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?" and "nothing ever changes" and "who am I to make a difference?"
It's about helping people see that the story of inevitability—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—is a lie designed to keep us passive. 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 exhausted, the overwhelmed, the people who care deeply but don't know what to do with that caring.
It's to show them: here are people building alternatives. Here are movements achieving victories. Here are concrete possibilities for a different world. Here's what you could contribute.
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 flicking 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 street protests. For others, it's cooperative economics, mutual aid networks, union drives, electoral organizing, creative expression, 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.