izzy walter
This was written in
September 2024
Pessimism is not logical, it is ideological
When we iterate our visions for the future, we do so under the illusion of temporal remove. But our words are spoken in the present, and their impact plays out now, not 50 years down the line. As someone who is fairly outspoken about my investment in climate justice, I’m quite regularly confronted with the hot take (that feels a bit more room temperature at this point) that goes along the lines of ‘the world is burning let’s dance in the flames’, in other words ‘humanity is destined for destruction so who cares’. Anytime I hear this type of thinking, I feel gut-wrenchingly at odds with its underpinning logic.
To be clear, I don’t mean pessimism as a euphemism for disillusionment or satire here. I also want to draw a clear line from the start between the pessimism discussed in this article and the defeating thought patterns that accompany mental health difficulty. Neither do I want to pigeon hole this discussion in exclusively environmental terms, since ‘the climate crisis’ is really just a linguistic cross-section in a wider web of patriarchal, colonial capitalism. I’m talking about the earnest kind (as in, not in jest) of ‘nihilism’ that shuts down responses and rarely arrives with comprehensive explanation, an organism in its own right.
The paradox of this particular narrative is that it feigns to operate in a realm separate from action - one where rationale, predictive logic and empiricism freeplay to produce the bestest, mostest logicalest, rightest outcomes in the whole wide world. However, its very proposal is an action in and of itself (cue the alarm bells of empiricism and epistemological hierarchy, weeeaaawww weeeeawww). It has real effects on our abilities to band together and mobilise - to hope and fight for a better future. And at the same time, there is a pyschological hypocrisy at play, since the there’s no point-er - the same 'nihilist’ instructing us the world is on fire - is often stuck in their own self-defeating struggle. Retuning home after a long day of spreading the not-so-good word, they sit on the shitter and swipe through hinge in search of daily transcendental experience (don’t we all?).
I hate to break the news, but no-one’s time travelling back to 2024 and handing out golden plated top hats embroidered with the words ‘righty mcrightface’ to that person in the corner of the pub booth crooning that “there really is just no point” out from behind their pint of micro-brewery stout, in response to your politely refusal of the communal pork scratchings because you’re trying to eat more plant-based. Life is not a crystal ball shining competition. But as the title says, despite its rhetoric this sort of thinking at its core has never really been concerned with logic, because the only real impact it has is that it . . . .
a) denigrates, demotivates and shuts down activist efforts as naive or weak, as if its own stance is void of paranoia and invulnerable to irrationality, which it certainly is not. (Eve Sedgwick touches on the harmful and flawed stereotype of reparative / hopeful critical positions (at once psychological attitudes) being seen as weak). It also discounts individual / communal action as a personal exercise in hope and the daily renewal of a moral code.
and b) to put it bluntly, clears the speaker’s own conscience of continuing not to give a shit. And it does these things now, not tomorrow and not ten years down the line.
It’s the same person who will slag off JSO and XR as a bunch of jumped up white middle class Karens, not because they are an active proponent of intersectional, class-oriented climate justice solutions against racial capitalism (of which there are many that they aren’t aware of because they likely haven’t looked), but because it’s easier to propose a socially performative nihilism that allows them to act without regard for the holistic wellbeing of their communities, than it is to engage in a nuanced and considered way with the issue.
So how can we understand this brand of pessimism a little differently? It’s often put under the umbrella of the general psychological unease suffered by young people, thanks to the usual suspects of widespread mental health difficulty, overuse of social media etc. . . (nothing new), but it’s more than that.
What if we saw this pessimism, not as a symptom of extrinsic circumstance - a brutal sentencing for the long-suffering and passive recipient - but as a socially corrosive practice that can be consciously transformed, not by waging a war of self-blame within your own mind but by replacing it with new practises of hope, however that looks to you. For me, such a shift in outlook constitutes a rebellion against the continual denial by cultural discourse of our agency (‘our’ in this instance referring to the youth of today, in the words of Amy MacDonald).
