Folk wisdom has long told us that evil succeeds when good people do nothing. That’s what actually stops movements from building the power they need: not the 30% who actively oppose justice, but the 40% who’ve given up believing change is possible.
Activism at its best speaks to something deeper and more fundamental in human beings—the battle within each of us between determination and defeat, and between courage and despair.
It’s about awakening people to a truth they’ve been taught to forget: that they have agency, that their choices matter, that they possess gifts the world desperately needs, and that sharing those gifts is both possible and necessary.
This is fundamentally spiritual work, though not in any narrow religious sense. It’s about helping people win the inner battle first—the one against the voice that says “why bother?” ... “the forces against us are too powerful” ... “we’re screwed no matter what we do.”
As someone in his early forties that’s grappled with those same questions, I have nothing but empathy for the folks who feel grinded down by this system.
Over the last twenty years, I’ve lost the battle to apathy for days, weeks and months. I got burnt out. I checked out. I downshifted. At many times, depression got me too.
Having empathy in a world this brutal is not easy. It’s no wonder we get numb. It’s often not a moral failure; it’s a survival mechanism in the absence of any better strategies. Staying human and refusing to grow hard in a culture as diseased as ours is itself an incredible victory.
The trick isn’t to never burn out. It’s finding our way back again.
Finding ways to rest and nurture that dim flickering flame until it can grow bright again. That’s it’s own kind of skill that we don’t talk about often enough, but it’s a skill we need for both ourselves and our community. It’s one I’ve developed from 20 years of trial and error, and for me it does come from an inner defiance combined with a spiritual awareness that can be found in the mystic branch of every popular religion. But the essence of it is called ubuntu: “I am because you are.” Your suffering is my suffering. Your happiness is my happiness. I cannot be what I am meant to be until you can be what you are meant to be.
Around the world it’s known by another word: solidarity. This is the original tribal instruction for cooperative living on this planet. It’s the model that has sustained humanity for thousands of generations, long before agriculture or modern civilizations built on colonialism and conquest ever took hold. It’s true, there’s always been conflict and fighting, and in the past, one’s solidarity might be limited to one’s tribe and only more loosely extended to other tribes. But today, indigenous and democratic socialist wisdom points to an international solidarity, a world where all people and the planet are “the self” “the family”—the indivisible unit and sphere of care and belonging. It’s a vision that seeks 10,000 peaceful ways of life.
That vision is what keeps my feet moving and what makes my heart sing. I want that for humanity’s children. I want it for the millions of other Animal, Plant, Mushroom, Protist and Monera nations that we share this home with.
For me, activism is about staying connected to that vision and warding off the constant onslaught of cultural propaganda whispering in my ear to obey, to tune out, to just “enjoy my life” while our family’s house is on fire. But I can’t do it. I’ll always know that path is a lie. Even when I step away from the work or get depressed, the will to fight eventually returns.
I often think about the plane analogy: put your oxygen mask on first, then help the person next to you.
That’s what activism is: awakening that inner fire. Breaking out of the matrix. Saying, “someone should do something about that!” Then realizing I’m someone!
It's about helping people see that the story of inevitability is a lie designed to keep us passive — the story that corporate capitalism is the end of history, that concentrated power is natural and unchangeable, that we're too small to matter, that fascism is already here, and the best we can do is wait for America to collapse.
The first act of resistance is refusing to believe that lie.
When I think about Films For Action's purpose, it's to reach the people who care deeply but don't know what to do with that caring — and to support those who already do.
It’s to show them (and to keep reminding myself):
Here are people building alternatives.
Here are movements achieving victories.
Here are concrete possibilities for a different world.
Here’s what you could contribute.
Here’s what I’m contributing.
While debunking status quo propaganda is important, convincing the die-hard believers isn’t the main goal. Our mission is to support the people and movements who who want a better world. The people who are already building that world in 10,000 different ways. The people who are fed up with both halves of the establishment. The people whose spirits are wounded but not entirely crushed. It’s to reawaken the flickering flame that’s buried in all cynics hearts - the belief that more is possible.
That’s what our activism is really about: it’s about getting people off the sidelines and into the game—whatever form that takes for their particular gifts and circumstances.
For some, that means protest and direct action — blockades, strikes, sit-ins, walk-outs, and other forms of organizing to shut down business as usual. For others, it’s cooperative economics, mutual aid networks, union drives, electoral organizing, creative expression, farmers markets, boosting independent media, or simply showing up consistently for their community.
There’s no single prescribed form of action, because we need all of it.
What we’re really doing is helping people recognize that their participation matters. That they can put their thumb on the scale.
That individual actions combine into collective force, and collective force can shift the trajectory of history. Not easily, not quickly, not without setbacks—but genuinely, materially, in this generation or the next.
This is why hope isn’t naïve optimism about outcomes. Hope is the decision to act as if our actions matter, because the alternative—despair and withdrawal—guarantees the future we’re trying to prevent.
Hope is choosing courage when despair feels easier. It’s the spiritual discipline of showing up anyway, even when victory isn’t assured.
We don’t need to convince everyone. We just need to mobilize enough people to tip the balance. And right now, millions of people are sitting on the fence not because they disagree with justice, but because they’ve lost the inner battle—they don’t believe their involvement would make a difference.
Our job is helping them win that battle. Showing them that their participation matters. And then inviting them to discover what form their contribution might take.
But before we can do that, we first have to win the battle of the spirit, the battle to never allow cynicism to have the last word.
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, a library dedicated to the people building a more free, regenerative and democratic society.
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