Facts, feelings, and fascism
content advisory: suicide and related stuff
Hello, it’s the Amy with clean fingernails, the one from the slightly alternate universe.
First, if you’ve recently arrived on Jessitron’s recommendation, welcome. This may or may not be the kind of thing you were expecting, it is almost never directly about software systems. Conversely, if you are in software and/or like thinking about complex systems and are not following Jess’s work already, you might like the kinds of things Jess writes about.
Next, I am going to talk about despair, hopelessness, and suicidal ideation (my own), but mostly as a jumping off point to talk about it as a particularly acute political problem under fascism, one for which it is helpful to understand generally how to work with such feelings, something I know a lot about because of my own personal mental health history.
Anyways please take care of yourself and do not read further if you do not want to read about suicidal ideation.
VERY IMPORTANT: I do not need you to “check in” on how I am, because yes it’s bad but I know how to deal with it. (I do have an ask, at the very end of this email, but it’s just an ask and I will be fine if you do not do the thing I ask.) I definitely do not need you freaking out about my ‘safety’, so don’t fucking do it. Which is to say: this is not a suicide note or some kind of parasuicidal “cry for help” or any declaration of intent; it is the EXACT OPPOSITE of that. If you get to the bottom of this email and you do not understand why that is true, read it again. If you want to know more about why I don’t do shit like that, here is an entire post I wrote about why threatening suicide is a very bad life choice.
Some personal context
For the last few days I have been suffering through a bout of relentless suicidal ideation on top of intense feelings of hopelessness and despair. For example, yesterday I cried because I could not give 50 years of my life to someone else instead, who I think would probably enjoy it more than I do, and the thought of having to live for another 50 years was completely intolerable, which fact I found depressing in itself. (Am I sure I have 50 years left? God, I hope not, but I might.)
Anyhow, as a person with manic-depression (or bipolar disorder, or spicy-sad brain), this is nothing new. Informants all agree that I was an inconsolable infant. In third grade I stayed after school one day to tell my teacher that I thought there was something wrong with me because I never felt happy. The first time I remember fully articulating a serious suicidal urge, I was 14. (To put this in perspective, this means that if you are under the age of ~35, I have been not committing suicide since before you were born).
I have never made a suicide attempt, but I am also never without an idea or several of how I’d do it. My suicidal ideation usually comes along with excruciating and frankly indescribable emotional pain, but it doesn’t always. Last summer I experienced significant suicidal ideation at a time I would have otherwise described as one of the most expansive and joyful times of my life: while thru-hiking Vermont’s Long Trail.
Something like 5-20% of manic-depressives will die by suicide. Something like 50% of us will attempt it at least once. Statistics are not facts about any individual’s future, of course, but these statistics are not exactly promising. Even so, I persist.
I tell you all this so that you understand that — even though I lead a very privileged and in many ways objectively amazing life — when I write about hopelessness and despair, I know what the fuck I am talking about.
Hopelessness and Despair as a Political Problem (I mean, duh)
A fascist regime undertakes a war on facts, that part is clear and easy to see and understand. The Trump administration and its propagandists lie, constantly, shamelessly, and about everything. This is annoying and corrosive and means that it takes us actual effort to even insist on basic facts about reality, for example, that Elon Musk’s Nazi salute was a Nazi salute.
But it also undertakes a war on feelings, on our capacity to feel them, on the kinds of feelings we feel, and even the very idea that certain feelings and associated values/concepts might be desirable, like empathy, love, mercy, hope, and joy. It makes war on our feelings because it is a very good way to control people.
It is especially convenient to a fascist regime if the people who are against it feel hopelessness and despair.
Lucky for us, this problem is not new and we do not have to here in the US under Donald Trump solve it from scratch ourselves. We have many, many sources of information and inspiration to lean on here. Maybe you’re fond, like I am, of Rebecca Solnit, or maybe you’d find some inspiring essays in the compilation The Impossible Will Take a Little While, or in the movement/book/website Active Hope, or in the writings of Vaclav Havel, or the collection Let This Radicalize You. I’m reading Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom right now, and he’s got a lot of great thoughts about this stuff too.
But whoever it is you read or watch or listen to, the message is largely the same, and so, based both on my wide reading about the topic and my years of personally grappling with it, I will summarize what I think are the most important things to know about it here. Please note this is an artisanal, handmade summary that has not been touched by a chatbot, so all errors and shitty writing and unnecessary repetition and typos are entirely my own fault. Still, I hope you find it helpful.
Hopelessness and despair are natural reactions to a government that does not value human life, human freedom, human dignity, or human futures. These feelings are natural reactions to both the actual practical impact of living under such regimes;
AND hopelessness and despair are natural reactions to such a government behaving and propagandizing in ways intended to produce hopelessness and despair in their populations, because people who are hopeless and despairing are easier to control.
BUT, we can fight hopelessness and despair on multiple fronts:
We fight it practically by pushing back against the practical impacts of such a government. When a judge orders a grad student released from ICE detention, that grad student is now practically in a situation that inspires less hopelessness and despair than one who is not yet released from ICE detention.
