33. Radical Hope: A Technology of Future Creation

If you've been searching everywhere for hope — in politics, business, self-development — only to find yourself more discouraged than when you started, this episode is for you. 

The surprising thing is that conventional ideas about hope might actually be keeping us trapped in the very systems we need hope to escape from.

In this episode, we'll explore:

• Why conventional ideas about hope will always lets us down
• Why your deepest pain might actually be the doorway to the change you're meant to create in the world
• What we can learn from wisdom traditions that transforms collective grief into a force for unstoppable resistance 
• The counterintuitive reason why uncertainty is where hope becomes most dangerous to oppressive systems

This episode will ignite something in you that goes far deeper than optimism — it's a call to step into your role as an agent of the world that's trying to emerge through you, starting right now.

If you're ready to turn radical hope into a daily practice that sustains you while creating real change, join our online retreat. Check out more details here. 

Transcript

Hey friends, you are listening to Liberatory Business and I'm your host, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for listening today. I want to talk about something that's really important to me, but also I want to start by being honest with you about something that I've really been struggling with for the past few years, and that is the question of hope.

Hope for humanity, hope for the future of our planet. I have looked everywhere for answers as to where I can get some hope, right? I looked at politics. There's nothing there that felt real or lasting. Public policy, same story. The business world, the tech world, they were all led by the same people — the rich white men, mostly — who were the ones who destroyed the world in the first place.

So why would I expect them to save it? So then when I turned to self-development to conventional coaching and healing worlds, what I saw was that while the intentions were good, I kept running up against the same wall, which is that these approaches were trapped inside the very frames that created all the problems that we are trying to find hope about in the first place, you know, problems created by colonialism, individualism, capitalism, consumerism, and these frameworks are talking about hope within the framework of trying to heal ourselves within a system that was designed to make us sick. So I was struggling and struggling and searching and searching and reading and reading and learning and learning.

And it wasn't until I turned to indigenous teachers and elders and to the wisdom of my own ancestors, to the legacy that were left by those who have fought for liberation and a better future across generations, across different geographies, that I finally felt the pieces coming together. And what became clear to me is this — it's not unreasonable to hope.

And in fact, it's not only not unreasonable. We must hope it's an imperative and we must take action on that hope. But for that hope to have real strength, roots, durability and power to actually change things, it cannot be what we've been conventionally trained to think it is. And so this episode is about everything that I've learned about what hope really is, and I call it radical hope.

And I just want to preface this by saying radical hope is not a term that I coined. But you know, there's been references by different traditions, different elders who have used terms like radical hope, and I am leaning on those traditions and I'm going to tell you more about them. But I really like these words, radical hope, because it points us to something different than what we've been conventionally trained to think about hope, which is — let's talk about that right now, right? Because what most of what we call hope is actually, I think, something so flimsy and weak, that it has very little power to sustain us through different challenges or to create change over the long haul and, you know, overcome some really deeply entrenched, difficult structures and circumstances.

Here's what most people, including me in the past, think hope is. That it's an emotion. That you either have or don't have. It's like happiness or sadness or anxiety or joy. It's like a feeling that arises inside you or it goes away, right? You wake up one day, one morning, and you feel hopeful, and then the next day you don't.

Right? Something happens and you're like, oh, I feel hopeful, and then something else happens and you're like, "Nope, I don't anymore." Right? And there's nothing you can do about it. It's just emotional weather. Like there's sunny days and rainy days, right? The second thing that most people think what hope is, is that it's circumstance dependent, right? Depends on what's happening. You feel hopeful when you see evidence that things might improve and you feel disappointed. You feel despair when you see the opposite. So your hope falls and rises with the news cycle, with poll numbers, with whether your candidate wins or loses, or with, you know, who's doing what out in the world.

Which is all outside of your control. And then hope becomes incredibly fragile once again. Right? One setback, one bad news cycle, one wrong politician being elected — your hope disappears. Poof. Gone. And have you noticed we also tend to treat hope like it's a luxury item, right? It's like something you can afford when things are looking up and your conditions are good, right? Like I hear people say, and I've said this in the past too, like, "Oh, it's easy for you to be hopeful. You're all set up, you know, you have a great job, you have enough money, things are looking out for you. You have health insurance," like as if hope is only available to people whose lives are already working out in a certain way.

