Despair is justified…

…but unfortunately not useful

What a week to talk about despair! 

The world is going to hell and lots of people don’t seem to care. Meanwhile, people active in or invested in the fate of social movements regularly find themselves bemoaning the apathy of the general public.

Apathy as a form of survival and self-esteem

But we shouldn’t be surprised that people are apathetic; apathy is an understandable psychic defense mechanism against a deeply unfair and heartbreaking world, especially if one feels one can do nothing about the situation. 

Most people are apathetic because they are exhausted. Life under capitalism is economically merciless: between commuting, working (increasingly precarious) jobs, caring for loved-ones, maintaining a home and paying bills there’s very little time for most workers to pay attention to the state of the world. Most of us feel like we’re barely treading water by doing what we’re told or what we imagine is expected of us: training for work, working at unsatisfying jobs, following the protocols of standard family and romance, keeping up with the Joneses, so to speak. And who wants to spend what little leisure time we have learning about how bad things are or, worse, go to a stressful meeting or a protest? 

Another problem is that many of us can’t spot any real political action possibilities. Very few of us have any substantial experience cooperating outside of mainstream, hierarchical institutions or of real democracy, of being and making decisions together as free, empowered equals. And most of us have only seen disobedient individuals punished, and never transformative or hopeful collective disobedience. 

Research also indicates that often the most oppressed people are the most likely to justify the system and therefore refuse to struggle within, against and beyond it. For many of us who endure oppression, we find dignity in our ability to strive, succeed and survive in the system, relative to others we see who can not or will not. 

Apathy breeds in the reality that most of us cannot imagine what it would mean to organize and take collective action, because we’ve never seen it or done it. And it breeds because, without another set of possibilities, we often can best value ourselves if we assume the system is the only possible way of doing things, or even that it is good. 

People are actually resisting all the time

What does this mean for people active in or who care about social movements? Two things.

First of all, rather than bemoaning the apathy of most people who ignore our refuse to participate in our efforts, we might better ask ourselves: what are we actually doing to make taking action empowering, meaningful and rewarding? How can we encourage our fellow oppressed and exploited people to imagine not only the utopian worlds we might build (this is less useful than you might think) but rather, and much more modestly, simply imagine what it might look and feel like to take collective action and find joy, meaning, friendship and the full expression of our humanity? If we want people to be able to imagine and enact radical democracy and take back power, it won’t be enough to propagandize it: we must create movements that enable people to practice it.

Second and perhaps even more importantly, we should ask ourselves: might we be looking for resistance in the wrong places? We tend to imagine resistance must take the form of organized social movements with all the dressing: unsold newspapers, janky websites, inscrutable banners, bombastic spokespeople, meetings that last deep into the night, internecine squabbles, ill-advised love affairs, etc. 

But people are actually resisting all the time. Workers conspire to steal their time back from the boss, covering for one another when they show up late or take a long break. Neighbours offer one another solidarity when utilities or state services come knocking, lying or bending the truth. Oppressed people mock and joke about those higher up the food chain. People practice laziness instead of working hard for institutions and systems that don’t serve them. And once in a while, people spontaneously protest or riot. Not all these everyday acts of resistance or explosions of rebellion are praiseworthy (sometimes they’re even profoundly reactionary), but they reveal that resistance is, in fact, happening everywhere.

If this kind of resistance is not intentionally and rigorously organized and directed, it is likely to be harmless to, or (worse) harnessed by, systems of domination. Indeed any system that survives creates spaces within it for people to let off steam or accepts a certain amount of disobedience, precisely to make sure more substantial rebellion doesn’t brew. Far-right and fascist forces specialize in co-opting everyday antagonism towards injustice and forging it into a politics that perpetuates and entrenches oppression.

Nonetheless, rather than just constantly bemoaning everyone else’s supposed apathy, participants in and people who care about social movements might consider how people are always already resisting and how this resistance might be engaged and mobilized. Because if we don’t… who will? (hint: it’s probably the far right…)

Escaping Melancholia

There is a risk for all of us who participate in or care about social movements to fall prey to a profound nostalgia for the past, where we imagine our ancestors-in-struggle had more opportunities and enjoyed greater radicalism and support from the public. In addition to this impression often being historically incorrect (many weak and disorganized movements have succeeded and many strong and well-organized movements have failed) it also places us in a melancholic position.

