Hope Is the Most Socially Acceptable Form of Gaslighting​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Hope is having a great PR run. It shows up in graduation speeches, motivational posters, and every climate conference closing ceremony since approximately forever. When things get bad, and things are getting spectacularly bad, adults reach for hope the way a magician reaches for a scarf. Endless, colourful, and ultimately concealing nothing. It gets wrapped in warm language, handed to young people like a life jacket made of feelings, and deployed with such reliable frequency that you begin to suspect it might actually be a reflex rather than a philosophy. When climate systems break down, when politics becomes grotesque, when inequality hardens into architecture, when young people look ahead and see a future that looks suspiciously like a series of compounding emergencies, the official response remains identical: do not despair, have hope. But what if hope is kind of the problem?

For many, this insight hits like a cold bucket of water to the face. The idea of hope as necessary for action is so entrenched in our culture that whenever I bring it up people get immediately defensive. But these arguments are not only what I have been saying for years. They are now also perfectly articulated in a brilliant 2026 paper by Thornton, Stratford, and Louverdis, “The Obscenity of Hope: Educating Young People in the Anthropocene,” published in Ethics and Education.

That Hope is a form of Gaslighting is not a casual accusation. Because hope is sacred in modern culture. To criticize it sounds almost indecent, like heckling a therapy session or reviewing a funeral negatively on Google. Hope sounds kind. Warm. Human. It has, over centuries of careful cultural management, acquired such enormous moral prestige that it essentially never gets audited. And that is precisely the issue. Because hope, especially in the context of ecological breakdown and social crisis, is not always a liberating force. In fact, it can become an obstacle to action, a palliative that dulls urgency, and, most disturbingly, a colonial mechanism that trains people to endure injustice rather than dismantle it. The central provocation is simple and genuinely explosive: in an age of climate crisis, political regression, colonial afterlives, and deepening mental distress, hope may not be what young people need. They may need something considerably more honest, and considerably less comfortable to sell at graduation.

The word used for hope here is obscene, and it is chosen deliberately. Not obscene in the sense of offensive language, though the argument does cause a certain amount of social discomfort.

Obscene in the sense that hope appears benevolent while hiding its violence. The obscenity lies in the fact that hope often asks people to wait politely inside systems that are burning them alive. It offers emotional comfort without material change. It encourages faith in outcomes that the existing order has no intention of delivering. It tells people to endure. To be patient. To believe. To hold on just a little longer. In this sense, hope becomes less a force of transformation than a technology of delay , an elegant, socially acceptable mechanism for ensuring that the people most harmed by the status quo remain too spiritually occupied with optimism to do anything structurally threatening about it.

Think about it. The world is on fire, literally and politically. And the official response from institutions, educators, and well-meaning TED talkers everywhere is: have you tried being more hopeful? That is like showing up to a house fire and handing the residents a vision board. The argument here goes further than simply saying hope can sometimes disappoint. That would be too mild, too polite, too much like the thing being criticized. The argument is that hope can actually hinder action. Why? Because hope often operates as a substitute for confrontation. Instead of facing the magnitude of the crisis, we soften it. Instead of reckoning with the absurdity of our political and ecological condition, we anaesthetize ourselves with phrases about progress, resilience, innovation, and better futures just around the corner. Hope, in this form, becomes a way of not fully seeing. And not seeing is, it turns out, extremely politically useful if you happen to be running one of the systems doing the damage.

If people remain hopeful enough, they may not rebel. If they believe the future will somehow be repaired by leaders, markets, green technologies, or the slow grinding of institutional reform, they are less likely to demand rupture. Hope therefore functions as a stabilizer for the status quo, a kind of ideological sedative administered in inspiring doses. It allows destructive systems to continue by convincing people that the system will eventually correct itself, probably soon, probably through the efforts of some very committed stakeholders at an upcoming summit. In this way, hope is not the enemy of despair. It is often the accomplice of passivity. The good cop in an interrogation room where the bad cop is called Collapse.

Camus had thoughts about all of this, as Camus tended to. His observation was that human beings live with a painful and irresolvable contradiction. We long for order, clarity, and meaning, but we inhabit a universe that is famously not offering any of those things on a reliable basis. There is a gap between our need for certainty and the fundamental opacity of reality. For Camus, many people try to escape this condition by clinging to illusions, making what he described as a leap into comfortable fantasy; a philosophical suicide, which is perhaps the most dramatic possible name for choosing a prettier story over an honest one. Hope, the argument goes, often plays exactly this role. It becomes a refusal to remain with reality as it is. A graceful swan dive over the abyss into a softer-looking future, while the present, with its actual crises and actual structures and actual people suffering inside them, continues largely unattended.

