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Social Change Won’t Cure Your Despair
Climate change is frying the planet. One lying, war-loving, rapist president is about to get replaced with another one. The pandemic has killed more than a million people worldwide. It will likely kill many thousands more before a vaccine makes it into production. The economic crisis it’s sparked will burn the poor and the precarious for years to come.
The world feels like it’s falling to pieces. It’s little wonder that the last decade has seen the predominant Millennial/Gen Z mood shift from bright-eyed enthusiasm to gloom. Anxiety and depression are spiking in tandem with mass indebtedness and unemployment. Why are young people mostly socialists? Well, how many under-40s don’t find themselves nagged by a sense that life is basically unfriendly, that whatever end it comes to won’t be happy? How many haven’t looked at the state of the world and felt that their grimmest suspicions were being confirmed?
The impulse to translate that bitterness into activism makes sense. As far as it goes, it’s admirable — surely a country without police brutality, wars of empire, and market-driven poverty would be a far better place. More immediately, a sense of social responsibility and commitment to the well-being of others is itself a virtue. However, activists tend to fall into a psychological trap. They believe that unless they accomplish their goals, they can’t have…