It is easy to feel despair nowadays.  Emese Izyes tells us in her commentary that is exactly what the authoritarians want.

My parents lived through the Great Depression and World War Two.  For at least half the war, the Allies were losing or struggling to survive.  The hardest time was spring, 1942 when the Axis Powers were advancing on every front. The Big Three did not lose heart. They started achieving significant defensive victories at Midway, El Alamein, Stalingrad and Guadalcanal. In February, 1943, the Axis Powers would advance no further.  It was a long way from Guadalcanal to Tokyo and from Stalingrad to Berlin but the Allies had to start from somewhere. 

Three men in the US have as much wealth as 160 million.  The US has more than 5,000 nuclear weapons and 750 military bases overseas.  I have heard no serious discussion or attention on the obvious steps to make. DT has convinced half the country that immigrants, brown people, black people and homosexuals are picking their pockets and the billionaires and Wall Street have nothing to do with people’s growing misfortunes.

Pope Leo wants to end war but there is no perceived activity from the war abolition groups.  They do not return e-mail inquiries and it is just about impossible to make telephone contact.

See these excerpts and then read the entire commentary.

Hopelessness makes money for tech platforms that profit from extreme content and division. Tech platforms have built an outrage-for-profit model that thrives on divisive content—a 2021 study found that posts leaning on political extremism were 67% more likely to be retweeted. These algorithms keep us trapped in apps, generating more money for oligarchs while keeping us perpetually outraged at each other. The hopelessness this creates maintains exactly the political polarization Trump needs to convince us we’re each other’s enemies instead of our greatest hopes.

Authoritarian takeover of democracy accelerates when the population feels hopeless, which is exactly why we must refuse that trap.

Kaba reminds us that hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness, frustration, or anger—emotions that make total sense given our circumstances. As she acknowledges, “in the world which we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that there is nothing going to change ever, that people are evil and bad at the bottom.” But radical hope is about believing in the potential for transformation and change, and practicing, actioning that belief every single day. It’s about being of the world and in the world, not escaping to Mars or retreating into algorithmic bubbles designed to make us feel powerless.

The authoritarians and tech oligarchs are counting on our despair. They need us to believe transformation is impossible, that we should accept their visions of hopeless futures while they plan their escapes. Our radical hope—practiced daily, grounded in community, committed to active struggle—is the antidote to their strategy.

The Authoritarians Want Your Hopelessness—Don’t Give It to Them

This is how authoritarians operate: they flourish when the population feels despair, turning even moments that could bring us together into tools for separation.

Sincerely,

Ed