A Word for the Futility of Waiting
Actively Passive • adjective • (ak-tiv-lee pahh-siv)
Definition: the futile act of waiting for, instead of cultivating, your desired outcome
Origin: English (The Sustainable Culture Lab)
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My book THE CRIME WITHOUT A NAME was released on October 12, 2021 and NPR has picked it as one of the top books of the year!
You can order the book—including the audiobook—and watch recordings of my book tour discussions at Eaton and the New York Public Library at thecrimewithoutaname.com.
Here’s a link to my latest column for The Daily Beast - “The Klan Was the Original ‘Election Police’”
Years ago, when I first started talking about ethnocide people would sometimes find the word to be debilitating. The term ethnocide succinctly articulated the bad place in which we live, and people found it hard to imagine how to live without engaging in ethnocide. Being aware that ethnocide is bad while also being unable to imagine what good looks like made some people feel hopeless. Knowledge had become debilitating.
Therefore, I also had to cultivate a philosophy of good and the requisite language, so that the knowledge of ethnocide could become empowering and a step towards goodness instead of a debilitating realization.
Additionally, many of the people that found the knowledge of ethnocide tough to cope with also wanted me to provide clear calls to action. My work and my book, The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture, apparently needed a greater emphasis on telling people what to do instead of helping people understand the world and think more clearly.
Essentially, people had few, if any, ideas about how to cultivate good, and they wanted me to tell them what they needed to do. They wanted to know which actions would lead to a good life. Neither of these situations is inherently bad, but what intrigued me was that they did not perceive language and thought to be an action.
Personally, I understood language and thoughts to be the first and required actions that must precede more physical and obvious actions. If I actively focused on having the right thoughts and saying the right words, I would be far more likely to do the right things.
Yet this understanding was not shared, and many of the people who have been critical or skeptical of my work have prioritized overt, physical actions ahead of language and thoughts. People wanted me to present the actionable goodness first.
The plan has always been to cultivate a good life through our actions, but in order for this actionable goodness to be effective, we must focus on our thoughts and words first. As people wait for the arrival of something good, I have thought about the potential dangers of prioritizing waiting ahead of cultivating. This is where being “actively passive” comes into play.
Godot and Being Anti-Bad
In the third chapter of my book, I discuss the play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. In the play, two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, actively wait for the arrival of Godot and the passivity of Vladimir and Estragon has inclined some critics to describe it as a “play about nothing.”
Yet, it is obvious that Vladimir and Estragon do not believe that they engage in nothing. They understand their waiting to be a vital action. They are actively waiting. They are actively passive. And as they wait they discuss the meaning of life, crack jokes, and commune with one another. They are not bad people, but since they do not actually do much of anything, it would be hard to describe them as good people either. Essentially, you could describe them as being “anti-bad.”
Despite Vladimir and Estragon being “anti-bad,” one character in the play, Pozzo, is definitely a bad person, and their relationship with this character demonstrates the futility of being actively passive.
Pozzo is a slave owner and Lucky is his slave. Vladimir and Estragon at first are outraged at Pozzo’s treatment of Lucky. They tell Pozzo that his actions are bad and that he should stop oppressing Lucky, but their words come to no avail. Pozzo lives a life of being actively bad, and he has an abundance of language for articulating why his horrible actions are supposedly good.
Vladimir and Estragon are linguistically and psychologically defenseless against Pozzo because they do not have good words or thoughts that can counter Pozzo’s dystopian logic. They lack the language and thoughts because their life consists of actively waiting for Godot, or something they consider to be good, to arrive. They have no relationship with an active goodness, in either language, thought, or action; and this allows for an active badness to prevail.
I have been thinking about this play quite a lot because far too often Americans appear to believe that being “anti-bad” is equivalent to being “pro-good.” Good is understood to be the absence of bad and not the cultivation of good, and due to this perspective there is hardly any desire to cultivate a good place, an Eǔtopia.
Additionally, if your society is not focused on actively cultivating good, then it can be easy for people to believe that “talk is cheap,” as the saying goes. Words and thoughts can become almost meaningless because there is no concept of the actions that should come next.
If the goal is to merely combat bad things then the emphasis will be on the actions because the goal is to stop something we all have already agreed is bad. In this scenario, the language and thoughts have been rendered nearly meaningless because the assumption is that we already have the same thoughts and speak the same language.
America’s anti-bad, actively passive status quo impairs many left-leaning, progressive Americans from cultivating the good world they hope to live within because the good place remains more of a fantasy than a reality. America has never existed as a good place, but merely a place that is great at concealing and denying its bad attributes. Without a tangible connection to creating an American good place, progressives will spend far more time combating bad than cultivating good.
Actively Passive Thoughts and Prayers
One of the beguiling, yet appealing aspects of being actively passive is that the responsibility for finding or creating the solution resides beyond the individual. Neither Vladimir nor Estragon are responsible for creating or doing good things in the world. The responsibility for goodness resides in an unseen, mysterious individual who will allegedly arrive at some point.
From its initial performances, people began wondering if Godot was meant to be a depiction of God or Jesus. Beckett famously never provided an answer to this question, but it should be obvious how much of the westernized world has created a culture that expects sporadic, divine intervention from time to time.
Christian societies often expect God, Jesus, or angels to save the day and bestow goodness upon the world at both micro and macro levels. The responsibility for doing good does not reside within the human being, but with a mysterious divine entity. And due to this theory, a “good” person has either been divinely chosen by God to be a vessel in which divine goodness flows, or must pray for God’s intervention and hope that their prayers are heard.
This relationship with the divine, or goodness, will obviously result in people focusing less on becoming divine or good themselves, and instead focusing more on waiting, asking, and creating an actively passive relationship with goodness.
America’s crisis of gun violence highlights the dangers of being actively passive. After every mass shooting in America, this country gets bombarded by statements from politicians offering their “thoughts and prayers” for the victims, and we all know that this statement is meaningless.
These politicians have been elected so that they have the responsibility to craft laws that will keep Americans safe, yet when tragedy strikes they call upon a divine entity to solve the problem. The language of “thoughts and prayers” thrives in America because we do not have a culture that focuses on cultivating an active goodness. Therefore, we are left defenseless against an absurd and dangerous discourse that professes the divinity of being irresponsibly bad.
Politicians, public officials, and community leaders could make all of our lives better, but they know that within our actively passive society the “person” seen as responsible for doing good is Divine, and not a human being. Additionally, when people do try to cultivate an active goodness, the concept will appear to be so foreign that people will struggle to believe in the legitimacy of the method or possibility of a good outcome.
The Daily Beast - “The Klan Was the Original ‘Election Police’”
