“We live in a time when anything’s possible and nothing can be done about it,” said the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman. Let us sit with that and sigh.
For those of us living in Critical Thinking America, there are all too many reasons to feel down. The climate disaster has lumbered past the precipice of catastrophe and academics say we can no more call it “change” than we could call a hurricane “property change.” Politics is a miasma. All sides believe such venomous lies about each other that no debate is possible. Lunatic conspiracies proliferate, psychopathic corporations profligate, and the techno overlords busily stock their islands. Nobody in particular wants AI but AI is, sorrowfully, everywhere.
It gives me solace that history has ended a thousand times before, and will do so one thousand times hence. Plenty of civilizations believed in their own imminent downfall. None were humanity's true end. Our apocalyptic fears are not new—though I do fear if we keep talking this way, we’ll conjure them into being. Society is a delicate thing woven on countless spectral filigrees of trust. I think this each time I walk past our local corner store which displays its fruits outside, untaken. I think about the brazenness with which pedestrians cross knowing the car will slow. I think back to an awkward dinner years ago where a relative proudly announced they’d voted for “that great man” to defeat “that evil lady” and no blood was shed. At the end, we still hugged, if reluctantly. For every bleeding news story, there are 1,000 lost wallets returned.
We still have that, despite what you read. And we have the power of telling and retelling our own story. Every great society was great not because of some objective truth but because of the belief that it was good and striving to be even better. All the way back. All that separated Rome and Carthage was belief. The Songhais, belief. The Renaissance, belief. Economic liberalism, belief. Civil Rights in America, belief. Lao Tzu’s beliefs still echo down the long halls of millennia.
So when I read that trust in government and each other is at a historic nadir, I see a self-inflicted, self-perpetuated conspiracy that is just as easily plucked from the mind, spun around, and reversed. We all know the word paranoia, but did you know it has an antonym? If paranoia is the belief that the world is conspiring to harm us, pronoia is the belief that it is conspiring to help us. This issue is about pronoia. It’s an exercise in calling in something different.
In Blue Skies and Honor, Marina Garcia-Vasquez reconciles herself with a close friend’s imminent passing. In her column The Clearing, Eve shares a list of ingredients for calling such a mindset into your life. Ritoban Mukherjee reflects on reading as deliverance and finding optimism amid diagnosis. And in the feature story, I profile an artist friend, Mag Charmot, who appears to be able to metabolize all the sad news the world can produce into countervailing art.
If we came to believe in the beautiful kind of conspiracy, what can we invite back in? I leave you with that question, and invite you to reflect as you read.
In this issue:
- Mag stands for metabolizing art from grief
- Blue skies and honor
- The Clearing for Beautiful Conspiracy
- On outrage, numbness, and some kind of equilibrium
- How to make your campaigns hypercreative