That practical success is then a fact about the world that we can then use to counteract feelings of hopelessness and despair generally, for all of us, by celebrating and publicizing it. We therefore fight hopelessness and despair for ourselves by acting for practical good in one or many of a million different ways, and then being sure to recognize and celebrate when those actions result in a positive change.
Even when our practical actions do not appear to result in a positive change, we fight despair and hopelessness by understanding the reality that the future is unpredictable, and that when we ourselves act in the present we change that unpredictable future, even when we may not now or ever see the results of that change. Maybe this seems obvious, but from the bottom of a well of hopelessness it does not seem obvious at all, it seems like an impossible leap of faith. For a deep dive into my personal experience with this particular truth, see this post about that time it turned out that a story I’d written when I was sixteen changed the life of someone I happened to meet pretty randomly on twitter decades later.
This unpredictability applies both individually and across society; we just don’t fucking know what will actually happen in the future. (see #14 below for a slightly different related perspective on feelings and the future).
Often, when people are talking themselves or other people out of hopelessness and despair, they will note that feelings are not facts. I disagree. Feelings ARE facts, but they are a special kind of fact. They are facts about your internal state of being. We have feelings at all because they are critically important information to guide us in our choices in life. I gave a whole talk about this once.
Because feelings are facts about our internal state, they are never wrong, per se. They are reports from the ground. It is always a mistake to ignore reports from the ground. Do not stamp your feet at your feelings and yell “that can’t be true, and it sure as hell is not useful, stop saying that!” This does not work. When people blah blah about “validating feelings” this is what they are trying to get at. But you can’t just validate your feelings and move on, something else is needed.
While feelings cannot be false, their relationship to other kinds of facts in the world is verrrryyyy tricky. Feelings are pretty easy to manipulate; that is what all effective propaganda does, see #2 above. They are also annoyingly susceptible to bullshit we TELL OURSELVES. “I’m weak, I’m guilty, I’m a bad person, I did that wrong, so-and-so hates me” are things we might say to ourselves that might cause us to have feelings of hopelessness and despair. There is an entire field of psychology - cognitive behavior therapy - that is dedicated to helping people ameliorate/reduce the impact of our thoughts on our feelings. CBT can be exhausting because it’s a lot of work to constantly be arguing with ourselves about the factuality of our thoughts, but it’s important to understand the relationship and the importance of presenting ourselves with ample factual information that counteracts the impact of our negative thoughts on our feelings. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but your feelings are trained in part on the thoughts you feed yourself, so, like, you gotta balance your diet. (You are almost certainly not doing this right now) See #5 above.
We can manipulate our own feelings in a whole bunch of other ways too: blah blah motherfucking meditation, wellness crap, sex, friends, nature, music goddamn gratitude journaling, and other shit that works but is frankly just fucking CRINGE. Not only can we, WE SHOULD. Under a regime that aims to undermine our sense of agency and hope and joy so we do not have the energy to act against the regime, deliberately acting to shore up our own and others’ sense of agency and hope and joy is, in fact, a critically important form of resistance, even if we all understand it cannot be the only form of resistance or else we will become a Reductress headline.
Another thing we can do with our feelings is accept them and do the thing we think is important anyways. There is also a whole kind of therapy that is based in doing exactly that; it’s called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and the idea is that you accept the reality of your life (including but not limited to how you feel) and you decide what is important to you and do your best to act on what is important to you despite the feelings. We do not have to have hope in order to take action. Obviously it is very helpful to feel hopeful when we are acting, but it’s not required. We may find that a practical action that leads to a practical result instills hope in us where we had none, and that’s great, but if it doesn’t, we can still observe that our lack of hope exists in conjunction with other facts that indicate that a practical action we or even someone else took had a practical positive impact in the world.
In other words, hopelessness and despair do not prevent us from acting in ways that reduce hopelessness and despair generally and practically even if we struggle to reduce our own feelings of hopelessness and despair. We can inject hope into the world even when we ourselves feel hopeless. I am attempting to do that right this minute, in fact.
It is also very, very important to understand that while feelings are a kind of fact, and need to be respected as such, one thing they are definitely not is facts about the future, or even predictions (which remember, are also not facts about the future). (Oddly, they are like statistics in this way). Thoughts can be predictions (and lead to actions): “hmm, tariffs are fucking up the supply chains, that means we might run out of stuff, therefore I will buy extra imported cheese now so in the future I can treat my feelings of hopelessness and despair with parmigiana-reggiano.” Feelings are not predictions.
A feeling is not a prediction in two ways: a feeling does not predict the actual state of the world in the future, and, somewhat counterintuitively, it also doesn’t even predict how you will feel in the future. It is easy for people to slide from having a feeling to believing the feeling is saying something about the future, but a feeling is a fact about a current internal state, and a feeling doesn’t know a goddamn thing about the future, either internal or external. The future is hard enough to predict by reasoning about it, since actions we take in the present change the future in unpredictable ways (see #6 above). It is much harder to face the future when we believe that our feelings are remotely predictive.
