"They sowed fear in us, we grew wings," goes the song in Spanish by Vivir Quintana, about women in Mexico resisting femicide.
Amidst the protests, a global collective hope crisis is also simmering, with many people hurting, criminalised, repressed and doubting that justice and dignity are possible. The old fable of a stable job, home, family and retirement is crumbling. For many, it is becoming very hard to plan ahead, to dream. This, while also experiencing an ongoing, crippling concern for planet and people; a state of prolonged alarm at an abyss of too-big problems.
The hope scarcity is being created and capitalised on with deliberate, anti-people policies designed to keep people disheartened and passive, in order to maintain elitist power. But, things are much more hopeful than they initially seem. We can come out of this, growing wings. There is possibility built into uncertainty and all this disillusionment. The lack of safety and a clear path forward, however, has many people understandably focusing on gloom.
Globally, there are significant increases in depression, especially among young adults and in parts of Africa, and happiness among young people in North America has nose-dived. Happiness rates have also dropped in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Downward trends in hope are contributing to rising numbers of deaths of despair (suicide, overdoses and alcohol-related mortality) in the US. A Lancet global survey found that 60% of young adults were experiencing climate anxiety.
The hope crisis isn't equal. Young people with the biggest fears around climate change live in the Global South, with people in the Philippines and India feeling that "humanity is doomed" and "the future is frightening".
The crisis also isn't entirely new; the horrors of inequality, imperialism and the recklessness of corporations are old, ongoing patterns. Now, though, the climate crisis has declared deadlines. The hazardous weather and floodscapes are less and less limited to just the Global Majority regions. Social media stupefaction is concerning. The ineffectiveness of global bodies like the UN to stop obvious horrors, while the ear-clogged baboon beings in power are also unable or unwilling to do anything about any of it, is perturbing. An emboldened right wing is dismantling care services and with them, the future. Most governments are going to increasing lengths to discourage resistance and initiative, and repress protests.
Why hope is so important and 9 ways they stifle it
Collectively, hopelessness has political implications. Hope supports resilience. It is based on self belief and on deep a understanding of processes, history and our ability to enact change, at many levels.
Critical hope (as distinct from blind hope, which sustains that things will work out without anyone doing anything) counters impotency and resists despair and paralysis. It spurs on action — which is what the baboons don't want. Hope, as a vision for the future, helps determine what we believe we can achieve, what we deserve, and what we demand. CEOs and their political puppets prefer consumers and voters to be passive and dim, so they strangle hope in the following ways:
1) Criminalisation
There is an increased criminalisation of solidarity with migrants in Europe, with prosecutions last year up from the previous two years, and protest movements there are also increasingly criminalised. Globally, more countries are passing anti-protest laws in order to silence and isolate, and protesters are being repressed in the US, Britain, Indonesia, Argentina, Mexico, Panama and more.
Here in Mexico, land defenders are frequently imprisoned for years without trial, while organised crime and transnationals have killed or disappeared hundreds of activists. As a result, there is a lot of trauma, distrust, self-censorship and fear in communities and movements. There is also courage and resistance, but activists often aim low, and a lack of clear victories compounds the sense of hopelessness.
Using stigmatising language in the media, arrests and heavy police presence, authorities can turn the bravest, kindest people (activists, migrants, unionists etc) into a perceived threat. The chilling effect sees the communities of those targeted also going quiet out of fear and disbelieving in the possibility of change. Surveillance causes people to become less vocal, erodes trust and discourages engagement with monitored groups. Such disempowerment leads to hopelessness.
2) Sanctions and hunger
Similarly to criminalisation, sanctions on countries like Cuba (since 1962) and Venezuela (since 2017), that have refused to do the US's bidding, are designed to wear the populace down, while also demonising those countries and discouraging outsiders from having hope in the possibility of alternative political and economic models. Venezuela's revenue loss has crippled its ability to import essential products, including life-saving medicine like insulin and crucial food items. US sanctions likely contributed to at least 40,000 deaths there in 2017–18 alone.
Hunger is being used as a weapon by Israel against Gaza and by both forces in Sudan as a means to demoralise, subjugate and control. Some 25 million people are facing acute hunger in Sudan, and 2 million are facing famine. In Gaza, journalists have described how children no longer dream of toys, but only of bread. Hunger leads to physical and mental helplessness. Those with food — governments, aid distributors, food companies, and armies — become the masters over life. Hunger can also cause impaired cognitive function, as well as impaired memory and low self-esteem. Food-insecure people tend to fixate on meals, experience apathy and irritability and have feelings of despair.
