Issue #61: Belonging and Crisis of Futurity

"Disbelief in futurity loosens in a great measure the ties of morality, and may be for that reason pernicious to the peace of civil society." — David Hume

Hey!

Welcome back to my current readers! Hello and a warm welcome if you’re new here!

If exploring and examining belonging and the myriad of ways humans relate to each other combined with the imaginative and systematic ways we can envision future possibilities sounds like a cup of your favorite toasty beverage, I invite you to subscribe and share this newsletter with someone(s) you care about.

I have many thoughts about the current state and trajectory of United States. If uttered aloud, many of those thoughts would involve curse words. Like so many, I’m feeling a lot of emotions both personally and collectively after the highest court in the land told me and millions of other birthing people that our bodies do not belong to ourselves.

But after taking a step back for some scream crying and assuming the “I’m overwhelmed, so I’m going to curl up in the fetal position” stance, I somehow became more appalled at the utter lack of imagination from the political establishment. On the right, the powers that be are stuck in the past with some archaic definition of salvation that relies on colonialism and control, delivering misery in the present for the hope of a fated afterlife of liberation. The “moderates” assume that a combination of magical thinking and fatherly speeches about being disappointed suffice as governing and leadership. Everyone in legal positions of leadership are all running a playbook of political skeuomorphism that is wholly inadequate and ill fitting for who we actually are and the moment we find ourselves in — the Age of Omnicrisis. None of these people must live and cope with the consequences of the futures they are creating.

I’ve often said that belonging happens by design, which would suggest that the converse is true as well: futures devoid of belonging also happen by design. We could craft futures without white supremacy as much as we can craft futures centered on the dark side of belonging.

The pandemic brought a couple of academic theories to my attention that speak to the moment that we are in: necropolitics and Terror Management Theory. If you ever learned Greek and Latin word roots for your SAT, then you would see necropolitics means a politics of death. Teen Vogue explored the background behind necropolitics last year as the pandemic took a turn for the worse:

Philosopher Achille Mbembe describes necropolitics as “the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.” In other words, necropolitics is a framework that illuminates how governments assign differential value to human life. The closer you are to dominant power, the more your life is worth. In the United States, if you’re a straight, white, able-bodied, cisgender, wealthy, Christian man, this is great news for you. But the further away you are from those axes of privilege, the less your life is worth under the logics of necropolitics — and the more precarious your existence becomes.

Terror management theory states that fear of our unavoidable mortality instigates many of our behaviors as we work to manage the existential dread or anxiety of our eventual death by adopting and sharing cultural worldviews that justify the worth of our existence. In some cultures, confronting death leads to appreciation and reverence for life, incurring a duty to have an enjoyable life that also provides a legacy of wellbeing for future generations. In other cultures, the opposite occurs; selfishness reigns supreme as people extract, manipulate, hoard and consume resources because “you can’t take it with you when you go.”

Belonging is something we both yearn and live for. To be connected and in relationship with others meets a material need for safety as much as an emotional need for validation and cognitive need for sensemaking in a complex, volatile world. We need belonging to create a safely enjoyable present and plan for the future. Although I did not know that necropolitics and Terror Management Theory existed before the pandemic, I can’t unsee them as I look at what is happening in the United States now.

By assigning a hierarchy of value to life in culture and policy, necropolitics engineers who belongs in a given society in the present and future. Despite what government and business leaders would have us believe, the pandemic, economic precarity and wealth inequality, homelessness, and now abortion bans all are manifestations of necropolitics that say people negatively impacted are not worth supporting to ensure they survive and thrive in the future. The wealth hoarding and compulsory suffering of people who are not white, cis, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, and/or rich becomes justified with Terror Management Theory. Supporting any of the politics as usual only normalizes the mass death we’ve already experienced, incurring more learned helplessness.

Crisis of futurity refers to the sense that the future is being stolen from us. Making people fight to survive is certainly a tried and true approach for increasing pessimism about the future. Although every generation might have had its own crisis of futurity, this one seems different. The speed and aggression with which the right rushes to design a future that I don’t belong in while “moderates” placate them fills me with dread. Our future is being stolen by people with limited imagination, instead living in deadly delusions that may literally take down the entire planet. Empires die when they stop engaging with reality, ignoring the impacts of debt, death and destruction. Without imagination, anything different seems ridiculous or impossible, or more likely, unthinkable.

Mythologies and dreams can be springboards and fuel for social movements but they aren’t meant to live forever starved of the oxygen of reality and accountability. The American Dream helped the country grow insofar as some people seemed like they were pulled themselves up economically and socially without the trappings of aristocracy and intergenerational wealth. Although never fully true, at least the myth had select grounded examples. Today we are starved for positive examples. An administration that fails to take seriously the risk of death of an ectopic pregnancy today as indicated by sending incessant fundraising emails to voters promising potential in November without delivering results for the last 50 years is not engaged with reality. They do not care to understand the lethality of their lack of imagination, falling back on necropolitics as usual.

Fernand R. Amandi @AmandiOnAir

She’s not wrong.👇🏼

Academics at the Contemporary Theoretical Network at the University of Birmingham put together a special edition journal focused on the theme “Futurity in Crisis” exploring new approaches and potential implications for changing how we think about the future when we have little to no faith that we will live to see it. Already millennials are opting out of having children or saving for retirement because there is the overwhelming sense that the planet will be uninhabitable or life will otherwise become impossibly miserable. Millennials are the first American generation to be worse off than their parents in terms of health and economic outcomes. Gen Z is following in these footsteps with even worse outcomes. The future has people in it of all genders, ethnicities, creeds, etc., not just a techno-utopia generated by one of the FAANG or a political dystopia bought and paid for by the Federalist Society. Younger generations must be cared for and older generations need to be responsive to the challenges at hand.

I don’t have clear answers of how to get out of the vicious cycle of a crisis of futurity contributing to its continued worsening but have some direction. It’s hard to hold the big vision of what could be positive on the other side of all of this. We do have some glimmers of hope that serve as ingredients for dreaming a new American Dream that includes belonging.

I’ve never played the game The Sims before but I’ve wondered what it would be like to play as though it could be real life. How can we imagine, experiment and create new ways of being that both stoke and spark imagination of futures where all of us co-exist? What does the bedroom, or the home, the street, the neighborhood look like? Who is welcome and how do we know they are welcome? What is uncomfortable or dangerous? How are connections generated and maintained? How do we experience conflict and then compromise and repair? What, if anything, is unforgivable or impermissible? How do we grow or evolve?

Comment below describing your Sims world that you would want everyone to live in.

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My apologies for the unexpected hiatus. Although emotionally grappling with the world did consume much of what pulled me away, I also had a personal life change. I left the Institute for the Future in mid-June to take on a new role at Omidyar Network as a principal on the Building Cultures of Belonging team. I’m incredibly thrilled and grateful to be working with an amazing team doing impactful work focused on this subject.

That said, I’m adjusting to something that was more of a side project now becoming my full-time job. I will continue writing but appreciate a bit more patience as I settle in. As always, all thoughts and views will continue to be mine.

In the meantime, I am getting more organized for regular community events. As part of that, I am considering rescheduling to better accommodate time zones for folks who want to attend. So add your response to the poll below.