I am alive today because I understand the above facts about feelings, and especially about feelings of hopelessness and despair. I understand that hopelessness and despair can be both induced and ameliorated, and I understand the various ways that can happen. I have many tools at my disposal to ameliorate them. I understand that my own hopelessness and despair do not prevent me from taking action in the present — yes yes, they can make it really fucking hard, but they do not necessarily prevent, they do not completely foreclose the possibility of action — and that my actions today may result in less overall human hopelessness and despair even if they don’t move the needle on my own.
I understand that my feelings of hopelessness of despair are not predictions about the future of the world or about how I will feel at any point in the future, and that this remains true even in the face of my well-informed prediction (based on past experience) that I will probably feel a lot more hopelessness and despair in the future.
The overall trajectory of my emotional life has been and remains, understatedly, not especially cheery. Yes, I expect that to continue, and I even have some pretty solid predictions about when I’ll feel bad vs when I’ll feel less bad, but still, shit’s gonna happen that I definitely do not expect and it will make me feel ways I can’t anticipate. I can’t tell you how exactly I will feel in three hours, much less tomorrow, much less next year.
The future remains open. It really, really does. Not open to anything, but more open than we often believe.
the tl;dr, which is also tl;dr!
In fighting fascists, facts matter more than ever. But the special kind of facts that are feelings matter too. Like I said above, fascists would rather we pay less attention to external facts (which they are lying to us about) and more attention to our feelings, because those are so easy to manipulate (especially if you’re so willing to lie about the facts). In On Freedom, Snyder writes “if we lose track of the difference between ‘it is true’ and ‘it feels right,’ we are not free; forces greater than us will hack our brains to make it feel right.” This is also true in the other direction: they are hacking our brains to make us feel hopeless because we are easier to control when we feel hopeless and when we believe that our hopelessness is a fact about the world and about the future, instead of a fact about our own present internal state.
When we understand that truth about hopelessness we are able to act in the face of it. There is SO MUCH prior art here about this; I have tried to give you an overview, based in part on my own experience and what I have had to learn in order to survive. But if you are feeling politically hopeless, then I invite you to take this as an opportunity to seek out more information on this critical aspect of surviving and overthrowing fascism. It is in itself generative of hope to learn how others have found and made it when they needed to.
Finally, one way I generate my own hope is by trying to offer some to you. In turn, since I am in a rough patch where I am currently undersupplied with hope, if I have been helpful to you perhaps you could hit reply and tell me so.
xo, Amy
PS I think this newsletter is too long, repeats itself too much, and probably sucks. But I also believe that even my shitty imperfect newsletters might make the future more open than otherwise, and I don’t have a newsletter editor to help me fix it, so I just accept that and send the sucky thing anyways.
More resources, from other people:
Here is a podcast on mental health and collective survival from Movement Memos.
Rebecca Solnit Hope in the Dark and MeditationsInAnEmergency
some other stuff I’ve written about this (with pull quotes!):
“Learn to Manufacture Hope”: “It sucks that my brain can be so easily lost in nightmares. But it’s made me very good at the production of hope, and hope is a currency that always holds its value, whatever the billionaires do.”
“Three icebergs, two internet miracles, and one mint-condition set of Sassy Magazines”: "When we make time to do the things we feel called to do, regardless of whether we can see or measure their impact, and whether or not we can even say what impact we think they might have or why, whether or not we even do them out of hope that they will have a positive impact — we change the world.”
“The Owl of Hope”: “Hope is not Annual Recurring Revenue and it’s not Stock Options and it’s not a Series C and it’s not an IPO and it’s not RSUs and it’s not TC: 400k. It’s not Ritalin or Concerta, it’s not Lexapro or Abilify. You can’t mint it as an NFT or mine it like crypto. You can’t earn it. It’s not VP. It’s not CTO. It’s not a Competency Matrix or a Performance Review or a QBR or an OKR. It’s not Observability or ChatOps. It is not a new Team Collaboration Tool, now with Kanban View. It is not a new at-home blood test or a chatbot that teaches you CBT. It is not any kind of business thing at all. Hope, like Soylent Green, is mostly made of People. And also, sometimes, Owls.
How to be creative when your back’s against the wall: bell hooks tribute edition: “But we do not have to die of existential despair. There are people who have been teaching about this, writing about this, living it, for a long time now, there are technologies we can use to turn our energies to the work of surviving together in some kind of world worth living for.”
Thanks, I hate them all: 5 wellness tips you hated the last 1000 times you saw them on Insta and 1 tip that’s maybe useful: “Centering hope is the most important thing I know to do for myself and for everyone I love and for the world and that is why I talk about it constantly. I can’t tell you exactly how to do it. It doesn’t fit neatly into a checklist and there definitely isn't an App for That…”
A painting I made, just because
Not sure if this gives you hope, but your words help. I too am in a similar mental health path.