3) Austerity, privatisation and anti-care policies
The rawness of inequality is magnified by insufficient or non-existent healthcare, deficiencies in workers' rights, disability support, and housing access. Some 4.5 billion people lack basic health services and half the world has no access to social protections or social security. Retirees in Argentina have been protesting weekly because their pensions are so low they have to work to survive.
While governments prioritising military budgets and corporate subsidies over care systems may not have hopelessness as their primary goal, the extreme levels of vulnerability created can have that effect. Without health, retirement, or safety, people can't think about the future. The prolonged nature of the adversity and repeated exposures to negative situations can cause people to feel like circumstances can't be changed.
4) Bureaucracy, dysfunctional institutions and the irrelevance of effort
Earlier this year, a Nestlé worker in Pakistan self-immolated in a Lahore court after a nine-year battle. Asif Jutt had tried to form a union in 2016 and was fired despite winning his case and a labour court order to reinstate him. But the powerful company delayed that order and dragged Jutt's case on for more than nine years. Jutt had to sell his home. He was victim of a scheme to wear him down and cause him to lose hope.
A Gaza writer wrote before the current genocide that she felt naive for believing hard work was all it took to start her small business, after it was bombed and destroyed in 2018. And even in the US, the belief that hard work automatically leads to positive outcomes is waning. Deliberate obstruction, bureaucracy, institutional weaponised incompetence, combined with inequalities and violence inhibit the impact of our efforts, making them feel pointless.
Call centres use queues, AI bots, menus and waiting, as a kind of corporate diplomacy to cushion customer frustration while not genuinely caring about customers nor about resolving issues. It is PR, aimed at postponing action — not unlike many politicians who blather about topics without confronting the monetary interests underlying them. These systems, like complex visa processes (especially for Global South migrants) are deliberate deterrence and debilitation methods to discourage action.
5) Climate inaction
Over the past five years, there has been a dramatic rise in frequency, duration and severity of weather events like floods and droughts — with areas affected reaching 6100 square kilometres last year, compared to 2000 km2 in 2004–18.
As noted, climate anxiety is increasing as well, with the People's Climate Vote 2024 finding that 56% of people are thinking about the issue daily or weekly, and people are more worried now than a year ago. The unmet climate change deadline is a lived experience, multiplied in the Global South by insufficient infrastructure and transnational pillaging of resources like water and land.
In contrast, the annual COP meetings are failing to reach effective agreements, and the most polluting countries aren't sticking to whatever weak targets are set. The space has become an enabling event for business deals (1700 coal, oil and gas lobbyists participated in last year's COP), so rather than alleviate worries, it is perpetuating inaction and hopelessness.
6) Habituation and desensitisation
With incremental and long-lasting mistreatment and slow-building threats, people's tolerance levels are building up. What it takes for us to speak up, to stop business as usual, is an increasingly higher bar.
The horrors in Gaza get worse and worse, and most of society gets on with life. The US has bombed Venezuelan boats in international waters, violating human rights and international law, and barely anything has happened. By declaring various groups in Latin America as terrorists early this year, the US is eroding standards for how it treats the continent.
It's similar to how domestic abuse often works, where the victim rationalises and dismisses incrementally worsening behaviour until the worst is tolerated. Habituation fosters learned helplessness, where people perceive that action is futile in a persistently stressful environment — and so rather than rebel or leave, they adjust.
Habituation is being employed as public education systems are privatised one small piece at a time, rights are eroded, and prices of essential goods and services increase — one month at a time. Rationalising the unjust, from the looting of the Global South to the objectification of women not only lowers the bar, but fosters a climate of permissibility, passivity and lethargy, where it can feel pointless to constantly challenge things, and so hopelessness is deepened.
7) Discrimination and dehumanisation
In many regions, we're seeing an increase in racism, deportations, attacks on women's health rights, transphobia and more. A right-wing offensive (Trump, Musk, Milei, Bukele, Subianto, etc) is translating to more open acts of discrimination and harm. This can push whole communities into despair about their future; if your group is hated on, how can you feel confident of getting work, or being accepted by others?
For targeted groups, everything they do can feel like a battle. It can be hard to wade through all the exploitation, disrespect, lack of voice, lack of safety, and still end on a hopeful note. It is an external environment that needs to change, and that seems outside of one's control. Discrimination and dehumanisation lay the groundwork for further abusive actions and policies, but the immediate consequence for victims can include feeling undeserving of reasonable treatment, which then has a silencing effect on them.