This is not the same as saying that all visions of the future are foolish, or that imagination is a crime. The argument is sharper than that. It is that when hope becomes a promise of rescue, when it allows us to evade the severity of the present, it disables the kind of lucid and courageous action that reality is actually demanding. It teaches us to look away from the fire while speaking tenderly about dawn. And once hope is structured this way, despair follows close behind, because the two are not opposites in any meaningful sense. They belong to the same psychological architecture. Both are fixated on imagined futures rather than present conditions. Hope says salvation is coming. Despair says doom is inevitable. But both can detach us from action in the present. If hope makes us wait, despair makes us collapse. Either way, the present is abandoned, and nothing actually changes except perhaps the ambient emotional temperature of the conversation.

Here is where the scam becomes clearest. Hope and despair are roommates, not rivals. Both obsessed with futures, both useless in the present, both giving you an excellent excuse to not do the hard thing right now. The hope-despair binary is not a spectrum. It is a cul-de-sac. And a particularly effective one, because it presents itself as exhaustive. Either you have hope or you are in despair, and either way you are oriented away from the present moment where the actual work of transformation has to happen. The entire binary needs to be rejected, not navigated.

This is where the argument becomes especially relevant for education, and especially awkward for the people running it. In mainstream discourse, young people are frequently described as needing hope. Educators worry, understandably, genuinely , that too much exposure to climate science, political deterioration, collapse dynamics, and ecological overshoot will produce anxiety or hopelessness. So the instinct is to soften the truth with optimism, to balance every difficult fact with an inspiring counterexample, to send students home with their sense of a manageable future intact. But telling young people to be hopeful may actually be a form of gaslighting when the evidence before them points in a different direction with considerable persistence. Many young people already understand, with uncomfortable clarity, that the future promised to them is unstable, overheated, unequal, and politically fragile. To insist that they remain hopeful can sound less like care and more like condescension, or worse, like being asked to perform wellness for the comfort of adults who helped create the situation.

There is a moral dimension here that gets overlooked. Consider who actually gets to afford hope. Comfort is not evenly distributed. Hope is considerably easier to sustain when you live in relative safety, with clean water, functioning cooling systems, secure housing, and enough insulation from direct catastrophe that the future still feels like an open question rather than a closed one. It is harder, perhaps structurally impossible, for those already living inside disaster, through colonization, displacement, poverty, war, or ecological destruction already underway. This is where the critique of hope becomes a critique of privilege. Hope is often preached most loudly by those least exposed to collapse. It is prescribed most insistently to people whose present is already catastrophic, while being optional for people whose present is quite comfortable.

And we must remember that, the most politically useful thing you can do for a broken system is tell its victims to stay hopeful.

This leads to the deepest and most politically charged claim in the whole argument: hope can colonize the mind. That phrase deserves to be taken seriously. It means that hope can train people to orient themselves toward futures designed by the same systems that have dispossessed them. It becomes a psychological discipline through which colonized, marginalized, racialized, and working-class people are told to endure violence today in exchange for promises tomorrow. Hope, in this context, is not innocent. It is historical. It has been used to pacify. To defer justice. To make exploitation bearable enough to continue. To make waiting seem noble rather than strategic on someone else’s part. Hope says: your turn will come. Just not yet. Keep waiting. Keep believing. Keep behaving. This is colonization at the level of consciousness, and it is no less effective for being invisible.

Colonization, after all, is never only about land. It is also about time, imagination, and subjectivity. It is about controlling what people believe is possible, and equally importantly, what they believe is theirs to demand. If people can be trained to hope within the coordinates of the existing order, to imagine only the futures the system is willing to offer, then something remarkable has been accomplished without a single law being passed. You have enclosed their political imagination without a visible fence post. They will wait. They will believe. They will keep behaving. And the machine keeps running, freshly repainted in optimistic colours, deploying language about partnership and progress and ambitious targets while the structural causes of catastrophe remain comprehensively untouched.

