"But even if we fail to halt the decline,

it will not be the end of hope. The forces we face may be powerful and ruthless. They may have the capacity to plunge us into a terrifying dystopia, one where we will see our freedoms curtailed and widespread economic deprivation. But no tyranny in history has crushed the human capacity for love. And this love - unorganized, irrational, often propelling us to carry out acts of compassion that jeopardize our existence - is deeply subversive to those in power. Love, which appears in small, blind acts of kindness, manifested itself even in the horror of the Nazi death camps, in the killing fields of Cambodia, in the Soviet gulags, and in the genocides in the Balkans and Rwanda.

The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman wrote of the power of these acts in his masterpiece Life and Fate:

I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man's meaning. [Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 410.]

 -Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges, pg. 191