Optimism In An Age Of Superstition And Decline

There will be a next chapter.

(Photo by STAN HONDA/AFP via Getty Images)

Democracy, living standards, and relative global peace are all imperiled. And if you attempt to get a handle on developments along any of these fronts, the most readily available sources of information are literally designed to confound you, if not convince you of lies.

If you were to ask a random stranger to whip out their phone and call up the latest news on almost any matter of significance, what are the odds that they’d come back with something true or close to true?

Is Benjamin Netanyahu dead or alive? A pretty important question at the moment! Yet millions and millions of people believe—and want you to believe—that he’s dead when he’s not.

What’s the most we can say we know for certain about the world based on the intentionally confusing, mass and arbitrary disclosure of the Epstein files? Try going in cold and assembling an accurate mosaic based on torrents of screenshots, decontextualized emails, forgeries, hyperventilating allegations, and (occasionally) professional news stories.

Is a piece of information that seems plausible and credible real? Or did some artificial intelligence, prompted by some manipulative charlatan, spit it out to advance some other interest? And this is the sector that’s both propping up the U.S. economy and angling to replace human workers with robots?

The fetal position becomes more tempting by the day.

Thus, regarding the title of this essay, I don’t mean optimism in the sense of odds-making or a sunny outlook. How could I? For all of the above reasons and others, I’m referring to a different kind of optimism. We can loosely define it as anything north of fatalism. It’s the idea that there are enough well-meaning people in the world and in our society that we can still a) take matters into our own hands, in order to b) bring about a stabler, healthier future, such that c) putting in effort, even if just at the margins, remains worth it.

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A mindset like that can coexist with all but the grimmest of forecasts. (In the long-run, we’re all dead, but maybe in the short run, too!)

North of fatalism, wars end; people who lose freedom fight to get it back; societies that endure immense hardship regain prosperity. What did Berlin look like at the end of the war? What did West Berlin look like a decade later?

The question is, how can we maintain optimism, as we’re being swept along by powerful currents? Turnabouts are highly contingent, and can falter without the kind of optimism I have in mind. But where can that optimism, the belief in resilience, be found when so much of our destiny is out of our hands? What can I or any of us do to stop the war in Iran? Not much. March in the streets? Yell at our members of Congress? How can we, as individuals, revitalize a stagnant economy when the people with the most control over it seem intent on running it into the ground, then eating our seed corn?

We can’t, at least not right now. And for that reason, I think the answer to the question—how can we maintain optimism?—lies, for the time being, in the smaller picture.

There will be a three years from now. Between now and three years from now, there’s a set of things we can do, then another set of things we can do afterward. In the near-term, nothing we do is going to make us feel like we’re in command, because we’re decidedly not. But we aren’t powerless either. We are not entirely captive to chaos and willful tyrants.

As individuals, we can opt out of many sources of despair. We can choose not to give our money to the men underwriting our time of monsters. This kind of boycott movement won’t bring them to ruin in all likelihood. But it could help slow the A.I. juggernaut—right-size a rogue industry and begin to place it under democratic control.

It would also help us escape the obfuscatory fog of online life that instills so much of our pessimism.

For instance: If you’re lucky enough, you can delete or suspend your social media accounts, and resume getting your information from independent media first and foremost. This isn’t a pitch for subscriptions. Subscribe to the New York Times, and your local paper if you still have one! But do it, and recognize that you’re likelier to find what’s true about the world in outlets like those than from any algorithm.

Even small actions can open huge founts of optimism, because they help remind us: All the forces of deception and mythmaking in the world can’t break the demand for truth.

What the people we’re up against have on us is something like chemical addiction. The dopamine rush of alerts and engagement and new content. It is within us to develop better habits of mind. We can either kick our addictions or train ourselves to better sort fact from fantasy, diligent communicators from bullshit artists. We can take it in increments. We can get offline. Or we can stay online, but remind ourselves that social-media platforms are terrifying fun houses, not reliable transoms of current affairs.

This mass demand for truth is more than just about gaining a more accurate sense of current affairs. Caring about the truth is anxiety inducing, but it’s also a superpower, and a real source of hope.

Donald Trump and his oligarch loyalists and his enablers in the Republican Party put enormous effort into making truth difficult to divine, and knowledge hard to produce. That is the biggest source of their control. They abhor journalism and scientific research and are trying to crush both.

But they’re up against the fact that we’ve already had a Renaissance and an Enlightenment; we’ve established a scientific method that’s been vindicated by industrial and technological revolutions; we have centuries worth of proof that we can understand and harness the physical world for the betterment of mankind. They can’t erase our mental and physical hard drives overnight. The sum of factual and scientific knowledge loose in the world is too big to force us into medievalism without a fight.

To be more concrete about it: What Trump has done to scientific research in the United States is a tragedy and a crime, but he isn’t king of the world and thus can’t snuff out innovation or make us forget what we’ve already learned and created. He can only change where progress happens. He can’t practically prevent knowledge produced abroad from reaching us, he can only ensure that our society doesn’t reap the rewards most fully. He may have crippled cancer research in America but that work will now be done elsewhere, and at some point it might come back home.