8) Suppressing and limiting agency and creativity
The best books, journalism, art and music are buried under a litany of consumer products, advertising and banal 10-second videos. Addictive consumerism and social media are numbing not just feelings and exhaustion, but also critical thought capacity and the desire to create or speak up. Agency (empowerment to take action) is fuelled by meaning and working with others, and these highly profitable industries counter that by isolating and pacifying.
Average daily social media use has increased to 141 minutes per day, up from 90 in 2012, and consumers today purchase 60% more clothing than 15 years ago. Online content algorithms deprioritise meaningful, critical content because it's less profitable or addictive, and they deprioritise the views and voices of oppressed peoples. On Instagram, for example, influencers are more likely to be white and young, and such bias is also reflected in the media, entertainment, and education. People can struggle to be hopeful when their voices and creativity are muzzled.
9) Violence and fear
Violence and fear are paralysing. I see it here in Mexico, in my community, where organised crime is prominent and people refuse to talk about it. The immediate and intergenerational impact of colonialism, invasion, violent security forces, sexual violence, corruption and extortion can be of deep trauma, ongoing freeze or flight mentalities and despair.
Fearing walking in the street, the sound of bombs, the police, attacks, the violence of water contamination by companies like Shell — can instil a sense of impotence. For the Mazatec people in Eloxchitlan, Mexico, for example, who have been detained and tortured for more than a decade for defending their river, it's understandable if that resistance feels pointless sometimes and not worth the cost (yet many don't give up).
Fear is, by nature, submissive rather than assertive. It stops action. The media and politicians can either conjure it by inventing enemies (like the terribly scary "illegal" migrants) or by employing violence.
At the moment, most people are aware that their governments, complicit in some way with the genocide against Gaza, clearly can't be trusted and are unsafe. Further, systemic violence can lead people to feel that negative outcomes are inevitable, thereby reinforcing hopelessness.
Reclaiming hope to reclaim the future
Of course, the first hope is that despite this sophisticated anti-hope machinery, most people still manage to be kind, thoughtful, engaged, and incredible. The second hope is that most of the above has its counterpoints; disillusionment with global institutions and governments can encourage people to realise the importance of their own role and to stop waiting for the people in power to solve everything.
AI is taking from creatives, journalists and researchers, but the phenomenon is also challenging people to appreciate the uniqueness of humanity. The climate deadline causes anxiety, but it also hastens action. The climate emergency and the droughts affecting Mexico to Ethiopia, the fires burning from the US to Australia, remind us that air and water are shared, and the battle for justice is ultimately global. Gaza has put the violence of colonialism back in people's minds. Imperialism against the Global South isn't academic, it is an ongoing lived atrocity.
The lack of faith in a better tomorrow, as agonising as it feels, is precisely the catalyst needed for people to fight today. This current crisis is ripe with change, because it is prompting questioning. It's not just us facing instability, the old and problematic ways of doing things are also unstable. Systems of subjugation aren't everlasting. The crisis comes with considering new things. It shouts that the future is not predetermined. That makes space for action, agency, adventure and non-conformity.
To reclaim hope, we must lose the passive tense. "It will get better" — the notion that things improve on their own, is a fallacy. Yes, the body heals itself sometimes, but within human systems, we are the ones who improve things. Delusion and baseless optimism presume a successful end without action, vindicating the status quo. Critical hope understands that the effort is worth it (despite the effort-outcome gap).
Information and clarity are vital for hope, so boycott pro-billionaire media. Perspective is important too, because a long view of history demonstrates what agonies we have got through and how far we have come.
There are hints of unravelling right now. Shifts. Strikes, riots, protests, discontent and a loss of faith in the callous and boring billionaires. There is daily, unreported tenderness and victories despite the odds. There are people refusing to serve in the IDF, despite the social pressure and material consequences. There are people overcoming horrific traumas and managing to be kind despite suffering. Fear and apathy are infectious, but so is solidarity, bravery, initiative, and organising. Given a choice, most people prefer the latter — and that is very hopeful.
Our hope for justice and a future multiplies when connecting and organising with others. Humans are both capable and imaginative. Someone imagined aqueducts, anaesthesia and electrical lighting systems. We can also imagine, hope for, and create a just and thriving society.
The flotilla is a strong metaphor for the ongoing struggle for justice. The participants went on a long and uncomfortable journey, but in the process they demonstrated solidarity between nationalities. Though their immediate goal of breaking the siege on Gaza may not be achieved (at the time of writing, nine boats have been intercepted), they are strengthening the cause and movement, in unmeasureable, profound ways.