And the last thing that I want to point to about how we conventionally are trained to think about hope is that we are conditioned to think about hope as being individual and private. Like your hope is your own personal feeling that is about you and your emotions doesn't affect anybody else. It doesn't have to do with anybody else. You keep it to yourself. You know, maybe you share it with your close friends, you know, like, "Oh, I feel hopeful about this," but it's not something that has broader relevance. It's not something that moves in the world or creates anything beyond your own inner experience.

Okay, I said that was the last thing, but actually this is the last thing. Most damaging of all about what we are conventionally trained to think about hope is that we separate hope from action because we think of hope as, once again, an emotion. Hope is what you feel in action is what you do. Right, so you can sit around feeling hopeful, but not do anything, or you can take action while feeling totally hopeless because these are two separate things.

Now, I think all of these together create a version of hope that is very fragile, one that keeps letting us down. But what if there's a totally different way to think about hope? What if everything that we've been taught about what hope is is not only wrong, but it's actually keeping us trapped in the very systems that we need hope to get out of?

Right? Because let me tell you what I've learned about what hope really is from elders, activists across generations and across the world from ancestors. Let me give you a small example, right? Let's say you look around at the world and you see so much isolation, so much pain, loneliness. You don't see much hope that these larger systems are going to change to make meaningful progress on that front, right?

But something in you decides to call a friend that you know has been struggling, not because you know for sure that it's going to help, you're not even sure, but something deeper inside of you is telling you, "Hey, what if you just reached out?" and you do. And to that one friend that you reached out to, you became hope. That conversation became hope. And here's a real life example that I experienced recently. A few weeks ago, I ran a fundraiser to raise money for an organization in Gaza, and I did this thing where I said, if you donate within 24 hours to this organization, you send me a receipt. I'll answer any question you have.

It was like a perk that, you know, that I used to incentivize people to give and it was a great campaign. It was fun, and we raised a bunch of money. So there's this one person who donated and sent me a screenshot of their receipt and I was like, amazing. Like, ask me your question and what do you want to know? What can I do for you? And they opened their heart to me and their story was totally heartbreaking. Both of their parents were dying. And that wasn't even, which is, you know, traumatic enough. But there was all these other things happening in their lives as well that were so painful. And this person was asking me, all these unfathomably difficult things are happening in my own life.

So where can I find hope? And that was a moment where I had to stop and see what was right in front of me, which was, here's someone who's drowning in their own grief and pain, who is telling me that they can't see a way forward, and yet they had been moved by compassion to give to someone else in perhaps even greater pain, someone who is undergoing genocide and because of what they did, a child in Gaza was going to eat. I said to them, "Hey, you are asking me where you can find hope. But look, you are the hope. Your very existence, your capacity to connect to others' pain, and love them beyond your own pain. That's what hope looks like. You are it." And that was another moment of crystallization for me, right?

Like, this is what real hope is. It isn't about believing it or feeling, it's not waiting for the world to arrange itself in a certain way, to give us reasons to believe or feel something. It comes from feeling, being connected to something deeper than ourselves and bigger than ourselves, and deeper than our circumstances. It is connected to love and it is — love motivates us to act even in the most difficult circumstances. That kind of hope doesn't need evidence. It creates evidence. It says, what if I acted as if the world that I long for was already trying to emerge through me?

What if my one tiny action was exactly what was needed right now? And that is what I mean my friend, by radical hope. It's hope that's deeper than an emotion, that it's something that comes from the soul, not the mind. It's hope that acts through you. It's not just something that's in you. Now I know what some of you might be thinking.

Which is when we start talking about hope in this way, it can bring up some questions, right? You might be wondering, okay, sounds great, but how is this different from just thinking positive thoughts and ignoring reality? Right, and I get it. This is a really important question and one that I struggled with for a long time because there's a lot of it out there.

There's a lot of, oh, just manifest whatever you want. Just manifest it and you know, good vibes only, and, oh, something terrible happened. Well, it's okay 'cause everything happens for a reason and that stuff is bullshit. It's not what I'm talking about. 'Cause let me be really clear about something. Radical hope is not about ignoring painful realities. It is something that works through them and with them. So here's the difference, right? Wishful thinking says, if I just focus on the positive stuff, if I just focus on the bright side and shove all that negative stuff under the rug, it is going to go away. It's like putting rose colored, you know, glasses on and pretending everything is fine, and it avoids everything that's uncomfortable, right?

Radical hope does something totally different. It says, okay, all the painful, terrible, dark stuff is real. And it's showing me what needs to change. It doesn't look away from injustice, from suffering, from the very real problems in our world. Instead, it sees those problems as information, right as a roadmap for where our hearts, where our energy, where our action are most needed.

