Pessimism Is Not Prophecy: On Declining Invitations to Surrender
“Public opinion is not a self-enforcing political mechanism; it’s a mood. If we want public disapproval to become public action, we need to extend worthwhile invitations.”
I have often talked about my discomfort with uncertainty and how it leads me to absorb as much information as I can about every topic of concern. I metabolize a lot of toxic knowledge, sift through frightening numbers and statistics, absorb right-wing vitriol, and outright horrify myself, all in order to do the sense-making work that helps me strategize and, perhaps, offer others some honest, measured advice about what we ought to do next. During a recent conversation, a friend mentioned that she had long relied on my predictions of what was ahead. From COVID to fascism and beyond, I have sometimes felt Cassandra-like, warning about dangers that many have dismissed, while telling my close friends and co-strugglers what to expect and how we ought to prepare. As my friend spoke, I realized that I probably haven’t made any actionable predictions in some time. The truth is, it used to be easier to guess what was going to happen next.
It’s much easier to anticipate that a stumbling person is going to fall than to predict exactly how their limbs will tangle or buckle, what ligaments might strain or snap, whether they’ll hit their head or bang their knee. The fall itself is a chaotic series of reactions, as protective reflexes fire, muscles guard, and gravity overpowers the flailing quadrants of a human body. What will the damage look like? How quickly will they rebound? What will be broken? Will those impacts cascade? Will they lose consciousness? I can’t tell you any of that before a person falls, or even as they are falling.
I can’t tell you exactly what will snap or break during our present spiral, or the order in which these impacts will occur, but I am thinking more urgently about posture: how we hold ourselves, how we move, what we reach for, and what we refuse to let go of.
Even when we are physically falling, there are things we can do to hopefully lessen the damage. If you lose your footing on the sidewalk, for example, and are inescapably about to wipe out, you can tuck your chin against your chest, to prevent your head from snapping back. You can resist the urge to try to catch yourself against the ground with one arm—a maneuver that often leads to broken bones. You can twist your body, and try to hit the ground with one of your meatier body parts, such as your ass or the side of your thigh. Basically, even when we’re mid-tumble, we have the capacity to make choices, and those choices can help shape the impacts of our fall.
That’s how I feel about this moment. Things are happening fast because we’ve gone over the edge of something. That doesn’t mean that we’re doomed, or that any specific outcome is guaranteed. But we are being thrust through the chaotic motion of this political moment, and there’s no way to draw a diagram of exactly how it’s going to play out. We have to figure out how to brace ourselves, and how to create as much safety and justice as we can amid these shifting conditions.
I’ve seen people voice a lot of frustration with imperfect strategies and tactics that “won’t get us out of this.” I understand the desire for a simple, publicly stated, all-encompassing strategy that is so bold, and so complete in its aims, that we need only adhere to its outline. I desperately want someone to bust out a marker board and draw me a map, so I can organize my life and my community around that sure-footed path. But we are mid-tumble. The impacts are underway, and will continue to unfold. We don’t know what all those impacts will be.
My own experience has taught me that we often cannot know, at the outset, what our work will make possible. I have been part of fights I did not expect to win, and I have seen them matter in ways I could not have predicted. When I joined the campaign for reparations for survivors of police torture in Chicago, I did not believe it could win. I only knew that it was worth fighting for. And yet, we achieved a transformative victory. When I joined Occupy, I could not have imagined the militance, relationships, or organizing capacity that would survive that movement’s encampment era and ripple across other struggles for more than a decade. Some struggles do not succeed in the way we imagine, or on the timeline we want, but they still alter what people believe is possible, who they trust, what they know how to do, and what they are willing to try next.
A variety of maneuvers might help us, and are worth attempting, but a wholly satisfying game plan for a chaotic descent isn’t a realistic demand. As Dan Berger has put it, “Nothing we do is sufficient, and everything we do matters.” There will be thoughtful approaches that don’t address all of our concerns. There will be organized formations that seem too narrow in their approach, amid so many burgeoning and unpredictable crises. There will be groups that seem focused on thoughtwork or skill-building that doesn’t feel action-oriented enough for those who are action-ready. And for those who are wholly focused on their particular approach, there will be efforts that feel like a “distraction.”
