Change happens
The generation born between 1940 and 1970 is fortunate. We have witnessed significant physical, cultural, and political changes throughout our lives and understand that progress is indeed possible. For better or worse, of course.
With this awareness, we should focus on the future rather than linger on the past and tally current problems. Shifting from pessimism to action-generative imagination would also benefit us. I have lived over half a century in the “post-everything” era. The best I’ve encountered is a few “neo-somethings,” yet even the “neo”s also refer to the past as they recall what already happened. Thus, I’m determined to pass away — not before 2050 — in a “new whatever” or at least in a “pre-something!”
Look forward
To be credible and effective, we better forget about the past and the gloomy present and focus instead on imagining and creating the world we want.
Schematizing the past is relatively easy.
Understanding the present is the most challenging task, an almost impossible one.
Envisioning the future can help us grasp the unfathomable present. However, it is not trouble-free. It requires bravery and self-confidence, as our imagination might prove wrong.
The French motto from 1968, “Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible,” (be realistic, go for the impossible) is much less paradoxical than it may seem at first glance. It challenges the usual paradigms and the mental framework of most people. Global powers and conservative forces can easily manage shallow progressives and futile reformists, but they are likely to overlook or lack the understanding needed to repress genuine alternative positions.
So, let’s get started.
A bias for hope
As we denounce the global regime, we should also carve out “places of hope,” whether real, virtual, or fictional. In these newfangled places, we will envision, design, and propose our desired lifestyles. This is not an easy task. Imagination is an altogether rare resource, although many of us believe we have it in abundance.
An intellectual framework is required to implement functional imagination. Nothing is more practical than a good theory, but theorizing is way more complex than doing.
The first step is to discuss democracy and the misleading language used to define political systems and their formal and informal institutions, including the military, academics, media, and others.
“Democracy” and “freedom” are not simple concepts we can market with trivial slogans. We should contemplate being “differently democratic” or “differently oppressed” and reclaim cultural relativism in foreign policy.
Progressive and conservative
The second step is to explore what being progressive truly means. I am afraid that contemporary progressives are not significantly different from conservatives. The louder they shout at one another, the more they demonstrate their likeness.
Most self-proclaimed progressives envision the future as yesterday’s tomorrow rather than considering today as tomorrow’s yesterday.
Progress should take a new direction. Although I still uphold the core principles of civilization and humanism, I reject the notion that we can continue along the same old path. We must strive to find new and diverse allies, even among those once our adversaries.
Digging into Trump’s manure
If we dare to sift through Trump’s manure, we will discover seeds of flowers to bloom and crops to harvest. If, instead, our goal is to preserve our comfort zone, disgust will blind us, and we will throw away the seeds of change along with the revolting manure. Even worse, we will allow others to exploit potential revolutionaries.
We respect and love the people, the populace, the ochlos (όχλος), and help them transform into a demos (δῆμος).
Most people are good, but sometimes evil leaders may mislead part of them or even all of them; however, they cannot deceive all the people all the time. We must see ourselves as the people’s servants. This would enable us to understand the needs and reasons that foster people to vote for populist platforms. Our duty is to open the eyes of sheep who prefer to follow the butcher rather than the shepherd, leading them to graze.
If we did not give him too much importance, we might compare Trump to Mephisto in Goethe’s Faust. The devil defines himself as “part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally produces good.” (Ich bin Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft). The quote is reported in the inscription of Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita.”
Times have changed
No longer is it “The Times They Are a-Changin’” as in the Sixties; they have changed, indeed. Many issues require reevaluation from a fresh perspective. I regret to say I don’t yet know which ones or what to do: all I can do now is search.
Whether willing or not, Trump and the so-called conservatives convey something new, albeit unacceptable, in contrast to progressives who persist in fighting battles that have long been won or are now irrelevant. The conservatives and Trump are the true progressives as they enthusiastically tread the same path—one that leads to ecological disaster, the extinction of democracy, rising violence, and unhappiness, unaware that the right to happiness was once among the most fervent aspirations of the American dream.
The conservatives and the Trumpists (there’s a difference between the two) lie about going back to the good old pre-modern times that will never return. Trump uses an appealing narrative that operates like an ideology or a superstructure. He wants to change the country and the world by eliminating the fundamental principles of civilization.
The good news is that he does not detect or respond to people’s basic needs. His success is doomed to be temporary unless he creates a totalitarian regime with the help of army-supported billionaires. It’s possible, though not that easy.
