“If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to earth.” – Martin Luther King Jr., “MIA Mass Meeting”

“My best thinking got me here.” I was recently speaking with a close friend who has undergone therapy for addiction, and he shared this phrase with me. It is especially relevant early on in treatment for addiction when addicts are tempted to believe that they can remedy their addiction on their own. It is a reminder that their best efforts led them to addiction, so to be healed from addiction they must look outside of themselves.

Collectively, we as human beings need to understand something similar: our best thinking got us to where we are today. Today, we are closer to nuclear annihilation than at any point in the past (Doomsday Clock). Today, we have plentiful resources to feed all humans, yet 25,000 people—10,000 of which are children—die every day due to hunger (UN). Today, climate change leads to increasingly devastating consequences—primarily borne by people who contribute the least to climate change—and our collective efforts are not enough to stop such consequences from worsening (IPCC). 

Most people recognize that we live in dire times. Most people want that to change. Yet, most people also are, at best, wary of revolutionary change and, in my experience, tend to doubt that it is even possible. I argue that cognitive dissonance is at least one reason people dismiss revolutionary change. Briefly, cognitive dissonance is the psychological theory that “people are averse to inconsistencies within their own minds” (Psychology Today). This discomfort with inconsistency motivates people to resolve those inconsistencies, sometimes in ways that are not reasonable. For example, an alcoholic may be fully aware that they are dying from liver disease but convince themself that they cannot stop drinking. Such mental gymnastics are ultimately fatal for the alcoholic, but they resolve the cognitive dissonance that exists when drinking oneself to death.

Together, humans are in a state analogous to the aforementioned alcoholic. That is, we are addicted to greed, selfishness, violence, racism, exploitation, and other human vices that have led us to where we are today. We know we need to change, need to change massively and fundamentally, but we largely have convinced ourselves that such change is impossible. This conclusion that nothing can be done to save us from ourselves is depressing but paradoxically soothing or perhaps numbing. There is a strange comfort to be found in nihilism.

Yet, there are these folks who come along every so often and challenge us to hope. In the Christian tradition, we usually call them prophets. Because people—especially people in power—generally don’t like what they have to say, their lives usually don’t end well. One such prophet was Martin Luther King Jr. Many of his most radical ideas got him dismissed as a “utopian dreamer.” For example, he insisted that white supremacy is a God-damned lie (I mean that quite literally), that every person must be treated with dignity and respect, and that violence is not an acceptable way to resolve our disagreements. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he stated, “I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the ‘isness’ of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts him” (Nobel). In other words, King insisted that we live up to our highest ideals.

When people—particularly white people in power—thought he was speaking in platitudes, they sometimes praised him, but once they realized that he was serious about accomplishing these goals on earth, he was often denounced as a dangerous extremist or dismissed as utopian. King had a similar reply to both of these accusations. To the former, he replied that he was an extremist in the tradition of people like Jesus and Paul. He argued that, given the state of our world, “Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists” (Letter). To the latter, he argued that what is called utopian is actually practical, given where our “practical” thinking has brought us. Reflecting on Jesus’ command to love our enemies, King stated, “we have come to see today that, far from being [an] impractical idealist, Jesus is the practical realist… far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization” (Loving Enemies). Said differently, our best thinking got us here—if we want to survive we need must embrace what has heretofore considered utopian. 

To close, I want to leave you with a challenge that King presented in his final address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference:

I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about “Where do we go from here?” that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy… We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. (SCLC)

Though these words were spoken more than 50 years ago, collectively we have yet to live up to them. To meet King’s challenge, we must abandon the “common sense” of white supremacy, greed, and violence, and build a new world together.