You make the mistake of watching the news. It feels like a slow-motion train wreck, but you cannot look away. There's new outrage every day now, a fresh assault on what you were once naive enough to believe were the baseline rules - of everything. At first you get angry, maybe even motivated. But the days turn into weeks, the weeks into months, and the outrages don't stop, they keep coming. They speed up. They loop back around to a previous outrage that you thought was settled, each one a little more numbing than the last.
It's not getting any better - not that you really expected it to. That would not be reasonable at this point in our history - you were just hoping it wouldn't get any worse, at least not today.
You make a mental note to avoid the news in the future. Lesson learned.
That's Autocratic Despair.
It's more than being bummed out about who's in office - again(?!). Autocratic Despair is a deeper, gut-level feeling that the whole damn game is rigged. It's the sense that the people calling the shots don't give a rat's ass about you or anyone like you. It's the slow, creeping realization that the future you were hoping for is getting smaller and darker, less and less likely.
Think of it like being stuck in a job where your boss is a narcissistic toddler with unchecked power. Initiall, you try reason. You gently point out some obvious flaws in what they are calling "leadership." Your feedback is not well-received. Eventually, you get ground down. You start to feel like your efforts are pointless, that nothing you could do would actually change the outcome.
That's what this stuff does on a societal level. It grinds us down. It makes us feel like our voice doesn't matter, that the institutions that were supposed to have our back – the courts, the media, even just the basic ideas of fair play or adult conduct – are broken. Or worse, they being used against you.
The Truly Messed-up Part
That feeling of hopelessness? No accident. It's a tactic. They want you to feel this way. When you are convinced your effort is futile, you are less likely to cause trouble. They want there to be a mass demoralization. They want to usher in a kind of collective "fuck it" where everyone just gives up on the idea that things could be better.
Autocratic Despair isn't garden-variety sadness. It's a specific kind of soul-crushing weariness that comes from living under a system that feels increasingly illegitimate and unresponsive. It's the slow erosion of your sense of hope, the sinking feeling that the basic rules of the game have been thrown out the window and nobody in charge gives a damn.
This feeling isn't inevitable. Recognizing this feeling as the weapon it is – a way to shut you down – is the first step towards finding the damn fight again. And that's what we're here to talk about. Not just how to survive this mess, but how to stick a wrench in the gears of their despair machine.