Spiritual bypassing is another trap, right? It tries to float above suffering, to transcend it and be in the light, be in love, whatever. They use these words, right? Without actually dealing with any of it, right? It's like these people — spiritual bypassing people say, trust in the universe, or, you know, whatever's painful, it's just low vibrations, whatever. You've heard it too, right? Spiritual bypassing dismisses things that are real and uncomfortable because it does not have the depth or the perspective or the maturity to hold the complexity of what it means to be human in a world that contains both beauty and horror. Radical hope, on the other hand, plants itself right in the middle of suffering, and it asks deeper questions about what's trying to emerge through it all. Like the person who donated to Gaza while their own parents were dying, they weren't pretending that they were happy, or you know that they were in the light or whatever. They weren't bypassing their pain by focusing only on helping others and pretending that's going to make all their pain go away.

Instead, they were experiencing their own loss and helplessness, and also connecting to the suffering of people that they'd never met. Their pain became a bridge to compassion. Their pain was not an obstacle to overcome. That's what radical hope looks like in action, using your pain as a doorway, as information for deeper understanding and more meaningful action.

Now, let's be honest about something though, right? When you operate from radical hope, you're stepping into a fuck ton of uncertainty, honestly. A lot of fear around the uncertainty too. Like you don't know if your action's going to work. You don't know if that one little thing that you do is going to make any difference. You don't know if the change that you're hoping towards is something that's going to happen in your lifetime or ever. You don't know if other people are going to join you or validate you or just think you're totally crazy or criticize you for it. Like, but here's the thing, the uncertainty is real and once again, most of us have been taught that uncertainty is bad, that it's something to avoid. So if you have uncertainty, it means you're not ready to act yet. Wait until you're certain to act. We need a plan. We need to be able to see the path forward. We need to know that our efforts will be successful before we begin, but I want to ask you, what if uncertainty isn't the enemy of hope?

What if it's actually where hope is the most powerful where hope has the most charge to make a difference. Because get this, when you act from certainty, you are operating from the bounds of what's already been proven possible. So the range of change you can make there is not very big. But when you act from uncertainty, when you step into the unknown because something in you is being moved in that way, something in you knows that it's right. That's when you create space for something genuinely new to emerge. It's not false positivity or wishful thinking. It's not the kind of paralysis right of cynicism either. It's something different. It's radical hope and this understanding of hope, right? One that emerges from the depths of real struggle rather than trying to float above it.

It doesn't come from just one culture or tradition, I think across the world in different times and places, people who have faced profound suffering, both individual and collective, have touched the same wisdom and talked about it. And as I was contemplating my own ancestral wisdom about this, you know, I touched on something that really would enrich how I understand hope, and it's something that I want to tell you about, which is a Korean concept, which in the Korean language is called Han. Han is a word that every Korean person knows if they speak Korean, and there's no exact translation for Han in English. The closest we can get is it's like a bone deep sorrow, grief, anger, resentment, all woven together.

But here's the thing, within Han threaded right through all of that pain are these tinges of hope. And Han isn't just about your personal pain, it's collective. It comes from shared suffering, whether from colonization or war, poverty. And you know, as Koreans, we have plenty of experience with those and here's what Han teaches us that's so powerful. Hope doesn't come from after you've healed all the pain. Hope something that rises from the suffering. The wounds don't need to be fixed before they can become sources of transformation. They already contain the seeds of transformation. And I want to show you something really different and fun. I think you can actually hear this, you can hear Han when you listen to Korean traditional music. There's this folk musical tradition called pansori, where singers move — here's what I discovered in terms of what scholars have written in English. They have written, they have described it as soaring peals of joy that quickly dropped to guttural groans.

It creates what they call cathartic transcendence. This sobbing, howling, moaning fellowship that makes poetic the otherwise unbearable. I think this is such a beautiful and profound artistic expression of Han. And let me actually play you an example so you can hear what I'm talking about. This is a pansori master called Kim, singing part of a piece called Chunhyangga. She's accompanied by just a single drum, and as you listen, pay attention to what I just described.

[Music plays]

Do you hear it? That's Han in sound form. Notice how the grief is not as flat as just despair, right? It transforms into something more dynamic, more textured, more multilayered, more generative, something that connects rather than isolates, and this more multidimensional understanding of pain. This is Han right, and Han — from this point on, we can understand Han as a force of transformation.

