Do Not Despair
Everything Will Be Okay, and, Everything is Going to Get Worse
When Trump was elected in 2016, I got a tattoo on my foot that says, “do not despair,” a quote from The Great Dictator, a Charlie Chaplin film from 1940 that ends with one of the most profound speeches in any film ever: a speech which has guided me all my life. I really, really recommend watching the speech in full.
From the moment I heard the speech it resonated with me to the point that it’s featured heavily in our podcast intro, and I even made a ceramic bust of Charlie Chaplin in high school (to the confusion of my classmates, who thought I had literally made a bust of Adolf Hitler).1
The quote goes:
“To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…”
When I got the tattoo, it was in rebellion against the Republicans, specifically Donald Trump — those bitter men who fear the way of human progress. It’s only been over the past 4 years that I allowed myself to take in the totality of the quote without the bias of my youth: the belief that I was on the good and noble side, and the other side was irredeemably bad and evil.
The speech continues:
“Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!”
Over the years, I’ve seen the Progressive side, my side, succumb to sanctimony, hate, censorship, and machine-thinking. These qualities exist on the Right, to be sure, but at a certain point I couldn’t continue to feel the cognitive dissonance I felt. I had become cynical about humanity. I had ignored the ways that my side enslaves and treats human beings like machines and cannon fodder. I was stuck in the binary thinking that this civilization has constructed, and I was unwilling to see that this speech is not about one side being better than the other, but about an entire system that is rotten, root and stem — a system that we are at once victims and perpetrators of.
In 2016, our civilization was the air I breathed, the water I swam in. I didn’t even consider that there could be another way — a future that transcends the political divisions, that sees in real color and not in black and white. I was not yet someone who had been called a utopian or an idealist. My ideas were not dangerous or radical then — they were perfectly angry, righteous, and toothless. They were perfectly in-line with a vision for the future that had been laid out hundreds of years ago — an impossible vision, which suggests that the earth is a limitless resource and that we are lords and masters of all of life. I didn’t even have to have this language to unconsciously believe this: it was the air I breathed. It is the air we all breathe, until one-by-one we realize it is noxious.
So when election day rolled around this time, I did not fear because I knew that either way it went, things are headed in the wrong direction anyway. I knew that we mortals have created a mess for ourselves long ago, and neither party has the political will to address it, let alone acknowledge it. The epistemological flaw at the center of our civilization is taken for granted no matter who rules, and he who will soon rule will take it for granted as much as Harris would have. The real problem of this election is that the problems we face go far deeper than endless political volleying — they are deep down in the soul of our culture, mirrored by the death of our soils, the machining of our minds and bodies, the monoculturing of the landscape, the breakdown of reality, and the destruction of myths that may be able to sustain us.
I made a conscious choice to not fear this time around because fear makes us complacent — it makes us victims of circumstances rather than beings with agency and choice, and we do have choice. Fear makes us default to an external locus of control — a survival strategy that is thought-terminating, nuance-terminating, and unable to see the forest for the trees.
The people who think that the reason Harris lost is because the country is irredeemably racist and sexist are simply wrong. The people who think that Trump is going to save them are also wrong. We are not at the Dawn of Golden Age, but we are at the End of Empire, and unquestioning Trumpism and thoughtless Democratic sanctimony are only symptoms of a much deeper decline that has been churning for generations. It is a systemic loss of meaning, of good myths, and of connection with a living world that we are responsible for. The atomization and dislocation of the American human is on full display right now, and for that I feel only empathy.
Whether one is mourning or celebrating today, we’re on a train that is careening toward a cliff and we need to wake up to that fact. Smug self-satisfaction and myopic self-pitying are just more ways for us to ignore the deeper reality around us: that every day we move closer to a point-of-no-return for our species on a psycho-social level, but also a mythic level. We are becoming lost and alone in a machine world of our own making, and it will be our undoing. We need to return to ourselves as creatures who belong to this world. But in order to do that, we need to find it in our hearts to believe that humans are good and we are worth fighting for.
