“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”, a Gramsci quote paraphrased by Žižek that seems to be going around a lot this morning. The original sentence – “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” – was written by Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks while imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy in the 1930s.

I like Žižek’s monster version, as it captures a current sense of despair and revulsion to everything that is going on. However, let us please remember that a monster is not only defined as “a large, ugly, and frightening imaginary creature”. A monster is also “a thing of extraordinary or daunting size”.

And we need a pro-active, progressive alternative that is of extraordinary and daunting proportions…

To quote the final principle of the Manifesto of the Dark Mountain project “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us”.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”, a Gramsci quote paraphrased by Žižek that seems to be going around a lot this morning. The original sentence – “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” – was written by Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks while imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy in the 1930s.

I like Žižek’s monster version, as it captures a current sense of despair and revulsion to everything that is going on. However, let us please remember that a monster is not only defined as “a large, ugly, and frightening imaginary creature”. A monster is also “a thing of extraordinary or daunting size”.

And we need a pro-active, progressive alternative that is of extraordinary and daunting proportions…

To quote the final principle of the Manifesto of the Dark Mountain project “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us”.

I know that passive shallow hope is part of evasive and toxic positivity. To be honest, I have found myself cynical about hope for the first time in my life over the past months, watching genocides unfold in Gaza and elsewhere, together with unwavering ecological destruction while a stupendously hypocritical liberal world order continues to dig its own grave and authoritarian politics is on the rise everywhere.

But just like positivity and shallow hope can be toxic, there is also a toxic privilege in cynicism and in giving up on hope, especially when we are the ones watching from a relatively safe distance. As tempting as it may seem to slide away in acerbic observations and dark complacency, we need to resist.

The end of democracy as we know it is not the end full stop. We cannot afford to give up on democracy, nor can we give up on hope. Now more than ever, it is time to double down on both.