And this goes beyond music, right? Han turns into a force for organized resistance. And let me tell you a little bit about my people's history, Korean history in the seventies. Koreans, Korean theologians developed what they called Minjung Theology, which can be translated as people's theology. They took Christianity and reframed it as being fundamentally about liberating the oppressed masses. And you can — this is me being a theology nerd as I was a religion major in college, and I enrolled in seminary for a brief minute before I dropped out. That's another whole other story, but I'm really passionate about this and when it comes to this people's theology, the Korean version of Liberation Theology, these theologians explicitly tied their theology into the idea of Han. They said that their goal was to resolve the han of the people through theological discussion, married to political and social change. Think about that. Right? And they took action in this too. They didn't just talk about it, they didn't just write about it. They were political activists and they bore real consequences. Many of them were jailed, many of them were right there on the streets marching with the people. They saw this deep collective wound not as something to heal privately, but as something that pointed toward justice work that needed to happen in the world, and they went out into the streets and made it happen.

And during South Korea's pro-democracy movement in the same decades, right, the traditional music that you heard about — there was a different form of it that became what activists called a sonic marker of dissent. Right? Picture this, people are taken to the streets for serious political protests where if they get caught, there's serious consequences. They could get jailed, tortured, even executed in extreme cases. And in those protests, people would sometimes break into dancing concerts, communal celebration right there in the middle of it all, and that tradition still continues to this day. We have done away with a lot — with those military dictatorships. We no longer have them in Korea. They were abolished as a result of these movements. And we live in a thriving democracy where protests still happen. If you keep up with the news, there was recently an instance where a democratically elected president declared martial law for a ridiculous reason, and people rose up. Everybody went to the streets to protest, and as a result, the president was impeached. And this happens again and again in extremely recent Korean history, people taking to the streets, protesting and in the middle of the rage, in the middle of the grief of recognizing the injustice and the oppression that is being done to the people, there are celebrations, there is dancing, there's concert, there is a communal expression of the spirit of our aliveness. This is taking collective pain and turning it into collective power, and that is the lesson of Han. The rage that we feel isn't meant to be destructive or only destructive. Sometimes it has to destroy something, but it's also a creative force that knows exactly what needs to change. The grief that you feel isn't supposed to just debilitate you. Sometimes it makes you feel weaker for a time, but also it shows you what needs to be protected. It refuses easy answers. Han isn't about, "Let's get to the solution as fast as possible," but it is about bringing people together around the pain in ways that transmute the pain in order to create something new.

So when we talk about radical hope, working through difficulty, rather than trying to float above it and bypass it, rather than going around it, that's what we're talking about. And the example of how Han works through Korean people shows us this, but this wisdom doesn't just live and move within Korean borders, right? It lives in liberation movements all around the world and learning from abolition scholars and activists has also profoundly informed my understanding of radical hope. These teachers have shown me how the same wisdom has been carried and practiced in the black freedom struggle in the movements for prison abolition in the fight for every form of liberation that refuses to accept the current reality as final. And I want to be clear, I do not belong to the lineage of black liberation abolition, but I am a humble and grateful student of it. So let me tell you a little bit about what I have learned, and you might know a lot more about it, but let me just tell you what I have learned for people who might not know as much.

So, Angela Davis, you probably at least know the name, scholar, activist, revolutionary. Writer spent decades in the Black liberation movement, including time as a political prisoner. She's someone who's seen the absolute worst of what systems of oppression can do to people. And yet she says this, and I quote, "You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world, and you have to do it all the time."

That's where the quote ends. And I add, not when conditions are perfect, not when things are getting better, not when you have evidence that it's already working, but all the time. She says, "Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don't yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it's actually going to be possible."

And this is someone speaking from decades of experience and movement that looked absolutely impossible until they weren't. Now let's talk about another person, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a scholar and organizer who has spent her life studying how systems of oppression work and how they can be dismantled. She is a professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and American Studies. She pioneered the field of Carceral geography, studying how prisons and policing shape our landscapes and communities. But she's also the co-founder of Critical Resistance and other grassroots organizations fighting for prison abolition.

Now, when people hear abolition, they often think it means just tearing everything down, and I used to think that too. But listen to what she says. "Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut, deep anxiety that abolition means, knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new. Let that go. Abolitionists building the future from the present in all the ways we can." She's telling us that the seeds of the world we want are already here scattered around us in small experiments, in community gardens, in mutual aid networks, in restorative justice circles. The future is already trying to emerge through our actions right now, small and big, and what we need to do is to tend to those seeds.

