Charles Dickens wrote, “Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilities as probabilities.” It was an advisory. An attitude.

Your neighbor might write, “Nothing is possible. People suck. It is what it is. Paste on a smile. Take a selfie. Make the best of it.“ It is an advisory. Another attitude.

You might go with one of the supposing you are alive to do so.”

Or, unbowed, maybe you say, “Look around. Everywhere reveals roots of resistance. Everywhere workers, blacks, women, trans, immigrants, and more wake up and face up. Forget the small stuff. It’s time to win everything. Dismiss anything less.”

So my question? What the hell should be our attitude in times like these? 

Today is undeniably among the worst of times. Human atomization is rampant. Human incivility is epidemic. Ecological nightmares escalate from this midnight to next midnight, and then again—everywhere. War rages. Judges trumpet their own soiled personal practices and impose frustrated depression on everyone else. Majorities reject even modest change while minorities elect lunatics. Or maybe it is vice versa. Even rebels can’t conceive mass action. 

High paid U.S. Sports pundits and minimum wage U.S. sports fans each grotesquely debate whether this or that baller deserves a quarter billion dollar contract. One think he deserves a little less. Another thinks she deserves a little more. Meantime life goes on all around us, headed toward death. 

Policy pundits discuss nuclear options that promise societal suicide. The President of the United States arrests Venezuela’s President and announces we will run the country. We will extract oil like no one has ever seen before. Stage right, sanity exits. Stage left, we throw verbal darts at each other. Meantime life goes on all around us, headed toward death.

Yet today is arguably also the best of times. Attention to feelings grows. Justified anger surges. Steadily more people emotionally reject global boiling, sexual subjugation, racist repressive regression, and obliterated workplace rights and responsibilities. Steadily more people in a society of laws sees that it ought to become a society where justice trumps law. Sports, even sports, however clumsily, however half-assed, starts to clean house. The tone and tenor of resistance grows and diversifies. People want peace and also justice. People reject what’s barbaric, colonial, and domineering. People practice mutual aid against rising tides and flooding rivers. 

People research causes of oppression. People research destinations for change. Activists organize. Workers unionize. Fledgling movements fight again and again. Fledgling movements amass strength as they battle. Steadily more people reject capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. By the standard of winning fundamental change, fledgling movements will for awhile lose, lose, lose. By the standard of daily growing bigger, broader, more committed and more competent, fledgling movements can close in on first smaller and then larger changes that improve people’s lives now and simultaneously create desires and conditions to win more later and finally to win fundamental change.

But hold on. This is also the age of foolishness. Goodbye thoughtfulness and wisdom. Hello people with advanced degrees. People with decades of education and reading. People with access to unlimited information. People who monopolize legal, medical, engineering, accounting, and administrative information. People who overwhelmingly prattle the most nonsensical idiocy. Especially economists, political scientists, and media pundits. We liberate what we subjugate, they pontificate. We uplift those who fear our every move, they salivate. We celebrate democracy but ignore the will of whole populations, including our own, they bloviate. Their bombs maim and kill, our bombs liberate and nurture, they celebrate. We reject empire while we defend and expand empire, they want us to believe. We destroy to save. We kidnap to nurture. We incarcerate to liberate. They feed us all that. Many with the highest education deny fact, ridicule reason, and preach against even meager moral decency. They lie and want us to believe. In America, the more pundits we watch the less we know. In America, the more degrees you get, the more politically deluded you become. In America, all too often garbage rises.

But, chin up, this is also the age of wisdom. The taxi driver and meat packer, the nurse and train steward, the dishwasher, maid, teacher, and drugstore cashier, the truck driver and the assembler all know injustice pervades the hierarchies of wealth and power that they daily encounter in schools, at work, in hospitals, in court, and in every other pursuit that crosses paths with entrenched power. They all know that everything is broken. They all know, even if they don’t always want to admit it, that Trump is soulless, that TV promotes illusion, and that mainstream journalism bolsters bastards. The commercial and the crass scream forth everywhere to capture our every attention, yet the commercial and crass fail to win peoples’ hearts and minds. People, even denied education so strenuously that they are unable to read nonetheless start to gain awareness. People though told they are worthless start to gain confidence. The public becomes poetic. 

