Be The Change.

There is only one correct answer to those Leftist intellectuals who desperately await  the arrival of a new revolutionary agent capable of instigating the long-expected radical social transformation. It takes the form of the old Hopi saying, with a wonderful Hegelian twist from substance to subject: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” (This is a version of Gandhi’s motto: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”) Waiting for someone else to do the job for us is a way of rationalizing our inactivity. But the trap to be avoided here is that of perverse self-instrumentalization: “we are the ones we have been waiting for” does not mean we have to discover how it is we are the agent predestined by fate to perform the task – it means quite the opposite, namely that there is no big Other to rely on. In contrast to the classical Marxism where “history is on our side”, in the contemporary constellation, the big Other is against us: left to itself, the inner thrust of our historical development leads to catastrophe, to apocalypse; what alone can prevent such calamity is, then, pure voluntarism, in other worse, our free decision to act against historical necessity.

Slavoj Zizek (2009) First as Tragedy, Then as Farce