The point of The Great Dictator speech is really to call attention to our universal humanity, our universal cooperative tendencies, and the reality that we are, in fact, good. We have been poisoned and corrupted by a suicidal myth, yes, and that has led us to commit horrible crimes against the Earth and each other, but it is not written in stone that that’s our fate. The speech is a cry to attend to the things that bring us together, and scrutinize that which wants to tear us apart. Even though I once used it as an avenue for further bifurcation, I no longer can. I have spent enough time in righteous hatred, and I have to remind myself that only the unloved hate, the unloved and unnatural. We are not unloved and we are not unnatural — we are humans who belong here and are worthy.2
“We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness - not by each other’s misery.”
Many people are miserable today, and my heart goes out to them. I made a choice not to let this election consume and destroy me, because the alternative honestly wouldn’t have been much better in terms of the issues that I really care about — war, localism, anti-imperialism, breaking the duopoly (i.e. creating actual democracy). Neither party offers the vision that I have for the future — not even close.
Knowing this in my bones makes me responsible, then, to create that vision — to concretize it and understand it and try to bring it into being with the scant resources I have. The world I was born into needs me to be responsible, and I mean really responsible. Not show-up-every-four-years-and-cast-a-vote responsible — I mean change the world responsible, make the world more green responsible, do the next right thing every day responsible. That’s what the world is asking of you, too. And we are a unique creature in that we can consciously take on that responsibility. We can do something with our precious lives, and, by the way, it was never supposed to be easy — so stop thinking it will be.
“Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…”
We’ve been on a particular, accelerating path for 10,000 years. We will not change course overnight. These things will take time to solve, and much hardship is coming down the line. It was coming no matter who won last night. But now is the time to finally start facing it.
So, everything is going to be okay and everything is going to get worse, much worse. How can both of these things be true? Because once you accept the inherent direction of our civilization, you see that both sides only lead one way. And once you accept that that vision is a recipe for doom, you can start to turn away from it and create a different vision. Responsibility is the antidote to fear, because you cannot have real hope without responsibility. All else is false hope — hoping that someone will step in and create the better world for you. False hope is a magnet for fear because it is not held up by anything real. When false hope is dashed, we can say that the world is just evil, the bad guys are bad, and carry on in our complacency.
True hope asks us to take responsibility for the world, and responsibility is what will truly set us free.
“We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.”
We lost the way long ago, and it depends on us to figure out how that happened, why that happened, and what to do about it. When we find a thread that illuminates these questions, we must pull it again, and again, and again, and again. Most problems are symptoms; everything that both candidates ran on are merely symptoms of a deeper, more pernicious, and more challenging sickness. We must look deeper. We can find a way — we don’t have to be lost.
Do not despair. Find and fan the flame of the gift you’re here on Earth to share.
It depends on you.
Written by Maren Morgan
For more context, check out our newsletter where I link to tons of media that helped me make sense of this election:
I just thought of this, because I’m seeing a lot of people saying, “this is what America deserves” which mirrors the same sort of sentiment you’ll often hear from environmentalists — that humans deserve to go extinct. It makes me think of how, when we don’t love ourselves, we accept being treated like shit. We don’t even entertain the possibility that we deserve to be treated better, so we stay in toxic relationships where we are treated badly and through it, all of our shadowy, negative material can remain unconscious. We unconsciously reinforce the unhealthy dynamic by not believing that we’re worthy, encouraging our own maltreatment — which also generally contributes to unhealthiness in the world writ large. If we don’t believe that we’re even worthy of a decent political process and decent leaders, how on Earth will we ever achieve it? If we don’t believe that we’re worthy of even being on Earth, how we will we ever come to be in right relationship with it?
An absolute banger of a post, Maren. I felt this in my soul. Many of us are right there with you. The question is though, and this is one I’ve been posing to others that are aware on this level, is how do we get others to see it?