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“My hope is necessary, but it is not enough. Alone it does not win. But without it my struggle will be weak and wobbly. We need critical hope the way a fish needs unpolluted water” – Paulo Freire, 1994

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Wars, political and social division, mass extinction, and potentially world-upending climate change – collapse appears to us not as a distant possibility but a daily headline. In our age of seemingly all-encompassing crises – dubbed by some as the age of “polycrisis” – individual hazards aren’t easily isolated and contained. Climate change heightens the risk of pandemics, pandemics stifle economies, and unstable economies feed political unrest. Caught in this web of consequences, despair, defeatism, and cynicism may appear as the obvious responses – why hope for a bright future for humanity if we are barrelling toward interconnected and seemingly inescapable calamities?

If cynicism is the natural response, then being hopeful about the future might seem like little more than a palliative way to escape an uncomfortable reality that simultaneously obscures questions of responsibility and justice. At best, hopefulness for the future is a naïve outlook only possible from a point of privilege. At worst, if it is accompanied by complacency, it could itself be considered a contributing cause of crisis.

Hope for the future, it may seem, doesn’t have a lot going for it. In her book Cruel Optimism, the American cultural theorist Lauren Berlant underscores how hope can even turn cruel when the very things we desire become obstacles to our flourishing. Berlant uses the example of the ‘good life’ fantasy – a set of promises rooted in postwar American culture: upward mobility, job security, homeownership, and social equality. These ideals once offered a sense of direction and purpose. Today, Berlant argues, a dissonance has emerged between what people are encouraged to hope for and what the system is designed to deliver, or, perhaps more accurately, not designed to deliver. Indeed, a contributing cause of the pessimism that prevails across much of the Western world today is the sense that the best times are behind us – breaking with the notion widely held since the postwar period that each generation will be better off than the one that came before.

Beyond modern meritocratic narratives that conceal structural inequality, hope has also served to legitimise power throughout history. Take the Roman cult of Spes (Latin for ‘hope’), which sanctified imperial endurance by promoting the notion that Rome’s future – and its hope – were embodied in the emperor himself. Modern political sloganeering invokes rhetoric of hopeful progress as well, sometimes directly – hope and change – and other times as a deferred promise – make America great again – to keep citizens invested.

It’s important to ask when, why, and how hope is sustained – whether it enables complacency, gives us a false sense of security, or helps support political narratives. Yet hope is not only an instrument of power and illusion – when approached critically, and coupled with reflective action, hope can also be a powerful force for change.

The dictionary definition of the word wouldn’t necessarily suggest so. Merriam- Webster defines hope as to “cherish a desire with anticipation: to want something to happen or be true” – a somewhat passive feeling with no immediate invitation to agency. Yet a deeper understanding of the role hope plays in reaching for possible and desirable futures makes this connection between feeling and action clearer and highlights how hope for the future is tied to decisions and behaviour that help bring it about.

In The Principle of Hope, the philosopher Ernst Bloch argued that hope is not a naïve emotion or a passing mood, but a vital part of being human. It is the spark that lets us dream of what could be, and in doing so, it connects us to – and drives us to achieve – the not-yet-realised. Bloch lays out the countless ways in which we express and hide our hopes in our everyday lives through dreams and fairytales, sports, music, and love. Bloch even highlights the entanglement of hope and disappointment in a reinforcing cycle in which hope is perpetually frustrated. Cynics might take this as evidence that hope is pointless – why reach for what is destined to fail? For Bloch, disappointment is not the end of hope, but its engine; he believed in a militant form of hope, fuelled by the constant desire to transform the world in the face of failure.

