We can create something brand new

Things are really bad. There’s a pandemic that has stretched on and on, that has been poorly managed on a global scale. That has not resulted in the abolition of medicine for profit or the recognition of our shared vulnerability that crosses our borders. Climate change is undeniably here, with various parts of the world literally on fire, and more horrifying suffering (human and nonhuman) than I could list. And that is just for starters. We are bombarded with horror and atrocity after horror and atrocity and the governments and capitalists go on as usual. Change couldn’t be more necessary and nothing changes.

It is easy and understandable to fall into despair. I think a lot of us are coping with grief and terror and overwhelm in whatever ways we know how. There’s a lot of numbing going on, a lot of scapegoating, a lot of pushing on like nothing is happening. And as usual, on whatever is left of the Left, there’s a lot of finger pointing, recrimination, symbolic action, posting, making empty demands of powers who ignore us, and taking down each other because we can.

I don’t know how to change things. I don’t have a perfect plan. I don’t know what we would need to do to make the necessary changes on a global scale. And yet, when I look inside myself, it’s not that I have resigned. It’s not that I don’t think it’s possible. It’s just that I don’t know how. I know we will have to do things we have never done before, and draw on things people have done, and combine things in new ways. I know we will have to sacrifice and be brave and be massively creative. And I know, more than anything that we will have to find a way to work together. But what exactly that work will be? I don’t know.

I remember getting what I thought was a political education inside what Jay and I call the Nexus, a social phenomenon that combines social media, identitarianism, and cancel culture. As a queer person I’ve spent a long time in the Nexus, from my queer alternative high school I went to as a teenager, to the iumblr years, to my women and gender studies degree, to instagram infographics, to watching cancellations play out in real time, to all the media I’ve been immersed in for more than a decade, to my entire friend group up until recently.

What I learned in these spaces and relationships was that being political meant simply knowing and repeating the correct takes. Being political meant being critical of everything everyone said, going over it with a fine tooth comb and finding and naming the problems. Being political meant studying the rules, making the right caveats, avoiding saying certain things, agreeing with people more marginalized, owning my privilege, knowing when to step back, and knowing when to hit hard with my ‘superior knowledge’. So much of what I learned to do inside the Nexus boils down to performance pure and simple. Displaying my knowledge of the ever changing rules. Saying the right things at the right times. And doing my very best not to say the wrong things.

Most of the Left as it stands today is like this. Toothless. It’s an elaborate performance of correct politics aimed at each other, the people on the bottom who have no material power to change things unless we band together in unprecedented ways. But banding together to make massive change seems impossible for a lot of reasons, and anyway, we don’t even try to do that. We are too busy with our periodic purges of the scapegoats within our already tiny, identity based and subcultural communities.

I’m not saying this to be mean, or flippant, or cruel. I think a great many people caught up in this stuff genuinely have the best intentions, genuinely want some kind of change, genuinely care about people and the earth and are just doing what other ‘political’ people around them are doing: performing and avoiding punishment. At least it feels like we are doing something and we can stay caught up in that for years and years. I know I did.

Everything I learned in the Nexus taught me that my job was to memorize the right things and call out the wrong things. To hold righteous rage or performative supplication. Nowhere in the Nexus are we encouraged to say: I don’t know but maybe we could figure it out together.

The human brain is a truly amazing thing. Our prefrontal cortexes, our capacity to imagine, envision, dream, plan, strategize, are fucking phenomenal. As a species we have done some wild shit during our time here. What if we decided that we wanted to turn the power of our minds (our own and each others) toward the great many problems that face us today? What if we admitted we don’t fucking know what to do and instead of that terrifying us it lead us toward each other? What if we valued our own capacity to contribute, not wasting our potential by ‘staying in our lane’ and not bulldozing over other people’s ideas? What if we thought we had something specific to contribute and everyone else does too, and that the real magic will happen in the meeting of our minds, in what hasn’t been imagined yet?

Kim Stanley Robinson is one of my favourite authors. In his series The Mars Trilogy there are many conferences and gatherings in which people come together to discuss major political issues facing the world on Mars. They talk and talk for days, presenting ideas to each other and discussing them. The bring up strategies and practices from different places and times in human history and imagine how they might alter them or combine them to fit the situation at hand. They talk science, philosophy, religion, spirituality, architecture, design, ecology, and on, and on. They come together as experts and as learners, as those with conviction and those with questions. They discuss until they are exhausted and then they party in the evening and meet again the next day.

More than anything, this is what I want us to be doing. I want us to admit that we don’t know and I want us to consider that together we could come up with ideas and strategies that none of us can think of on our own. I want us to be excited at the possibility of discovering our shared potential. I want us to create containers for our ideas to come together, for us to think and dream and learn and strategies together.

I remember back when I was stoner, high out of my mind as usual, saying What if every human brain is like neuron in the larger brain that is this world? And I’m like - yeah, what if dude?

That’s why, even though I wish I didn’t have to waste my time on it, the work I do trying to embolden people against the orthodoxies of the Nexus is, I think, the most important political work I could be doing right now. Right now, even on the so-called Left, where we agree that climate change is real, that vast global human exploitation and suffering is wrong, we can’t even begin imagining new things because we are only allowed to think in prescribed, narrow ways. We aren’t allowed to put stuff out there, try things out, be curious, ask questions, wonder, disagree. And we certainly aren’t allowed to build networks with people different from ourselves, people who would not understand what is happening on woke twitter, who have no idea what the rules are and so would be cast out.

I don’t want people to be perfect, good, righteous, right, free from sin. I don’t care about any of that. I want people to be curious, to be interested, to feel like the state of the world is something that they could take an active part in changing, that their own ideas and actions matter, that they are welcome to join the collective, and that together, as a collective, we can do things we can’t currently imagine. I want to work side by side with people I don’t agree with, having rigorous discussions, not to prove I’m right but to find what the generative power of our disagreement can create. I want to build power and solidarity with every person who is currently helpless on their own to stop the atrocities being forced upon us.

I want to do this for real, in big ways and small, in conversations with friends and at large planned think tanks to generate crazy new ideas for tackling climate change, ending capitalism, and taking our planet back from the parasites that are killing it.

I want to know what you think, what your ideas and dreams and expertise and questions are. I want you to feel free to think, to imagine, to wonder, to dream, to plan to strategize. I want your ideas bouncing off the ideas of millions of other people so that we can create something brand new.

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Clementine Morrigan is an independent writer, cultural change maker, truth teller, and moral philosopher. She writes essays and literary nonfiction about ethics, politics, relationships, sexuality, violence, trauma, and unconditional compassion. Her cult classic zine, Love Without Emergency, has sold more than 11,000 copies (that’s a lot of stapling). Her podcast, Fucking Cancelled, independently toured the United States. Her readers have created and disseminated amateur translations of her work in several languages. If you have spent time in a punk house or queer collective house in the last 20 years, you have probably flipped through one of her zines in the bathroom.

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