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Radical Optimism is Not Denialism [1]

['Crashing Vor', 'Dan K']

Date: 2026-08-19  

Taken by the crew of Apollo 17.

It is time to inject some anti-bodies into the body politic, because the slop-heavy algorithm that feeds our darker moods back to us (on steroids) certainly isn’t going to help us change things. It goes without saying that things are dark. Things are shitty. But we need to learn new ways of navigating the current epistemic regime– warts and all. In a way, as I see it, we have a binary choice: We can swirl down the sewer of misery, which is incidentally what Trump (and the GOP) hopes we all decide to do. He wants us to give up, stay locked in our air-conditioned siloes of fear and existential nausea, stay cynical about politics, and pretend that all is for naught, and that we might as well eat and drink ourselves into a food coma from which we never awake. Then, it will be easier for his army of troglodytes to finish the job. Sure, things keep me up at night with worry– a major one is the climate change. We are blowing past “deadlines,” we are not scaling up fast to tackle the mind-boggling disasters happening RIGHT now, much less further down the road. It is all very depressing and distressing. For those of us with children– the worry is compounded. And for those of us who are already climate refugees, the problem is unequivocally real ( not theoretical). Add Trump and his fossil fuel fetish, and the roll back of EPA regulations, data center proliferation, and it all feels mentally and physically unmanageable. But this is the nature of trauma ( we are actively being traumatized for power and profit), and action in the face of trauma, even a little action (not denialism, and not downplaying its effects, or beating ourselves up), is the beginning of the road to a cure. In the face of bleakness, I want to pushback against the notion of environmental despair as a viable strategy for change, or even a state of being. I am not advocating its opposite, mind you. I am saying it would be wise to consider unforeseen factors ( namely us, global society) when we make future projections based on one data set. Here is a link to a brief opinion piece in the Guardian, by George Monbiot. I’d also like to quote part of it below:

“There are many reasons to despair: our green and pleasant land is parched and brown, reservoirs are depleted, and wildfires are racking the UK, Europe and the US. But there are many more reasons not to despair: despair is self-fulfilling; despair is disempowering; despair is what the bastards want you to feel. But above all, despair is irrational…

The complex system we call society has two equilibrium states: impossible and inevitable. The change we want always looks impossible. Votes for women? You must be off your rocker. Independence for India? Britain will never let it go. Civil rights? Ridiculous! But with sustained pressure, a bit of luck, a change in circumstance, bang!, the impossible happens. Then everyone says, “Well, that was inevitable, wasn’t it?”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/8/19/800086585/community/radical-optimism-is-not-denialism/

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