As someone who often finds value in tactics others call distractions or “busywork,” and who believes that marches are marches, and not “parades,” I probably won’t identify with all of those frustrations, but it’s okay for folks to feel them. It’s okay to have opinions about what you think is valuable, and what you believe is the correct course. But in my experience, the best way to make such points is to model the work you believe should exist. Or as I spent the early 2010s telling my co-strugglers in Chicago, during a period of intense direct action and protest, “Do cool shit, and people will want to do it with you.” Simply trying to verbally disassemble other people’s efforts is not a worthwhile pursuit for most people.
We don’t need more disorganizing efforts. We need organizing efforts.
We have a surplus of culture critics when we need more culture builders. Values, customs, behaviors, and ways of living are not produced by critique alone. They are produced through action, invention, repetition, and relational practice. So before posting a dunk or recording a TikTok, it’s worth asking what your contribution is meant to do: poison something, or enliven something?
And if you are trying to poison something, I hope it’s fascism.
We need more people highlighting solutions, practicing care, bracing for impacts together, and naming the openings we might push through—which is why the public broadcast of doom and despair deserves scrutiny right now. Not because people are obligated to be cheerful, but because resignation, transmitted as a factual conclusion, becomes an invitation to surrender.
Casual invitations to surrender are rarely extended by those living on the frontlines of atrocity, people growing hungry or dehydrated in prisons and detention centers, or people whose loved ones are being hunted or even mowed down by fascist weaponry. More often, they come from people who, for all of their disillusionment, are opting to live much as they did before our national spiral intensified.
For those of us whose lives are relatively intact, elective doom-saying is not just a private expression of despair. It is something we are asking other people to metabolize.
Sometimes, when I find myself formulating an angry, judgmental or shit-stirring social media post—the kind I probably would have posted without a second thought during the 2010s—I often ask myself, “Do people really need to hear this?” I’m only human, so this mental guardrail occasionally breaks, and I write the ill-advised post. More often, I either refrain from posting (which I have often done lately), or I think about how many people must be feeling what I’m feeling, and I ask myself what they might actually need to hear. There are people whose work I admire right now—people whose work I want to encourage others to join and support. There are encouraging developments to highlight. There is momentum behind ideas that we need the public to galvanize behind, such as the anti-AI sentiments of students booing commencement speakers at their graduations, growing frustrations with burgeoning inequality, large-scale public disapproval of ICE and the war on Iran, growing support for unions among Gen Z and Millennials, and a broadening recognition that we are up against an authoritarian government. But public opinion is not a self-enforcing political mechanism; it’s a mood. People can be in a bad mood and go about their day as if nothing’s changed. They can also get mad and start breaking things. If we want public disapproval to become public action, we need to extend worthwhile invitations.
I was thoroughly annoyed a few weeks ago upon reading an article in New York Magazine called, “I Mean, Why Shouldn’t We All Smoke Cigarettes Again?” The article’s subheading spelled out its thesis: “We quit our bad habits for the sake of our future selves. How naïve of us.” Perhaps it was the author’s romanticization of the smoking culture of the 1990s—an era when I (like many others) foolishly exposed countless people to the secondhand smoke of my teenage angst, because no rule, policy, or common sense prevented me from doing so. Perhaps it was the author’s presumption that the breakdown of their future-oriented self-discipline ought to be projected over the whole of society, and that their would-be surrender to cardiac complications and excruciating, deadly cancers, was something worth sharing with the masses, at this particular moment in history.
Generally speaking, I think it takes a special kind of gall to assume that what a desperate world needs is your particular spin on giving up.
When someone is falling, why would you encourage them to flail?
I’m not saying despair never makes great literature or great music. Some artists inhabit despair without pointing toward any exit, and the greatest of them can help us understand pain, ourselves, or history more clearly. To be blunt: you probably aren’t one of those people.