This critique extends directly to contemporary sustainability discourse, which is worth sitting with for a moment. Green growth rhetoric is a masterclass in hope-as-delay. It sounds hopeful. It uses words like transition, innovation, ambition, net zero, and circular economy with the confidence of people who believe that renaming a process constitutes changing it. It promises transformation while quietly declining to engage with any of the structural logic driving ecological destruction. It is the rhetoric of maintaining the machine while repainting it green. Hope, here, acts as a lubricant for denial. It allows institutions to celebrate ambition in press releases while avoiding the implications of planetary limits in boardrooms. It is hope as the pleasant smell coming from the exhaust pipe.

This argument is strengthened by contrasting Western future-oriented panic with Indigenous perspectives that already understand apocalypse not as an approaching event but as an ongoing condition. For many Indigenous communities, colonization itself was apocalyptic. The end of a world has already happened. From that standpoint, mainstream calls for hope can sound absurdly naive, or worse, cruelly selective. They presume that catastrophe is new, that it is exceptional, that it represents a deviation from a history that was otherwise going rather well. For many people, it is inherited. It is structural. It is Tuesday. The idea that hope is universally ethical, universally appropriate, or universally available does not survive contact with this reality. And I would argue that hope as a strategy is the most socially acceptable form of gaslighting​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​.

So what is actually proposed instead? Not nihilism. Nobody is suggesting you sit in a darkened room composing a comprehensive list of everything that’s doomed while refusing to engage with material reality. The alternative is something both simpler and considerably more demanding: a hope-less revolution. That phrase matters. It does not mean a revolution without care, meaning, or commitment. It means a revolution freed from the fantasy that things will improve simply because we wish them to, or because history has some predetermined arc toward justice that just needs a bit more patience to complete. It means learning to act without the guarantee of success. To remain ethically and politically awake without requiring the narcotic of optimism as a precondition.

This is a far more demanding vision of human agency, and a considerably less comfortable one to package. Instead of hope, what is offered is solidarity, ecological worldview, systems thinking, and what is almost mischievously called do-what-you-can-ism. That phrase could sound embarrassingly modest. It isn’t. It names a discipline of lucid action. You do not act because history is guaranteed to bend toward justice. You do not act because you are confident of victory or because you have calculated a positive expected outcome. You act because reality demands response. Because injustice is intolerable right now. Because ecological destruction is real right now. Because other people are suffering right now. Because meaning is made in the act itself, not postponed to some future vindication you may or may not live to see.

Strip away the obligation to sound hopeful, and something surprising happens: education gets honest. Young people, who already mostly know that the future sold to them is overheated, unequal, and politically precarious , can be taught to understand systems, limits, interdependence, and power rather than being gently gaslit into cheerfulness. They can be introduced to degrowth, decolonization, ecological democracy, and other frameworks that actually challenge the assumptions of endless growth and human supremacy rather than accommodating them in softer language. They can be invited into solidarity rather than false reassurance. They can learn that meaning does not depend on certainty, that action does not require hope, and that responsibility does not wait for emotional comfort to arrive before it becomes operative.

There is something almost cleansing in that position. It refuses both sentimental optimism and melodramatic collapse. It asks us to grow up, politically and philosophically. To stop confusing emotional uplift with ethical clarity. To stop treating hope as sacred simply because it sounds kind and makes everyone in the room feel slightly better for approximately forty minutes. What makes this argument so compelling is that it dares to say what many people feel but rarely articulate in polite company: that hope, in the wrong hands and under the wrong conditions, is a trap. It can keep us obedient. It can keep us distracted. It can keep us waiting for futures that the present is actively foreclosing while we maintain an appropriate attitude of optimism about the process. And if that is true, then one of the most radical acts in education, and perhaps in politics, and perhaps in life , may be to stop teaching hope as a virtue and start teaching lucidity, courage, and collective responsibility instead.

Not because the future is guaranteed. Precisely because it is not. That is the unsettling gift this argument leaves you with. It replaces a comfortable question, what do you believe will happen? with a considerably more serious one: what will you do now, without illusion? And if that question is more frightening than hope, it is also more honest. And perhaps, in the end, more useful.

Source: Thornton, S., Stratford, R. and Louverdis, E. (2026) ‘The obscenity of hope: Educating young people in the Anthropocene’, Ethics and Education. doi:10.1080/17449642.2026.2645852.