A sense of powerlessness against the world regularly overrides the image of younger generations as uniquely positioned to imagine new futures - futures generated by reparative understandings of the past. It is an idea of apathy that I see constantly perpetuated by media outlets - see the sage prophets at Buzzfeed (all hail the voice of our generation). Although these pieces are regularly authored by, or drawing from the first-hand experiences of young people, that doesn’t diminish the selectively curated nature of the narratives nor their potential for misrepresentation.
We have to question, who benefits when the young are encouraged to identify in a role that is paranoid, apathetic and powerless (regardless of who the encouragement comes from)? It is those in power.
Whatsmore, this performatively nihilistic thinking proffers a fictional storyline. It’s overwhelming totality fails to map the complex reality of youth political engagement, where, online and offline, divergent emotions violently ebb and flow; rage, frustration, hope, love etc. . . The tonal variation in political discourse is erased when we buy into a fantasy of powerlessness that only serves to protect current modes of governance from dissent.
And like most fantasies, it is characterised by contradiction. Gen Z are painted as helpless, yet unworthy of help; powerless in the face of a brutal, uncaring world they did not choose to be born into, yet too lazy, too chronically online, too ‘woke’ to do anything about it. It describes an existence in the digital realm of emotionlessness and apathy, populated by ghosts who at the same time suffer the immobilising forces of hyper-emotionality attributed to the “snowflake” generation. I smell a trap!
This prevailing despair evokes John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in which he warned against the “two opposed errors of pessimism.” The first was the pessimism “of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us but violent change.” The second was the pessimism of reactionaries who view economic and social structures as “so precarious that we must risk no experiments.” Ahh it IS a trap!! (disclaimer: this is not an advert for Keyne’s overall character, he also held some abhorrent views)
There is a huge amount to be said for resisting a teleological understanding of our current socio-political climate. As if all the times before now have been compounding one another in sequence to lead us to this inevitable point, an expression of all previous misendeavour. In this story, we reap an original sin, so monolithic and shameful, that the nihilist (often in a position, or many positions of privilege) has no choice but to feel no guilt at all and continue living in the bliss of unexamined selfhood.
The effect of this brand of pessimism is a totalising myth, strangely seductive in its simplicity. And the irony is, that the endless discussion that mourns how pessimistic the young have become doesn’t actually offer any alternative. Its ideas perform as diagnostic and observational, dressed in research and statistic studies, but rather than gazing from a place of clarity upon the zeitgeist, it is just part of the problem.
It fails to address or give voice to the complex expressions of young people’s autonomy. Instead, the rhetoric offers individuals currently benefitting from the system a way to acknowledge and performatively address the disconnect between young people’s desires and current systems of governing, whilst continuing to perpetuate a story that seeks to mute and disenfranchise the expressive avenues of youth political discourse (side note: this does not preclude young people themselves from proposing the same narrative, a form of self-monitoring). This idea blunts the imaginative power of young people to mobilise and build community, because experiencing the adverse outcomes of power imbalance exclusively from a stance of personal credo, is a position of privilege.
Then there’s the matter of how continental philosophy’s been coopted by mansplaining men who harass you in the smoking area with their shroom induced epiphany about the interconnectedness of our universe and the futility of action (which you suspect is not an expression of divine consciousness, or any indicator that they’ve read Nietzsche, but rather the depth of concerningly niche youtube essays engrained in their subconscious bubbling to the surface in small but pungent discharges), but anyhow . . .
If we allow ourselves to get so bogged down in the fiction of future-oriented ‘rationality’ we loose sight of the immediate narrative that we weave in the present moment. What does this pessimism mean for our creativity? What does it mean for our intimate relationships? And again, this is not something to do alone, healing happens in community, but it is also a circular process, and just as pessimism has the potential to collapse those cycles, hope can accelerate their turning. Like hope and like love, pessimism is not always conclusion, it can be a practise. It can be both destructive and defensive in its monolithic logic, and undermins the creativity of the hopeful imagination. Its refusal to envision alternative realities upholds the current status quo otherwise challenged by ideas such as prefigurative justice.
writers that influenced this piece:
What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. Bell Hooks
We are an army of dreamers, and that’s why we’re invincible. Subcomandante Marcos
‘It is the absence of a redemptive vision that sustains, and partly defines, today’s prevailing pessimism, not the other way around’ Robert Skidelsky
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