21st century behavioural scientists, increasingly interested in assessing the attributes of wellbeing, generally agree with this perspective, defining hope as a cognitive process that enables individuals to recognise their goals and imagine concrete pathways toward their fulfilment, even in very unfavourable conditions. Neuroscience also supports the notion that hope is not mere fantasy. Rather, it is considered a biological rehearsal for action – the brain’s way of preparing us to persist toward the not-yet. Research has shown that feeling hopefulness causes the brain to release chemicals like dopamine, activating its reward systems and lighting up the same regions as when we anticipate achieving a goal – as if hope is a nudge from evolution itself telling us to keep going.

Hope also contributes to psychological resilience, helping people identify effective ways of coping with stressful life situations. A 2017 neurobiology study titled “Hope and the Brain” found that hope, a feeling linked specifically to the orbitofrontal cortex, shields the brain from the effects of anxiety and is associated with lower neuroticism and higher extraversion. On a community level, hope drives collective action and contributes to conflict resolution, strengthening social connections and encouraging conciliatory attitudes.

As it turns out, hope does in fact have a lot going for it. Considering the many ways in which it can be beneficial both to psychological health and as a motivating force in working towards personal and common goals, can a better understanding of the transformative potential of hope counteract feelings of defeatism in the face of crisis?

A source of inspiration may be found in Brazilian educator and theorist Paulo Freire’s concept of critical hope, which sees hope as meaningful when reflection is combined with action. Freire’s own life would have given him plenty of cause for cynicism. He was arrested, declared an enemy of the Brazilian people, and exiled to Chile following the 1964 coup by the military dictatorship, which saw despair about the future of the country become widespread. The coup, Freire believed, had ruined his country. Yet despite bearing witness to a profound social and historical trauma, he cautioned against both cynicism and complacency. Instead, he argued for an intentional, conscious, and engaged form of hopefulness to sustain people in their striving for justice under oppressive conditions.

Activist movements advocating for structural change – from indigenous land defenders to climate justice networks – have embraced a conception of hope similar to Freire’s. Black Lives Matter was described by one of its founders as rooted in grief and rage yet oriented toward vision and dreams. In her famous speech at the Youth4Climate summit in 2021, the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg spoke of the connection of hope and agency: “hope is not passive […] Hope is taking action.”

It should be a consolation to those inclined to despair that the future is created in a constant interplay of agency and structure – sometimes what is fixed and what is fluid is not immediately apparent to us. As Paulo Feire knew well, history does not have endpoints. There are moments in time when change seems impossible but emerges unexpectedly; the French Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of Apartheid are all reminders that social transformation – whatever its eventual outcome – often begins in acts of collective, critical hope. Even if these historic events seemed impossible prior to their eruption, they did not arise out of nowhere. The French Revolution was preceded by decades of Enlightenment thought, clandestine assemblies, and the quiet circulation of radical ideas about equality and freedom. The fall of the Berlin Wall, often remembered as a sudden event, was in fact the culmination of years of hidden dissent, mutual support, and cross-border solidarity cultivated through underground presses, churches, and civic groups. Contemporary movements, such as the 2025 Moroccan Gen Z 212 protests, emerge from these same subterranean channels, where grief, anxiety, and longing for justice coalesce into collective energy.

In Hope in the Dark, the historian Rebecca Solnit applies a down-to-earth metaphor to illustrate this dynamic: “After a rain, mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a sometimes-vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms, mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but less visible longterm organising and groundwork – or underground work – often laid the foundation.”

Like the slow work of roots beneath the surface, such shifts in consciousness grow through dispersed and often invisible labour, across writing, education, activism, and everyday dialogues, until they quietly remake the ground of what is thinkable and just. In this sense, the polycrisis does not simply mark an age of collapse, but also of possibilities arising in its ruptures. When the familiar order falters, assumptions can be questioned, priorities re-examined, and new forms of solidarity imagined.

This is not an invitation to despair, but to embrace the in-betweenness of staying with the trouble, which, in the words of multispecies feminist theorist Donna Haraway, “requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or endemic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings”. Hope, understood critically, is not a project of rescuing modernity from the polycrisis but one of learning to live with others amid it – of inhabiting crisis rather than denying it.

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