Likewise, what Trump means to do to immigrants in the country, encamp them by the millions, is evil. But our immense storehouses of knowledge include experience with this very kind of evil. Why do we think his administration keeps getting turned away by communities, even right-wing communities, that don’t want prison camps just down the road? Some of it might be NIMBYism. Some of it might be driven by fear of jailbreaks. But it’s also that most of us don’t want to condone atrocity, even implicitly, let alone make neighbors with it. An appetite for cruelty is hard to impose in a permanent way on people who have seen the benefits of progress.

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That’s for the near term. What optimism means three years from now is less clear, because we can’t know what the world will look like then.

But imagine a particularly bleak scenario: The dollar has lost its value. Breadlines run through every community. America is a pariah state. The pro-democracy movement has regained power, but must more or less start from scratch.

OK, so what?

The U.S. would still be a large and resource-rich country, with the ability to atone for its sins, and the power to put the world on stronger footing. For this reason, I think back quite often to what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in Munich last month about the future of the global order.

[W]e are in a new day and in a new time. But that does not mean that the majority of Americans are ready to walk away from a rules based order, and that we’re ready to walk away from our commitment to democracy. I think what we identify is that in a rules based order, hypocrisy is vulnerability, and so I think what we are seeking is a return to a rules based order that eliminates the hypocrisies around when, too often in the West, we look the other way for inconvenient populations to act out these paradoxes, whether it is kidnapping a foreign head of state, whether it is threatening our allies to colonize Greenland, whether it is looking the other way in a genocide. Hypocrisies are vulnerabilities, and they threaten democracies globally. And so I think many of us are here to say, we are here and we are ready for the next chapter, not to have the world turn to isolation, but to deepen our partnership on greater and increased commitment to integrity to our values….

When you have a rules based order where you carve out exceptions to our values, exceptions to our rules, eventually the exceptions become the rules. And I think that to your original point, over the last five years, we’ve seen such a breaking and such a fraying of these alleged western values that people wonder if it ever existed in the first place. So I don’t know if it’s necessarily that we are in a post-rules based order, I think it’s possible that we were in a pre-rules based order, and we have an opportunity to explore what a world would look like if we upheld democracy, human rights, trade that actually centers working class people, instead of accruing overwhelmingly the benefits of trade to the wealthiest. But if we reoriented a new era that could actually help people and show how foreign policy and healthy foreign policy can show up and help them in their lives.

This isn’t the naive hope that the pre-authoritarian normalcy will snap back into existence after the next election. It’s a belief that we can defeat authoritarianism with something new and better than what we had before: A popular alliance of workers and allies, helming more honorable and humane governments and partnerships, to counter the cynical alliance of nationalists and kleptocrats. A revitalized order of free societies. The U.S. might never enjoy the benefits of hegemonic power again, but we can still become a senior partner in an arrangement like that.

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This surely sounds farfetched, at least from the vantage point of today. It would obviously require vast effort, resilience, and luck. But three years from now, we may very well have unusual latitude to act. America will be rebuilding from the Trump humiliation, and our leaders will be able to cite it as reassurance that we’ve been chastened.

The Trump humiliation. Get used to saying it.

Every president must eventually remind the public that all was not perfect when they took over. In this century, whenever Democrats have come to power, they’ve had a great case to make that they should be judged by their ability to see the country through crisis. Unlike Trump¹, they tend to do this in euphemism and by allusion. Remember Barack Obama and the car in the ditch? But citing the failures of the past is still a powerful source of narrative formation.

If Democrats have a chance to rebuild in 2029, it will make 2009 and 2021 look like child's play. The economy, the world order, even the viability of the American state will be on the line. They will thus surely see the value in making a clean and explicit break with the way we used to do things.

Leaders who don’t want failed legacies will move aggressively. They’ll have to. I won’t recapitulate all the many things they’d need to accomplish, and quickly, to put the country on an even keel. You can mine the archive for those. Suffice it to say they include accountability for public corruption, truth and reconciliation, court reform and other democracy enhancements—both so that the U.S. can govern itself, and to prove to the world that we’re not just one election away from another brush with despotism.

It’s a long list, but as of today, every item on it remains achievable.

Trump is causing immense and compounding damage in the world. But many historical figures have done that with their moments in power. Few have shaped the world for all eternity, and none has succeeded in making it permanently oppressive for everyone.

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I mostly wrote this for me, to keep my own self centered. It’s hard to write meaningfully for an audience of news-seekers when things feel like they’re spiraling out of control in multiple directions. But I really believe it. And I thought it was worth putting to word, not just to make myself or any readers feel a little better, but to insure against failure.

We’re only going to get one shot at this, which means everyone needs to be prepared to act—now and in the future.

1. Republicans, by contrast, have inherited stabilized societies and wrecked them. Trump has nevertheless been a more aggressive excuse-maker—the buck stops with my predecessor—than any president in our history.