By clicking “Accept All Cookies”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information.
“I know that the houses have fallen. We entered the world in them, wonderfully sure, that they were more durable than ourselves.” — Hannah Arendt
It is challenging to be a witness to these times: brutal beyond belief, cataclysmic climate events, and obscene concentrations of power and wealth held by a few. Adding to that, we seem to be living in parallel realities where even agreeing on what needs to be done becomes impossible.
This is paralysing. And this serves the wealth and power hoarders well. It also means all many of us can do is express our outrage, but there are so many things to be outraged about, we find ourselves in a state of perpetual outrage. This too is paralysing. Not only that, our collective expressions of outrage inadvertently end up amplifying that which we were outraged about. Which is what the merchants of outrage seek: we are so busy being outraged, we do nothing but be outraged.
Is it mere noise at this point? Are we doing it because we still hold on to this idea that somewhere out there, someone will hear us and come save us? Or are we all screaming at the titanic ‘don’t sink, don’t sink’ hoping our voices will stop if from sinking? Or is it because our outrage is trying to convince an insane world to become rational, to make sense, to be reasonable again?
Maybe we worry that by not expressing our outrage, we signify that we are giving in, or giving up, or accepting things might fall apart. And this goes against everything we have been taught in our modern world. But this is the trap of binary thinking, it’s not everything or nothing.
So what if we freed ourselves from our technocratic way of understanding the world and looked for other perspectives?
Writer Dougald Hine says more and more people can feel that the future we were promised no longer works, but these are not the conversations we are having. Speaking of the work of Philosopher Federico Campagna, he says that sometimes we are born into the ending of a world, when this world ends, the stories we have been telling ourselves about the future no longer work. And the leaders that are able to make the most political capital are those that speak mostly of the past.
Campagna says that when we find ourselves in such times, we should first of all stop worrying about making sense according to the logic of the world that is ending, and secondly, we should try to make good ruins.
For Hine, this means for example, that we should look for those who, for whatever reason or another, are not under that much of an obligation to pretend to make sense according to the logic of the world that is ending. That’s why, for him, working with artists is such a priority because “they’re the one group of people who are allowed to go out in public without wearing the clothes of economic rationality.”
Beyond working with artists, we should seek to connect with, and invest in people, leaders, organisations, ideas that are not conformists, rule abiding, restrained, sensible, plausible, but those that are bold, creative, unreasonable, unrealistic, audacious and fearless.
Poet Ben Okri says we need existential creativity, where we dedicate ourselves to bring about the greatest shift in human consciousness. “We have to be strong dreamers. We have to ask unthinkable questions. We have to go right to the roots of what makes us such a devouring species, overly competitive, conquest-driven, hierarchical,” he writes.
In the dystopian world of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, written in 1953, books have been banned and firemen are tasked with hunting down and burning the books and the houses of people who keep them. Driving slowly and enjoying the sights is also forbidden, so speeding cars are constantly killing pedestrians, but this is not punishable. Protagonist Guy Montag, eventually manages to flee the city and joins a group of exiled intellectuals. Each one of them has memorised a book so that in the event that society ends, they can contribute to rebuilding the new one with the literature of the past.
Writer Elif Shafak says art and literature is what remains in the ruins, so we must expand our cultural spaces, link radical creativity to compassion and link new ideas to new activism. “Even in times of instability, erosion, jingoism and demagoguery,” she argues, “the human spirit endures through its remarkable capacity to imagine, connect, change, resist, love.”
Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes.
See also: To Be Maladjusted / The Artist as Visionary / Working with Impossible
References
Poetry by Hannah Arendt, quoted in Elif Shafak’s piece - see below.
‘"To Be Thy Adam": Agency, Activism & Collective Intelligence in the Ruins of the Human.’ A conversation with Dougald Hine, Catherine Keller, Alex Forrester and Bayo Akomolafe, The Schumacher Center for New Economics, 17 October 2024. Watch here.
Prophetic Culture- Recreation For Adolescents, Federico Campagna.
‘Artists must confront the climate crisis – we must write as if these are the last days,’ Ben Okri, in the Guardian, 12 November 2021.
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury.
'A Sort of Strangeness Among People', Elif Shafak, 19 January, 2025. Read here.
Further Resources
‘How To Be a Nonconformist: 22 Irreverent Illustrated Steps to Counterculture Cred from 1968,’ Maria Popova, The Marginalian. View here.
‘Six things I wish social justice leaders understood about grief,’ Leila Billing, 29 January 2025. Read here.
Walk Out Walk On, A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now, Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze. See more here.
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.
At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies, Dougald Hine.
Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira.
“Diego had never seen the sea. His father took him to discover it. . . . And so immense was the sea and its sparkle that the child was struck dumb by the beauty of it. And when he finally managed to speak, trembling, stuttering, he asked his father: “Help me to see!””— Eduardo Galeano, The Function of Art I
“We are asked to love or to hate such and such a country and such and such a people. But some of us feel too strongly our common humanity to make such a choice.”— Albert Camus
“Sometimes I think that the artist is like a child who when he blows out a candle creates a hurricane, who when he cries causes a flood or who when he laughs illuminates this apparently incomprehensible world that adults agree to hide.” — Jaume Plensa
“Think of a formation of migrating birds that knows the way across oceans and continents to its far-away destination, and the pathfinding capacity of which resides not in the individual birds but somewhere in the connection between them.” – Anna Katharina Schaffner