Mariame Kaba, another powerful voice and activist and scholar in the abolition movement says this, "Hope does not preclude feeling sadness, or frustration or anger, or any other emotion. That makes total sense. Hope isn't an emotion. Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline. We have to practice it every single day."

I love that quote. That's just the distillation of what radical hope means to me. It's a discipline. It's something you do, it's an action you take. It's something you practice. It's something you commit to, not an emotion that comes and goes. Not something you wait to arrive to you, not something that you wait to fall into your lap, right?

So let me ask you some questions, questions that might help you to find where your radical hope wants to emerge. What pains are you carrying that might actually be a doorway to the change that you are meant to create in the world? If your pain contains the seeds for the world, we need, if the rage you feel knows exactly what needs to change, if your grief sees what needs to be protected.

What is the reality that is trying to emerge through you? What would you do if you acted as if the world you are longing for is inevitable and is trying to come into being through your actions?

What tiny experiment could you try today? Something that takes five minutes, 10 minutes. Not because you have evidence that it's going to fix everything, but because something in you knows that it's what's needed. And I know that for some of you, what I shared today might feel like the beginning of a deeper inquiry and deeper practice, right? You might find yourself thinking, oh, I want to go further with this work to really explore how I can make radical hope a daily practice for me, and what your unique path to radical action on a daily basis might look like so.

Okay. There is an online retreat where we could go much deeper with these questions, not just as intellectual concepts, but as lived practices. And it's called together because we have to do it together as a community. And it's starting September 10th and it runs for two weeks. And I'm inviting you to it because here's what I know happens when people try to live from radical hope. You get inspired by the concept, like, sounds great, but then you hit the barriers, right? You hit it, you run up against the difficulties. You lie awake at 3:00 AM 'cause I know, I have, wondering like, you know, what's wrong with the world? You know all the things that need to be fixed, but you're like, okay, what's my role? Right? In the online retreat, we can identify exactly what is the intersection of your skills and your longings for the world that you want to see and what the world needs from you. So you know exactly where to focus your energy. Maybe you are an entrepreneur or maybe you are something else and you are making good money. You are financially okay, but the way you are living feels a little bit disconnected from the change that you want to see in the world.

If that's you, we're going to build a roadmap for a profitable business, a financially secure life, maybe an even abundant life that doesn't compromise your integrity or your vision for the world. Work that feeds your soul and your bank account. Or maybe in the past you've tried to join movements before, but felt like, I don't know that I quite fit in here. I don't know that I quite fit in in any standard movement. And so you've been trying to figure out how to do this work in isolation. Well, if that's you, I promise you you're going to find your people in this retreat. The ones who get it. The ones who see and validate and will celebrate your unique different role.

And the ones who definitely won't think you're crazy for believing that a radically different world that nourishes everyone that is kind to everyone is possible. Or maybe you're like, okay, I get the theory, but I don't know what the daily practices are for me that are doable to me, that I can actually do in spite of my neurodivergence, in spite of my chronic illness, in spite of my incredibly busy schedule, in spite of all my family demands that turn radical hope into consistent action.

Well, guess what? I guarantee you we're going to develop a doable daily practice that works for the life that you have, that works for the brain and body that you have that takes five minutes, but anchors your day and life in purpose and radical hope plus a business model that is rooted in your values and funds your activism instead of feeling like it's always — you know, like a competition between how do I do my business or how do I do my activism? Right? And when you get this right, truly, like when you have clarity on, okay, what's my unique contribution and what's everything else that other people can do so I don't have to worry about it, right? How do I find my way to financial abundance? That — and a way to create that that aligns with my values and I connect with a community that supports my vision. And I can identify the practices that are actually doable for me, that sustain you. You will become unstoppable and you'll become what I call a one person's resistance army. So this retreat called together is the exact map that's going to help you navigate all of these barriers and help you discover your unique blueprint for living radical hope or for being a living agent for radical hope, not just as an inspiring idea, but as a way of life that sustains you while you create radical change in the world. So if you're being called to explore this more deeply to do this work, I'd love to have you join us. You can find the link that takes you to all the details in the show notes.

I'd be so excited to meet you there, and otherwise, I will talk to you next week. Bye.

Hey, and if you're listening to this after the date of September, 2025, please know that this entire retreat is available as a self-guided experience, and you can still go to the link in the show notes to check it out.