I admit it surprised me recently to hear Keir Starmer speak about the ‘collective trauma’ of the recent decade, and of a society of people who no longer feel like they have a future’.
I know that nothing coming from the mouth piece for a mere electioneering PR exercise should surprise me. But I wasn’t so much surprised because it was such a jarring statement alongside his recent ones, such as his praise for Thatcher. It was the fact that it was deemed relevant in the focus groups he speaks to for him to speak of a collective hopelessness..
It felt like the moment when a murdered body dumped into the river with rocks tied to it finally breaks free and rises to the surface one cold winter morning.
Why? Because it reminded me of a rare moment when mental illness began to be seen as a political issue.
Because for me, to speak of a lack of a belief in a better future, and thus of collective hopelessness is to perhaps accidentally speak of mental illness as being a political issue. Hopelessness by its very meaning is the inability to believe that life can get any better, and in fact can only get worse, or at least continue in a situation already experienced as painful.
As somebody who admits to being ill-equipped to deal with academic life, I have leant ignorantly heavily on the work of the late Mark Fisher for more than a decade. But there’s a reason for this.
Two chapters through Capitalist Realism in the summer of 2010, I was excited in a way I’ve never been whilst reading non-fiction: it was there, in a way that had never been explained to me before. I almost instantly recognised my own struggles with mental illness as political issues.
True, passive liberal commentary, made by self-policing gatekeepers, too scared to say anything too overt that may make them lose their slot on a weekly chat show, would keep the ball rolling by saying things like “skinny people in adverts put pressure of people to be unrealistically thin”. But it would never go as far as was necessary to understand how emotional suffering may have its roots in how our society and economy is organised.
Fisher spelled it out, whether when talking about stress in the workplace, teenage apathy, or the nihilism in the music of Nirvana and Joy Division.
Hopelessness is normally experienced as a personal failing. But this was Fisher’s point; no matter the horror of the world, we internalise it, because any genuine sense of collectivity, a sense we can actually emotionally experience this, has all but disappeared for many. This is his argument, and I agree, that there that been a political strategy in countries like UK since the 1980s to privatise people, and in turn prevent them having political consciousness.
The fact that we all privately know that so many of us feel the same merely impounds the hopelessness unless there is a tangle sense that things can change, a tangible horizon beyond which things can genuinely be different.
This is why, with the failing of the genuinely progressive political energies of the 2010s, came the return of an endemic privatised hopelessness. We don’t just live in the failure of a left wing Labour Party, we also live under the failure of the politicisation of mental illness.
In a world of so much mediated horror and sadness I imagine I’m not alone in experiencing hopelessness about the world and myself in a kind of closed circuit: “I can’t see any hope for things to get better in the world” becomes “I can’t see any hope for myself because I’m a useless piece of shit”.
On a personal level, my way of measuring the general collective emotional state is through looking at male friends who, 8 years ago were fully behind the Corbyn Labour Project, only now to be full of the politics of resent fuelled by reactionary content creators, as their hearts fill up with hopelessness about their lives getting better.
To understand where this energy has gone, we don’t just need to look at the formal political defeats of progressive movements, we need to look what I see as the two main forces for change on social media platforms: political justice and self-help/improvement.
Some self-help content creators (by which I mean anything from therapists with a social media presence, life coach content creators, deemed toxic or non-toxic, all the way down to people who just use their profile to create self-help content) may have a visible political conscience, and feel a moral obligation to speak out on situations such as the current Palestine slaughter. But as a collective force, especially since the traumatically isolating period of the Covid lockdowns, it is about the private self, and how one can improve the emotional and physical well-being of their private self.
This stands in total opposition to the force of political and social justice, which, split from a genuine connection to simultaneously looking after oneself, becomes hostile to this, hostile to our desire to simply feel OK one night, when we know something bloody horrific is going off elsewhere in world, yet feel powerless to intervene.
Ultimately, self-help and self-improvement, in this kind of climate, requires a hell of a lot energy spent on dissociating ourselves from things we see with our own eyes (such as the army of homeless that has been building over the last decade). It makes our geo-political situations, even our national situation, seem insurmountable, especially once one gets trapped in the ‘hopeless world/hopeless me’ circuit.
Fundamentally something new needs to emerge, and nobody knows when or if, because like the movement of the 2010s, it has to emerge almost as if out of nowhere.
John B Ledger 