When I studied creative writing, my friends and I had a term for poetry steeped in the endless, generic despair of youthful disappointment. We called it “oh woe” poetry. Student writers often confused the depths of their own discontent with a depth of broader meaning, mistaking bleakness for substance. Usually, they were selling themselves short while boring the hell out of everyone around them.
If you have room to act, but your primary offering to the world is “we’re fucked, everything is awful, abandon all hope and self-destruct,” you had better be the next Dostoevsky, Jean Rhys, Elem Klimov, Cormac McCarthy—or at least fucking Thomas Ligotti.
Odds are, the world needs your “oh woe” politics about as much as it needs your breakup poetry.
This is not simply a question of your positionality within social justice spaces, for the record. When I rattle off complaints about how people are conducting themselves, my friends sometimes remind me that not everyone is trying to be an organizer, or has any desire to be. I can accept that. I don’t actually mentally divide the world into organizers and non-organizers, and I don’t think that’s the most useful way to determine how we should address each other at scale. I think we should ask ourselves whether we are a person who is trying to make things better, or if we are declaring ourselves exempt from such considerations. If we are exempt, I think we should be plain and blunt about that. As in, “I don’t care if what I say or do helps or hurts people, or makes things better or worse, because I am not a person who is trying to help. I am a quitter who has quit.” I see no reason why people who want to make things better would take such a person seriously, or spend much time thinking about what they have to say. I am equally unsure why someone who has given up on humanity and themselves, and therefore says and does whatever they want according to their own whims, would give a single fuck about what I have to say. They are not my audience, I am not theirs. But some people want to have it both ways. They want to see themselves as a good person who wants to do good, but also feel unaccountable for what they pour into the world, what they provoke, what they denigrate, and most importantly, what they fail to assist in doing.
To persist, to try, to take risks, most people need hope. They need the confidence that people can in fact change their conditions, and that collectively, they can do more together than they can apart. That confidence requires the ability to believe in other people, and to invest in other people. It means engaging with other people enough to pool our capacities and try to accomplish something worth doing. I know that some of you can do those things without hope, and without confidence, but that is not how most people function in the world. You can’t simply beat the hell out of people emotionally and tell them there’s nothing to hope for, no one to trust, and nothing to look forward to, and expect them to show up for each other in a good way.
We have to convince people that, even amid these punishing, uncertain, and fast-changing conditions, the good we do matters. We need to help them believe that taking a chance on other people is worthwhile. We have to insist upon the basic truth that together we can accomplish things that we cannot do alone, and that we will not win any of the battles ahead as scattered individuals. Remember that organized people can pivot under changing conditions much more effectively than individuals. Organized people already have the first thing they’ll need to navigate and survive any unfolding crisis: each other.
Is it frightening and at times even discouraging to build things in a chaotic political moment, when we have no idea where the next impact will be felt, or how destructive it might be? It is, and believe me, I am both mad about it and tired as hell. I also know that it takes a certain level of mental discipline to think about how we are positioning ourselves mid-tumble. How many times have you fallen down without thinking about tucking your chin or aiming yourself ass-first at the ground? That’s human. But this is a long fall, and we’ve had some time to think, so let’s do ourselves and others the kindness of trying to be strategic.
I can’t tell you what’s going to happen. I have certain expectations, and I am making plans that fit those expectations, but I recognize that tomorrow, everything could change in a way that I haven’t foreseen. That’s always been true, but it’s truer now than it’s ever been—at least within my lifetime. Donald Trump says he hasn’t ruled out sending troops to polling places in November. I think that possibility should factor into our planning. Natural disasters have intensified and will continue to intensify, and communal disaster preparedness is not a large part of leftist organizing. I think we should account for what seems probable, and what appears to be looming in our political work. But there’s no sequence to map, no diagram to draw. There’s no sensical, strategic path we can expect our unstable opposition to follow, or any way to predict the weather.
We can tuck our chins, unlock our limbs, and aim our bodies. And as we brace for each new impact, we can forge deeper, broader, and more determined connections with other people. Sometimes, those connections are what hold us up.
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