as the world burns: finding hope in a fascist era

I hope this email finds you well in uncertain times.

Ah, the parlance of “uncertain times.” While 2020 is hardly far enough way to be nostalgic, who can’t remember those emails about troubled times, uncertain times, or just a general, “What’s going on here?” And things haven’t slowed down. We haven’t caught our breath. The reality is, it feels like we’ve been in a constant whirlwind since 9/11, maybe even before if you include the Clinton sex scandal.

I’m a geriatric millennial; too young to be Gen X, so old that I’m almost edged out of the Millennial generation. This means that my freshman year of high school was Columbine, and my senior year was 9/11 – I’m one of the first generations to be educated using classroom computers almost since the first grade. I don’t fit all the key markers of Gen X, but I fit every single one for a Millennial, including growing up in the relative calm of the late 80s and the decade of the 90s. I can remember a time when things were stable and predictable. Even older Gen Z people can, to a degree, 2001-2016 wasn’t as chaotic as post-2016 has been. For most younger people, however, chaos is all they’ve ever known on a world stage.

Post-2016. I think we take for granted just how much the world has changed and gotten worse in this past decade. In some ways, it’s better. Syria – for now – looks to actually have a shot at recovery. Only time will tell there. But outside of that, all the good that I could usually look for is gone. Medical advancements? Without funding from the US government, the new golden era of medicine is finally over. Tech advancements? Every tech advancement that mattered has been gutted, and all power is being handed over to techbros. After all, why do you think I coded my own website, built my own server, and run the whole thing myself? I want to be as independent as possible…even though I still must rely on megacorporations for server hosting.

To anyone paying attention and who is conscious and has a conscience, things are extremely grim now. Europe is within 5 years of being invaded by Russia, likely hit with a first round of tactical nuclear weapons to scare them into capitulation before they can put up a fight (a fight Russia knows it can’t win conventionally). China is almost certainly going to gain soft power with the power vacuum the US is leaving behind and will feel comfortable and confident making moves on Taiwan within the next 5-10 years as well. And the United States? Who knows, but there isn’t a path there that looks good. The best case is we fall apart and self-isolate as we turn on ourselves. Worst case is we end up in a shooting war with any number of our allies for any number of stupid reasons.

This is a hopeless situation, or so it seems.  I can’t remember who it is that I read about, but I remember the story of a German intellectual who took part in the Weimar project. He worked for over a decade to bring freedom and democracy to Germany, only to watch it taken away by the Nazis in the 30s. He eventually escaped to Brazil, every year watching Germany become more and more evil, watching the war break out, and finally in 1943 – when the Nazis seemed invincible and on the verge of a victory in Europe – he committed suicide. Two years later Hitler would be dead in a bunker and Germany would be defeated. Had he just held onto hope a little longer, he’d have lived to see the budding of life on the tree of hope.

So long as there is life, there is hope.

This is a refrain found in the Bible. It’s a sentiment found in multiple religions and from multiple philosophers. The reason is it’s not just a platitude; it might as well be the founding motto for our species. It’s how we’ve evolved and advanced – our refusal to give up despite the odds, our desire to press forward no matter how impossible it might seem, is how 300,000 years of human evolution brought us to this point. So long as there is life, so long as we are conscious and conscience, so long as there is an us, we know things can get better. We know things can collapse overnight.

But it takes work. And it begins first and foremost with hope.

Hope is a weird concept for an agnostic nihilist to talk about, right? Being agnostic I have no belief in the afterlife and so, ultimately, I have no real “hope” of anything happening after I die. I’m a nihilist, meaning I don’t believe there is any inherent meaning in life and instead we must inject that meaning into life, so if there is no meaning then why care? Why do I have hope if nothing ultimately matters? But this ignores the existential part of existential nihilism.

There is something to being alive and conscious. When I look at the utility of the AI I use to help me code vs my cat, the AI is way smarter, hands down. And yet, I’m drawn more to my cat. If AI were banned tomorrow, it’d absolutely hurt me with my coding and business model, but there wouldn’t be any sentimental loss to the AI itself. But my cat? I’d miss that cat, even though the cat has lower utility than the AI.

This is because I have injected meaning into these objects, and I am alive and that matters to me. But the existence and freedom of other people matters to me just as much as my own life because I realize that they are essential to I. They can exist without me, but I cannot exist without them. This I simply how we evolved as a species; we are possibly one of, if not the most social of all mammals. So much so that our maturing period takes almost 20 years to achieve; this is likely because being social, children had more time to develop due to being protected by large groups, meaning they could stay in adolescence longer, which gave those early human brains time to grow.

In other words, it’s not necessarily selfish to have hope because I matter, after all, I’m acknowledging that I only matter because others matter just as much. And I’m not the only person who functions this way – most people who spend time being empathetic, while they may have not thought through their motives, are likely all driven by what I described above.

Meaning, we all inject meaning into this world and so this world matters. But it’s not just that this world matters, but what the world could be. We can see how a better world would be possible, if only x, y, and z would change. But we lose hope and believe x, y, and z will never change, forgetting that those who believed in the immutable nature of x, y, and z in the past were eventually proven wrong; they are rather mutable.

Things can change overnight. If enough people get upset enough, then history can move at a rapid pace. Put another way, when bullets are cheaper than bread, the powerful end up dead. In human history, especially the last four centuries, power imbalances have often been corrected rather quickly within most Western nations. “Quickly” on the scale of human history, but even then, we’re looking at within a few decades. Assad seemed invincible in Syria until one day he didn’t.

All the tyrannical systems facing the US are all based on the cult of personality, and people eventually die. When they do, the cult begins to lose its power, even if a replacement comes along. Eventually, the cult collapses. Nations simply cannot function on corruption and will eventually, inevitably collapse. The US is not immune from this reality, and it could take decades, or it could take weeks.

In the meantime, how do you find hope while you await the collapse of fascism? The simple answer is this: You don’t. You cannot find hope in an era of fascism. You can, however, create hope and become hope. If you are of those who are privileged in a hierarchical society, you can use your position to help those who are not. Many Germans used their positions in society to protect and hide Jews, Roma, and other targets of the Holocaust from 1933-1945. It may not come to that in the US – or so I hope – but speaking up, defending people, and refusing to acquiesce to the inevitable abuse that the out groups will face is one way to become hope.

How you choose to become hope, how you choose to act in hope, is on you to decide. Do small things to help in little ways. The smallest bit of help can go a long way to giving others hope, and in return you’ll begin to find hope. But if you choose to wait around to find hope, or for hope to come to you, or for some savior to come in and save the day, you’ll be waiting until the day you die. The only way to find hope in a time of fascism is to create it.