The people’s needs
For a long time, Trump and the conservatives have advocated for a wishful new world founded on vanished, contradictory values. Their success cannot endure unless their opponents, specifically the Democrats, keep the political debate focused on misleading issues while colluding with the ongoing totalitarian drift toward a radically different form of governance that they are constructing together behind the institutional scenes.
Trump’s success cannot last because his platform does not respond to some basic needs of the people who are not LGBT+ and abortion rights, halting immigration, foreign policy, and the like. Even civil rights and equal opportunities are, to a large extent, part of an old rhetoric. Nowadays, people’s basic needs are concerned with quality of life and environmental protection, not to mention peace, security, and justice. All this goes together with expectations for the future, such as health enhancement, positional goods, self-improvement, and security. The progressive Democrats do not have a different agenda about what really matters to the people.
A shepherd-seeking sheep
A shepherd-seeking sheep is flocking aimlessly out there. We need to provide them with enthusiastic new goals. We should not fear to promise and to ask for too much. Environmental protection and peaceful relationships with nature, other species, and foreign people are intrinsic human attitudes rooted in human genes.
People would group and support a platform that locates a new relationship with nature and peace at the center of the political debate. We should not fear a lack of consensus because, blinded by pride and insecurity, we assume most people are evil and foolish. Faith in humankind is a distinguished feat of progressives. The 19th and 20th-century politics are outdated, and the focus on social classes and income distribution is less appealing than thirty years ago or so.
Social justice and the environment
The emphasis on the super billionaires shifts attention from people’s needs to their hollow emotions. In the past, the poor hoped to climb from the proletariat to the middle class. Very few can reasonably aspire to become billionaires; instead, most people strive to stay in the middle class. However, most people aim to improve their lives and societal positions, which no longer strictly relates to income as in the past. The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few billionaires has much to do with power and democracy and very little with social justice. The fact that 1% of Americans control 80% of the GPD is a political issue. The social justice issue is twofold: (a) how the income is distributed among others and (b) what the income is used for.
Regarding point (b), nuclear radiation and widespread pollution affect the rich and the poor indifferently, as do other environmental issues.
Social justice regards the opportunity for the low-income classes to improve their condition and access to the middle class. Nowadays, except for a dispersed lumpenproletariat composed mainly of immigrants and deprived marginalized citizens, the low middle-class definition applies to a large and growing part of the citizens. In the past, economic growth and government policies defused the proletariat’s revolutionary potential by transforming it into a broad middle class. Education and new urban job opportunities allowed many to access a higher social status or at least hope for it. All this is gone.
A plea for more development
Once basic needs are satisfied, people look for the possibility of choosing a lifestyle that fits their personal preferences. Lifestyles involve the environment, health, safe food, and daily habits unrelated to income.
If we assume that we have moved from a class to a lifestyle society, we can maintain that if you make $30,000 per year, you are almost poor; if you make $300,000, you are almost rich. Nonetheless, both can choose similar lifestyles and share similar values. Of course, we all prefer to make $300,000, but what really matters are two aspects: (a) the expectation and the actual possibility for the poor to improve their living condition, (b) to be in the position to choose how to live among diverse lifestyles.
It is time to dump the pseudo-ideology of sustainable development. Sustainable is a depressing, self-curbing word. We need and want a great, massive development, though a different one.
Enough with reforms
We should no longer employ the term “reform” regarding old bureaucracy and institutions. We would rather speak straightforwardly of change.
We need to answer questions such as:
a) How can we develop (or discover) new technology and consequent techniques for producing food for self-sustained communities?
b) What architectures, lifestyles, and infrastructures fit into an ecological environment?
c) How can we envisage a new economy?
d) What about new forms of governance?
e) What about a different idea of education?
f) How can we eliminate the professional armies and the military business?
Conclusion
I’ve already taken a few steps forward by contacting academicians and professionals to design an imaginary, ecological, self-sustained community. The first outcome was a book published last September, in which I collected eighteen projects about a self-sustained environment and community. I connect all the projects in a coherent narrative in the book’s introductory essay.
I’m writing a longer book to be published by the end of 2025. It will cross between an essay and a fictional story, proposing radical and utopian ideas.
*Corrado Poli is a retired urban and political geography professor, author, and columnist. He has taught at American, Italian, French, Spanish, and Australian Universities and was a Fulbright Professor at The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He authored several books and academic articles (recently in Human Geography: A New Radical Journal) and hundreds of editorials in newspapers and magazines.
See website www.corradopoli.net ; email: policorrado@gmail.com