The legendary psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud theorized two ways that we have of dealing with a lost object. An object here is more than just a thing: it could be a loved one who has died, a relationship that has ended, an event that has ceased, a time that has past, a revolution that has failed (or succeeded), a hope that has been quashed - essentially, anything a person can become emotionally attached to. 

In most cases, we grieve the loss of the object. It hurts like hell, but through grappling with the pain we transform. The grieving changes us, and when we are a new person, we are no longer dependent on that object to feel whole. We call this process mourning. Mourning obviously doesn’t make us happy, but it allows us to get on with our lives.  

By contrast, melancholy is a state in which we fail to grieve and we fail to transform. We remain hurt, angry, in denial and depressed. Often, we melancholics romanticize the lost object (“it was amazing, historically unique, one of a kind”) or demonize it (“it was utter trash, worthless”); we refuse to dwell with it in all its complexity. Worse still, we wrap our sense of self and sense of the world around the lost object and use it to refuse to transform and change.  

When we look back on great struggles of the past and their successes and failures, it’s easy for us to dwell in melancholy, even when we’re being thoughtful and critical. We tend to imagine cycles of struggle like the alter-globalization movement, Occupy, or the Movement for Black Lives were either transcendent in their wisdom and nobility or, by contrast, utterly irredeemable. Perhaps this is especially so because so often great movement upheavals come to define the lives of participants who are young at the time - for many people, they are formative moments of disobedience, friendship, collective joy, growth, passion and challenge. We become attached not only to the event but the feeling, and to the image of the people that we were in that struggle. 

Unfortunately, social movements don’t typically do a great job of building frameworks and institutions for passing on historical memory. What might help is to have more events (not just lectures, but also convivial events) where we share and process events of the past and gain multidimensional perspectives on what worked and did not work about past struggles, with an eye to how we might pursue struggle in the future. 

Mourn, but then organize (for your own good)

Here’s some bad news. People that researchers categorize as liberal or left-wing are, typically, less happy than other people. 

Does left wing politics attract more depressed people in the first place? Does having a relatively pessimistic view of the world make us unhappy? Or does that fact that the world actually is just as messed up as we lefties think make us, justifiably, unhappy? 

The jury is out on this one, but at very least it should encourage us all to be a little more thoughtful about how we can sustain our emotional wellbeing so that we can continue to contribute to struggles for the long haul - nothing meaningful changes quickly, and most veteran organizers agree that, except in the rarest circumstances, most movements take at least 5-10 years to see any results, let alone major social change. Part of being a bit happier is just realizing this, and planning accordingly. Maybe a lot of our unhappiness comes from unrealistically expecting things to change quickly and being constantly disappointed.

One thing to watch out for is that, weirdly, feeling badly about the world can offer its own kind of problematic rewards. When we look at the cruelty and injustice of the world, we may feel depressed (as some liberal psychologists argue), but we also can feel virtuous for being able to see so clearly what is apparently hidden to or ignored by those (allegedly happier) normies. For some of us, a depressive position towards the world can also be quite motivating. But for most people it is not.

But there’s good news. One thing tends to reverse the finding that left-wing people are unhappier than everyone else: if they are active in social movements. If they are active, they tend to be happier than the norm. There may be a few reasons for this. 

As we discuss in another episode, social movements fight for a different world, but they are also instances of a different world, in miniaturized form. Some activists (people actively engaged in movements) try to “prefigure” the futures they want to create, seeking to organize themselves on the basis of values of justice, solidarity, care, equality and grassroots democracy. But even those that do not are, nonetheless, spaces where we see a flash of what we and the world might become. 

Activism is also typically a profoundly social experience, and there is almost universal evidence that sociality is among the best remedies for sadness. The reason we have funerals and wakes is also because mourning is easier with others, and the collective rituals and protocols we follow to mark a loss give us profound solace. Social movements, whether we choose to admit it or not, are also spaces of ritual, protocol and, at the best of times, social care and conviviality. 

“Activists” are just as aware of the horrors of the world, but they’re doing something about it. They are not helpless in the face of it. Even if their movements are not particularly successful they have a sense of agency and meaning, a sense of purpose. This is the route out of despair -and the antidote to groundless hope- at the same time.

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