“Oft hope is born when all is forlorn.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

Here are a few sources that helped me rethink what “despair” in the context of a sociological study of social inequalities could more accurately mean. It’s not simply the opposite of “being” hopeful and the lack of hope. This is about a sociological mindset of despair that leads to perceptions of apathy, acquiescence in the face of the lack of a sense of autonomy to work with others to make a change. The power dissent requires one truly understand what “despair” or a culture of despair does to working and middle class people in a neoliberal climate.

1. Despair (used in the sense of “nationalizing despair): when an excessive amount of knowledge (surfeit) clouds a subject’s eye for the future. Cf. Lamming’s “luxury of a nationalist despair.” It prevents a balanced assessment of the potential contained in the present. (daSilva, p. 16). It is a despair, I assert, that is precipitated by the nation-state, by the environmental conditions that arise from neoliberalist agendas.  The Luxury of Nationalist Despair: George Lamming’s Fiction as Decolonizing … By A. J. Simoes da Silva
2.  Fritz Richard Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (1963):This author articulates it as a “discontent with culture and a discontent with his own place in it.” (p. 151). “Germany’s celebrated achievements in science and politics were villified, and the failures of the age magnified and maligned.” (151). This led some to find diagnosis–critical thinking–unbearable because “he lacked the detachment and ‘timelessness’ that Nietschze prescribed and possessed” (151).

   Despair he asserts leads to a maze of self-afflicted hatred and frustrations (I would add resentments). He writes, “Despair had ultimately to yield to the promise of redemption. Hence the insistence on several steps to regeneration. The healing powers of Rembrandt, on the still slumbering powers of the Niederdeutschen–all these were verbal constructions designed to combat the deeply rooted sense of despair” (152).

   Politics he writes is based on illogics that harness the cultural, spiritual and psychic dimensions of humanity not just rhetoric. Stern asserts that it is the explication of history that sheds light on the “persistent deficiences of a certain kind of unreflective, uncritical modernity and also the dangers of exuberant reform movements that in the name of idealism claim to be immune from accountability, that in their utoptianism propose collective solutions for grievances and aspirations that do not allow for collective solutions” (x; preface written at Columbia University).

   He concludes his preface with wishful thinking that perhaps it is this very culture of despair that demands a historical return: [I] “would prefer to live in a world in which the politics of cultural despair had nothing to do with historical resonance”. In other words, in a world where the past was just that, behind us, not shaping us without a need for critical reflection.  This is brilliant analysis of despair!!