Towards a Politics of Meaning and Hope

We need to start by acknowledging the limitations and opportunities of life

Recently, I've been focusing on the fact that a lot of the politics out there, from both the left and the right, are deeply negative. On the left, it is mainly caused by postmodern critical theory and its oppressor vs oppressed, power is everywhere narrative. On the right, it is the endless moral panics, outrage-based populism and conspiracy theories. Both sides paint a bleak future, and radicalize their followers towards a destructive extremism using fear. I think the only thing that can save us from all this is a positive vision. what we need is a politics of meaning and hope.

So how can we have a politics of meaning and hope? First of all, we need to have meaningful, achievable goals. One of the biggest problems with the left right now is that it is basically living in fantasy land. It wants to build a utopia that simply can't exist, and wouldn't mind heightening conflict and deconstructing everything we have to get there. The repeated failures of this project has brought about a well-known phenomenon of left melancholy. The lesson is that setting unachievable goals based primarily on theoretical philosophy is not a constructive way to move forward.

Instead, we have to start with reality as it exists. And part of that reality is that life is suffering, at least to some degree. This has been true throughout history. Suffering is part of life, and it can't be extinguished by politics, as history has clearly shown. Trying to do so would only bring about more unnecessary suffering. This is the reason why utopian dreams are so scary. On the other hand, although life is suffering, we can lessen the suffering, both for people alive right now, and for generations of people to come. Objectively speaking, life consists of less suffering right now compared with back in the middle ages, and we have the hard work of many people across the generations to thank for this.

Therefore, to put it simply, the limitation of life is that we can't escape the fact that life is suffering, but the opportunity here is that we can lessen the suffering, both in the here and now, and for the future of humanity too. This, I think, provides us with the meaning of life. Even though we can't make things perfect, the fact that we can lessen the suffering of people, and the fact that this can benefit many generations still to come, provides us with more than enough meaning for this life. It is the hope that things can get better that provides meaning for life, and the will to think and act to make it happen. It is also the realization that things can't be perfect, but can be improved, that makes every incremental improvement a cause for celebration, and prevents the kind of utopia-dystopia bipolar thinking that is the root cause of left melancholy and paralysis. I believe that having a positive vision people can believe in also prevents them from falling into the perpetual panic, outrage and conspiracy thinking that characterizes the populist right.

When we start from a positive thinking mindset, rooted in a practical and realistic belief that things can get incrementally better, we can be truly constructive in both thought and action. There would be no more us-vs-them tribalism, no more need to 'own' the other side, and no more victim mentality. There will only be a rational desire to make things better, which logically leads to the rational thinking and discussion required to make it happen. This is the kind of positive politics that I want to help bring about, to replace the kind of negative politics we have right now.