By Kermit
In the wake of the L.A. fires, a lot of folks were re-posting a quote about how climate change will manifest “as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer…until you’re the one filming it.” The same could be said about totalitarianism. Each day the footage and news reports of actions meant to destabilize, shock, and control people are getting closer and closer. The fascists have hung up their dog whistles and are putting on their boots. For many of us inside the US who have felt insulated from the capricious actions of the state in the past, it feels like something vital about our world has just shattered. For those of us in whom that realization came a long time ago, it still feels like a turning point, where the pretense of slow moving and deliberative institutional stability is evaporating and the naked use of institutional violence, stripped of any veneer of legitimacy, is accelerating and openly repressing any attempt to mitigate the trauma left in its wake.
We don’t know how bad it is going to get or how effective court challenges will ultimately be against this flurry of executive orders, but the trend lines are clear and it is easy, in this moment, to feel like any and all of our actions are futile. The stories that have encouraged us to hope for the best and believe in a future that is better than the present increasingly seem like wishful thinking if not absurd lies. Electoral politics have failed us, the courts cannot be trusted to defend us and we have been conditioned to believe that these are the only ways to make the world better; to save it, and us, from a terrible fate. As we move forward it will be necessary to let go of stories that do not serve us and find other ways to remain grounded and able to thrive.
However we do that, we have to start by accepting that we cannot save the world; there is no way to turn back the clock and the arc of the moral universe does not always or inevitably bend toward justice. Clinging to the belief that time, reason, institutional safeguards or thinking good thoughts will prevent or overcome the bad things happening leaves us immobilized and unable to recognize what we can do to resist them. Things will never go back to normal; we will not be delivered out of this world and into a better one — this is the world we have and we have to decide how we will live in it, connected to our values and nurturing a culture that is robust enough to survive the coming storm.
The opposite of hope…
Faced with terrifying headlines and an overwhelming sense of current and impending trauma, It is understandable that many folks are checking out, their sympathetic nervous systems overloaded, reacting with despair and numbing distractions. Some try as hard as they can to sound the alarm, burning brightly and demanding that we pay attention to everything all at once, not realizing that to pay attention to everything leaves no time or mental energy for meaningful action or the capacity to tend to the things in our lives that we are fighting for.
It’s true that this is an emergency and direct actions are needed to slow the fascists down but martyrdom is not the answer and overwhelming people with information meant to scare them into action often backfires in the long run. It sets people up to burn out, lose motivation and disengage in order to protect their psyches.
Others who do see the perils of martyrdom counsel us to remain calm and distrust mainstream voices that are suddenly horrified by things they were silent about when a center-left politician was doing them. They point out that this process did not begin in the last election and losing our shit will not serve us now. They are right and calming our nervous system is vital, but knowing this doesn’t change the fact that things are getting worse and stopping here can lead to a sense of smug resignation; a feeling that since things have always been terrible and are unlikely to stop being terrible, there is no point in doing anything.
The idea that we are not able to fix the whole problem can obscure the fact that there are smaller things we can do that have an impact. If we understand the future as a winner-take-all contest between utopia and catastrophe, then being faced with realities that cause us to lose faith in utopia means that everything is lost. It renders us incapable of noticing the small ways utopian moments and dynamics can exist in catastrophic times.
…is collectivity.
There is an irony in the idea that to avoid hopelessness, we must walk away from a certain kind of hope. In her book, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, Sarah Jaquette Ray talks about how the opposite of despair isn’t hope, but a feeling of collectivity, of being connected, with others, to something larger than ourselves. She describes not wanting to leave people feeling hopeful, but “like you have the capacity and power to do something, including the most important task, preserving yourself for a lifetime of thriving in a climate changed world.” We live in a culture and economic system that encourages us to focus only on our agency as individuals. Things like climate change and political instability are far too large for any one person to meaningfully effect (save the odd megalomaniacal billionaire), so we are forced to conclude that our agency doesn’t matter. When we recognize that we are all, unavoidably, also part of larger collective groups of people and nurture those connections, we are not only able to do things together that make us feel good, but realize the actual sphere of our influence and see opportunities to be part of larger efforts to make positive change.
Recognizing that we are each only a small part of something larger can take the pressure off and give us permission to care for ourselves. It also allows us to better identify the scale within which our agency is powerful; certainly inside our own heads, but also in the lives of the people we love and are loved by, perhaps among our neighbors and other people we encounter or connect with as we move through the world and even as part of larger collectivities; haphazard and intentional, cultural and occupational.
Strengthening our communities and building collective solidarity has to start with finding our people and talking to them about the things that matter; building relationships with others that allow us to have healthier relationships with ourselves. Exploitative work schedules, antisocial urban planning and ‘social’ technologies that isolate and discourage us make this task harder. Finding ways to overcome those barriers and live in defiance of a culture that would seek to alienate us can push us to take the emotional quality of our lives more seriously.
Making sure we are able to conserve our energy for a long and ongoing struggle is important. There are always ways to respond to the present moment that are not meaningless; that connect us to one another and the world around us and encourage us to find joy and purpose with each other. Paying attention to our need for play and pleasure increases our capacity to get through difficult times. Resistance can look like sharing burdens and joy, like people who know how to laugh with, soothe, affirm and challenge each other. It is important to stay focused on the places where we can have the most impact, but also to honor the necessity of finding playful moments of presence with each other and to be reminded of the wonder of being alive; of recognizing that we have more energy to face the world when we feel connected to the people around us.
Our lives are precious, our stories matter
When I lived in Berkeley, I had an old crimethinc poster on my door that said something like “Beauty must be defined as what we are, otherwise the concept itself becomes our enemy.” The stories we tell ourselves about the world matter; they shape our lives, fuse meaning onto our actions, nurture our relationships and help us understand our emotions. As we learn to nurture stronger bonds with those around us and build more resilient narratives together to replace the stories that have failed us, we can articulate our own values more clearly and counter the rhetorical and material escalation of the fascists more effectively.
Fascist narratives try to convince us that choosing to value our own life and culture demands devaluing the lives and culture of others. This is bullshit. I know that the lives of other people are precious precisely because my life and the lives of the people I love are precious to me and in dehumanizing others, we dehumanize ourselves.
My own certainty about this did not develop in a vacuum, it was nurtured and grew over time, through many conversations and experiences with people in my life. Conversations like those and the relationships and communities around them are what teach us how to critically engage with the world, allowing us to take in new information and let it change us. There is so much over which we have virtually no agency or ability to control. We do have agency over the stories we tell ourselves about what is important and who we want to be. We can learn to tell stories that acknowledge the grief of this moment and the trauma of the past honestly, that allow us to move through that grief and into a space where we are more healed and better able to meet whatever life might throw at us.
Figuring out how to live in the world as it is means finding ways to create meaning and build structures that serve us on the scale of our own lives. It means interfacing with technology in ways that promote community building and solidarity while evading state surveillance, respecting the common humanity we share with people all over the world and understanding the systems of power that seek to estrange us from one another.
Once we let go of the idea that we will get to paradise or return to normal, we have more capacity to make choices that build meaning, connection and resilience. Working together, we can build and defend the best lives we are able to make for ourselves, not as atomized individuals or nuclear families, but as networks of support and mutual aid bound together with ties of solidarity and love.