Fear and Loneliness – and Hope

I oscillate these days between crippling fear and endless hope.

It’s a strange dichotomy, actually. The fear is both very real and very fantastical. By that, I mean what I have an imagination for – climate collapse, the collapse of our democracy, economic collapse, the pending authoritarian threat and the very real damage it could do to me personally or to those I hold dear – is horrifying yet not entirely outside the realm of possibility.

But there’s another layer to it that I think is important to keep at bay, namely when the reality of what could happen crosses a threshold similar to the suspension of disbelief required to watch a movie that defies science or the natural order of things. That is, we see a world crumbling around us but we’re generally okay. Yet the more it crumbles around us and as it crumbles closer to us, the easier it becomes to imagine our own lives can and will crumble even if the chances of that happening are far-fetched. The inundation of fear-based imagery is intended to slow or chill our courage, make the fear feel closer and inevitable, and our appetite for solidarity with one another risks collapse.

Frankly, this is why it’s sometimes said that joy and creativity are acts of resistance, largely because the fear factor is intended to quiet and stamp out all of that.

Someone somewhere is, indeed, enduring unspeakable acts of hatred and violence by this regime. Those should be condemned with moral outrage. But the line between what you see happening to others and what you’re willing or unwilling to do to protect them for fear that you might be next is a thin line.

If you’re a person of privilege, like me, cowering over what is by no means new to vulnerable populations is really quite shameful.

I met with someone recently who was convinced if they gave a relatively small amount of money to an anti-fascist organization with protected legal status, the government would come after them. Mind you, no one is coming for them. Maybe, I guess, if they were giving millions, they might get an angry post on X or Truth Social calling them out, and certainly in that scenario, right-wing press can and does target big left-wing philanthropy. But this person was talking about less than $15,000. No one cares. You aren’t going to be shipped off to El Salvador for that. You’re a white U.S. citizen with wealth. And if you aren’t using your privilege for good trouble, what are you even doing?

But I get it: I have to remind myself not to get sucked into the fear, as well. Musk claiming that activists are merely the “foot-soldiers” while the funders are the “generals” – and the correct target for the right – is deeply worrying for someone who funds activists.

The loneliness epidemic does not help, and the moment we’re in caters to it.

I am experiencing a kind of loneliness I never have before now. It is not a poverty of relationship. I feel surrounded by people I love. So, to say it is loneliness in the sense of “being alone” is not quite right. An introvert like me loves being alone. This is something more existential. It feels more like a chasm, as though we are separated not by distance or time alone but by our very being. You can be next to someone and get to know them deeply and yet still not be seen or see.

Authoritarianism demands a call-and-response of dehumanization; we have been sucked into a society where, perhaps because we’re forced into survival mode 24/7 and bombarded with the cacophony of death, we have lost the capacity for care – of ourselves or of each other. Put another way, we’re lonely because we’re caught up in the struggle and that leaves us with little time for anything but the struggle.

I’m drawing from my seminary days in how I think about this. Theologian Paul Tillich liked to describe “sin” not as a material or tangible “wrong” we had done or caused others but as, quite simply, “estrangement,” or a kind of alienation from one another, from ourselves, and from “the ground of being.” This resonates strongly with me when I speak of this newfound loneliness.

We are asked in a fascist society to disconnect from one another and connect only to the truth provided by those in power. We are asked to forgo our web of interconnected relationships, near and far, to instead remain small, quiet, yielding to power for the sake of power. I have no meaningful tie to the powers that be; I know instinctively to reject them. And yet, when existing contrary to their demand, we make ourselves outsiders. Even when there’s seemingly more of us than there are of them, we are made to feel distinct by the mere fact that they hold the institutional power and we do not.

To confront fascism is to intentionally estrange yourself from the conformity power demands of you. To find and hear and understand each other in the midst of this is, simultaneously, exhausting and itself another form of separation. There is a demand in the need to care for those of us carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders. But what have we left to give?

Whether we fight it or join it, it seems, we’re bound to this inevitable estrangement one way or the other.

German-American historian and philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who wrote at length on her encounter with Nazism, writes about the problem of loneliness in a totalitarian context, and this tidbit from an article about Arendt’s work seems appropriate:

Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness is felt most sharply in the company of others. Just as much as we rely upon the public world of appearances for recognition, we need the private realm of solitude to be alone with ourselves and think. And this is what Arendt was stripped of when she lost the space to be alone with herself. ‘What makes loneliness so unbearable,’ she said ‘is the loss of one’s own self which can be realised in solitude …’

What, then, are we to do?

As a climate activist and funder, here’s my craziest answer to you: Go outside. Stand in the rain. Breathe in the crisp air. Reach down and touch the dirt. Get muddy. Listen to the sounds of Mother Earth beating with your own heart. This is the most essential thing we can do, first. It reminds us who we are and to whom we belong – to a world much bigger than us, a world that’s dying just like we are, a world that’s capable of giving life at the same time.

The moment that we’re in demands we take these pauses of solitude to, ironically enough, combat loneliness, and in doing so find these little reminders of what matters most before we can be there for ourselves or for others.

We also need to remember that the fear and the loneliness cannot compete with hope. For this moment, counter to all the fear and loneliness I might carry, I am also carrying more hope than I ever have before as well.

Status quo politics is dead. This administration has upended normalcy so much that the idea of returning to it, ever, is over. That means the door is wide open to something new. The advantage of confronting those who break things is that rather than replacing what’s broken exactly as it was before, you can start to vision something new and innovative and more powerful than before instead, and that’s what I see taking shape in the populism forming across the nation.

There is also an energy I have never seen in this country. Protests in recent weeks have come close to eclipsing the Women’s March. Activists have catered Tesla’s stock and forced Musk to return to work. Harvard said “no” in a symbolic moment that galvanized pushback from other universities uniting in advance. Parallel institutions are forming en mass, including Resistance Rangers, alternate Departments of Energy and Transportation, and I’m told there’s soon to be an alternate FEMA and Peace Corps. Parallel institutions have a history of helping reverse democratic backsliding in other countries and can expose corruption in powerful ways.

We are on a positive trajectory, though it doesn’t feel like it.

I’m grateful to be funding some of this work, and I feel a little like I’m getting the political revolution I always dreamed would happen, but I know deep down there’s repression of these groups coming, and holding that in tandem is existentially difficult, to say the least. Protest movements can make what feels impossible inevitable, so the idea that, riding on the waves of climate populism, we can still achieve a thriving, livable future with a strengthened democracy, is something we can and should rest our hopes on.

In the meantime, we can rest our hopes on the Earth, on the ground of being, and on those who are feeling similar feelings in this moment to each of us and who know that we’re all in this together, seeking something really quite similar yet profound: love for one another and the world.