"It's not my fault. I'm not responsible!"
On doomerism, agency, and who is (and isn't) taking responsibility for fighting back
There’s a sense of impending doom right now. We’re seeing climate change grow into a climate crisis. Billionaires are buying islands while grocery stores can’t keep eggs in stock. And we’re staring down a transnational alliance of authoritarians enabling wars and human rights violations as they undermine any institutions that might constrain them.
What are a few court wins and some protests worth? Even a landslide at the midterms (a full 18 months away!) won’t do much in the face of everything that will be broken by then. Things are heading in a bad direction and we’re already exhausted.
The sense of dread we all feel at some point has metastasized for some into doomerism, a condition that says, hey, there’s not much we can do. Humanity has had a good run. Well, maybe not good—it’s been terrible a lot of the time—but we’ve had a long run. And maybe this is it.
A slightly optimistic bent on doomerism notes that throughout history we generally root out whatever new problems we’ve introduced along the way and eventually recover from the setbacks. In our handful of millennia on the planet, we’ve at least averaged an upward trendline, leading to more lives lived in peace and freedom. So pick your favorite historical reference point: the civil rights movement, the abolitionists, the anti-apartheid movement, the suffragists, even the Age of Enlightenment. Some of those movements took decades, some spanned generations. People born after the start had children who didn’t see their ends. It’s small comfort to know that change isn’t a sprint or even a marathon but rather a relay race, but it can veer into Doomerism Lite if it lets us off the hook for near-term change.
On the other hand, full-flavor doomerism sees this time as different from those past examples: the global ecosystem is collapsing, surveillance technology is too powerful, and inequality in both wealth and power are several orders of magnitude beyond what anyone facing previous crises could’ve imagined. We’re on a vicious downward spiral leaving each next generation less able to make positive change. This might be the end of the run for humanity: the “end of history” and not in a good way.
This time is different, of course, at least in the details. What that means for the long-term trajectory is impossible to know. We’re still too close to see whether we’re headed toward the doomiest doom. I’ve felt a sense of despair too, but intellectually it would be the height of arrogance to think I know how things will turn out. That’s the same reason you can’t swing to the other extreme, where confidence in existing institutions leads to the complacency of “surely the Supreme Court will/won’t do X” or “surely the midterms will be a wipeout”.
At the center of the spectrum between complacency and any form of doomerism lies a zone of agency and action. That’s the medicine that treats doomerism: whether you think there’s anything you can do in this fight. In the words of Sarah Connor and others from the Terminator movies (which are all about fighting an apocalyptic future from becoming a reality): “There is no fate but what we make.”
Taking responsibility
The last few months have seen some shaping the future, while others pass the buck. Big law firms like Paul Weiss buckled, while Perkins Coie and 500 others decided to take a stand. Columbia’s leaders threw their students and faculty under the bus, while Harvard is risking future grant funding to fight back. New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams let himself be leveraged over his federal corruption case, while Maine Governor Janet Mills said “see you in court” in the face of Trump’s bullying.
On the media side, Paramount started interfering with editorial freedom at 60 Minutes to improve their chances of getting approval for a merger, and Jeff Bezos has focused the Washington Post editorial page on “personal liberties and free markets”, while nonprofit news outlets like ProPublica and independent journalists with little more than newsletters continue to shine a spotlight on abuse and corruption. Even retailers are split, with Target scrapping programs that supported Black employees and Black-owned vendors, while Costco doubled-down on its values and its shareholders beat back an anti-DEI proposal.
None of these organizations or leaders were the ones who put Trump in office. It’ll be important to peel off some of his voters, to weaken the resolve of elected Republicans supporting the regime, to reduce the influence of the right-wing platforms and podcast bros—but we won’t do that until and unless we see folks like those above making the right choices.
I remember something my mother used to say when my siblings and I were being too rowdy, and inevitably something got broken or someone got hurt. Like all kids, we would try to pin the blame on someone else. But mom would say: “Oh, it’s not your fault? You’re not responsible?” The double-meaning has always stuck with me. There are people who are at fault. But there’s a much wider set of us who are responsible, and who need to take responsibility.
Being responsible means having agency. It means making decisions, for a reason, and following through. It means exercising the one thing that makes us human—free will. Being responsible means being reliable, in that others can rely on us to do the right thing, even if it might not work out. Being responsible also means responding—not reacting. It means not being pushed around by circumstances but also not being detached from the situation. You are immersed in it like a river, swimming against the current if needed. It’s about leadership and agency.
Trickle-down fascism
Fascism aims to undermine our sense of responsibility, if not directly, then in a trickle-down way that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever been micromanaged at work. If your boss micromanages every little thing you do, then there’s no reason to take ownership or make decisions on your own. Now suppose you also have a team reporting to you. When your boss tries to micromanage you, then you face a choice: you can either turn around and micromanage your team to meet your boss’s demands, letting that micromanagement trickle down; or you can be an umbrella that protects them.
Likewise, Trump and his regime don’t have to directly control every institution and person to cement their political control. He just needs a few big institutions to comply and to use their power in turn over others. So Trump said, “Universities, drop your commitments to civil rights and equality. Law firms, use your profits to provide pro bono defense for my favored causes.” Leaders at Columbia and Paul Weiss turned their tools of control on their students and employees, while their peers at Harvard and Perkins Coie chose to be umbrellas.
I understand the leaders at those organizations face multiple demands and tough choices. A sense of doomerism probably feeds into their calculus: is it worth standing up right now, when at best this is a generational fight? That reasoning combines over-confidence in knowing what the outcomes will be with an abdication of responsibility—an especially galling combination for university leaders, who should know the limits of knowledge and who are tasked with preparing those future generations who will be left holding the bag.
We can’t let historical examples feed a sense of doom, any more than we can let them make us complacent, when we just don’t know what will happen. Doomerism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anchoring ourselves to the illusion of inevitability is a curse. The way we break that curse is by taking responsibility for what happens.
In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre: “There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.”
Links
"Abundance" is a book for an alternate timeline [Dave Karpf / The Future, Now and Then]
An unprecedented scheme to profit from the presidency [Judd Legum / Popular Information]
The Radical Right's Culture Capture: A Conversation with Ana Marie Cox [Parker Molloy / The Present Age]
The Emergency Is Here [Ezra Klein and Asha Rangappa]
The group chats that changed America [Ben Smith / Semafor]
Empathy as Strategy: The Meidas Method [Virginia Heffernan, Stephen Metcalf, Ben Meiselas]