to "change the Universe", or to "be the change". The effort may be variously framed by others using phrases such as "change agents", "white knights" or "holier than thou" -- possibly adopted as a self-image. It is therefore valuable to recognize the despair that such individuals may eventually come to feel as a consequence of investing their energy in this way, or in the process of doing so. This may be articulated in relation to:

• Dysfunctional game-playing: disappointment at exposure to systematic game-playing, especially in group and institutional contexts, where there is effectively little interest in achieving a worthwhile impact on the external social condition and the focus is switched to gaining advantage within those contexts (Wrecking an International Project: notes from a saboteur's vade mecum, 1972)
• Deception at the betrayal of declared collective values: this has been remarkably articulated by Shirley Hazzard (Defeat of an Ideal: a study of the self-destruction of the United Nations. 1973)
• Futility: a growing sense of futility, having "tried everything"
• Lack of appreciation: an emerging sense that the effort has gone unrecognized, whether by those it was designed to assist, by others with similar concerns, or by various groups and institutions who claim to be concerned with the issue. This may be associated with physical, emotional, intellectual or spiritual efforts -- whether as tangible actions, supportive endeavours, or creative products (art, drama, writing, etc).
• "Burnout": in psychology, burnout describes the experience of long-term exhaustion and diminished interest, notably on the part of those endeavouring to act as agents of change

For others, the experience may be cynically framed as the collective's unwilligness to be persuaded by the truth offered by the change agent -- by their message in a context of many other competing messages. The capacity to handle despair may have been best framed in the famous Poem by Rudyard Kipling (If..., 1895) of which the first verse is:

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise

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