So, we come to our question. In these oh so complicated, topsy turvy, upside down, inside out awful times, what attitude should dissidents have? Should we proclaim hope is four fifths empty and leaking further fast? Or should we proclaim hope is four fifths full and filling further fast? Or what?

Manipulative media used to deliver whatever truthful information fit well with protecting their system and gaining eyeballs and revenues. Ludicrous media now delivers whatever half-assed lying nonsense they can manufacture to best protect their system and to clickbait gain eyeballs and revenues. We stare out windows. We guzzle YouTube. We see whatever algorithms feed us. We know mainstream media distorts, corrupts, and channels. But we stare anyhow. It is for now the only entertainment in town. 

Outside—it’s a mess. Inside—what attitude fits the times? What attitude for me? What attitude for you?

I am not going to lie. Your neighbor, with his pasted on smile. Your neighbor with her eyes on the ground. They have a point. To see, hear, and feel what’s really out there, over and over—that hurts. To see, hear, and feel what’s out there over and over—that embitters. So, your neighbors conclude, why not ignore the onrushing pain? Why not make the best of a bad scene? Why not announce that “Nothing is possible. It is what it is. Key Sera Sera.” Why not paste on a smile. Take a selfie. Lie Uber Alles. Make the best of it. With friends at least. Screw the rest. Well, why not? Perhaps because the selfies we take will show us swan diving all the way to hell. 

Okay then why not buck up and instead announce: “Look around. Everywhere the roots of resistance spread. Everywhere workers, blacks, women, trans, immigrants, and more wake up and face up. Forget the small stuff. It’s time to win everything. Dismiss anything less.” The spirit of that certainly feels better, but the truth is, the small stuff actually matters. Without small gains there will be no big gains.

A defeatist attitude decays efforts. If you think you are going to lose, you are going to lose. A triumphalist attitude marginalizes essential steps. The revolution won’t triumph soon enough to curtail our current slip-slide to oblivion. Change short of installing new institutions will have to curtail oblivion. That matters. Change while old institutions persist will have to chart a long path to a revolution to not just save but also to liberate humanity. That too matters. 

Attitude? We need confident, steadfast, accurate thoughts able to propel calm, confident, informed, and continually escalating efforts. Sure, it’s easy to say, but what can do that?

The Italian Revolutionary Antonio Gramsci urged that we need “pessimism of the intellect,” and “optimism of the will.” Perhaps his advisory to perceive rising fascism and to simultaneously seek worthy socialism was brilliant wisdom in his day. For our time, however, call me blasphemous, but I think his advisory misses the mark. I think we need optimistic not pessimistic intellect. I think we need realistic not optimistic will. Why flip his script? 

“Pessimism of the intellect” urges that we look at reality to find what is horrible, and explain why it persists. And yes, of course we need to be honest about current dangers, but do we need an entreaty urging us to do that? Is pessimistic intellect in short supply? I don’t think so. Quite the contrary. I think “optimistic intellect” is what’s in short supply. I think to look forward and work to conceive what can and should be is what’s in short supply. I think to optimistically look at the present for what can galvanize support to win what we seek is what’s in short supply. So, yes, we need unyielding clarity about our current plight, but I think we mostly need forward-facing clarity about our potential to achieve another destiny. What is in excess supply is “pessimistic intellect.” What is in short supply and thus sorely needed is “optimistic intellect.” 

And what about “optimistic will”? I admire, respect, and resonate with Gramsci’s sentiment. But as an advisory for today’s leftists, I think it isn’t what our times call for. Put “optimistic will” on top of “pessimistic intellect” and what do you get? Magical proclamations of vague aims that will convince few and sustain little. Even add “optimistic will” to “optimistic intellect,” and what do you get? Chants that “we want the world and we want it now.” Chants that sound great but achieve little. I think we instead need a wise but no less militant mindset that “we want the world and we know it will take much time and many steps but we are steadfastly in it to win it.” 

So, I say, for attitude, in our complicated current situation, as a start we need optimistic intellect that can inform realistic will. As Charles Dickens wrote, “Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilities as probabilities.” It was an advisory. An attitude. Perhaps we should make it ours.

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