Radical Hope vs. Radical Acceptance: Continuing an Asynchronous Debate

In which Richard Crim generously allows me to critique his critique of my critique of his definition of “radical acceptance”

After a little back and forth in the comments sections of other people’s posts, I decided to expand my thoughts on this topic in a post of my own, titled “We Need Radical Hope, Not Radical Acceptance”. As I intended, that post has generated a fair amount of pushback (and a rare “boost” here on Medium). Included among the initial round of comments was a very thoughtful response by Richard Crim. I wanted to respond to Richard’s response, but — given the fact that the implementation of “comments” on Medium leaves much to be desired — I asked Richard if I could include his comment in a follow-up post, in which I would intersperse my own comments with his. Richard agreed, so here’s the result: Round 2 of “Radical Acceptance vs. Radical Hope”.

The argument I want to make here is that Richard’s version of Radical Acceptance is actually Radical Hope in disguise. Having engaged on this issue for awhile now, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are actually two versions of Radical Acceptance among the folks who call themselves Doomers.

• One version of Radical Acceptance says we need to accept that the human race is going to extinguish itself, along with most of the rest of life on this planet, and all we can do is sit back and accept it. I’ve…