“I'm scared”: the conversation nobody wants to have

Dear friends,

it’s day 2 after a horrific attack on Berlin Pride. One person died, many are injured. I was at the event with a date, but we luckily left the event a while before the attack. We’re fine. Queer life isn’t. It is under attack, and I’m terribly afraid. I’ve you’ve been in the unfortunate position to have a debate-fight about this with me in the past few years, you may have felt that I was being impatient, abrasive and arrogant. And while these are all indeed real flaws in my character, in no small part connected to the mountain of privilege I live on in spite of my economic precarity: I was indeed impatient, because I was, and am, afraid. Take Pride marches: Saturday’s attack was deadly, it was carried out by an islamist, and is as such actually unusual - most anti-queer violence in Germany is perpetrated from the hard right, and ever more Pride marches are met with (usually small, but growing) fascist counterdemonstrations and threats.

So: I’m scared. I’m also scared of losing access to my HIV meds, like millions in subsaharan Africa, and tens of thousands in the US. I’m scared of many things, so I’ve written a second book, entitely “Together against fear: prepping together for collapse”. I’m posting the introduction here today, since… it just seemed to fit.

With somewhat frightened greetings,

Tadzio

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I finance most of my political work by way of this blog, and would be grateful for your support

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“I'm scared”: the conversation nobody wants to have

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do all who live to see such times," said Gandalf. "But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring

I'm scared.

It's not easy to admit that so openly: but my work, my political work, which used to be my vocation and my hobby, my pastime, my livelihood and the meaning of my life, "politics" now scare me. The whole damned world scares me; thinking about the world isn't "interesting" any more, it actively puts me in a bad mood. Although I've been a daily newspaper reader for about as long as I've been able to read, there are now days — Sundays, bank holidays, days of rest — when I resolve not to so much as glance at a single newspaper website, because I know: it'll drag me down, I'll end up reading about catastrophes, genocides and the queerphobic power fantasies of fascist assholes... I'd rather skip it; it's emotionally more relaxing to consume my beloved Stephen King horror novels instead. At least there, sometimes, there are still heroes who can defeat the monsters. The real world nowadays is one where the heroes have lost: Sauron has the Ring, Luke and Leia are in the Emperor's hands, and in the next Robin Hood movie adaptation the erstwhile hero of the common folk in the rich world is now a psychopathic murderer and rapist. Only a fool would think this isn't about more than just Robin Hood.

I'm scared of the future.

It wasn't always like this, because despite being a “commie eco faggot”, I am, first and foremost, a fairly privileged, bourgeois (albeit half-migrant, but white-passing) cis man, and as such the world didn't, until recently, really have to frighten me. Until not so very long ago, until the end of the last decade, I was certain, on some deep psychological level — "knew," in a way that was probably more faith than actual knowledge — that the future would be good, or at least: could be good. What exactly "good" meant, whether it was about "fully automated luxury communism" or global climate justice or "the good life for everyone" or simply "a good life and a pleasant old age for my husband and me," wasn't really the point; in any case, I was convinced that a "good" future for everyone in the world was possible.

Of course I knew — anticapitalism and all that — that there were a few rather weighty problems to be cleared out of the way on the road to the good life for everyone, capitalism chief among them, the many looming global environmental crises, and of course the fascists, who already last decade, were crawling out from under their rocks and out of their rotting tree-stumps ever faster and in ever greater numbers. And I was certainly afraid of these developments, of these confrontations, I was deeply worried — but in my head there was always something that enabled me deal with these fears: social movement. An anti-capitalist movement against capitalism. An antifascist movement against fascism. A climate movement against climate collapse. Sure, it didn't necessarily look like we were about to win against these opponents in the short term, but in the long term...? Without really understanding back then why I was so sure of it, I was simply certain that in the long run we would somehow win. Because... it had to be that way. “History” had promised us as much, hadn't it? The iconic German leftist Band Ton Steine Scherben once promised in a song that is still belted out at lefty marches: “Die letzte Schlacht gewinnen wir. Wir!” (The final battle will be won by us. By us!”)

But "the movements" didn't win: the final battle never came, and the many second-, third- and fourth-to-last battles that are currently under way don't look particularly good for the progressive side — the left, the greens, the remaining humanist centre. And instead of moving, a bit jerkily, two steps forward, one step back, towards a good, enlightened, liberated world for everyone, we're moving in great strides towards something nobody really wants to think about. Towards collapse.

I'm scared of collapse. Terrified, really — a panicky, initially paralysing, soul-devouring fear. Fear of climate collapse, of the collapse of other global ecological systems ("crossing planetary boundaries"), and of the societal "collapses" that will come with them. Fear of growing societal irrationality and "assholification" — that is, a hardening of the performative, shameless politics of malice towards "minorities" and towards those who give the relatively privileged majority a guilty conscience: trans people, for instance, migrants, Gaza-solidarity demonstrators, climate activists... In headlines like the one I'm looking at right now in the Guardian: "'Witch-hunt' in Niger: military regime cracks down on LGBTQ+ population. Fears of a resurgence of HIV/Aids due to lack of access to PrEP medication..." barely raise an eyebrow any more, because attacks on queer rights, and likewise on medication access for marginalised groups, have become standard fare in the right-wing offensive.

(Oh, and in between writing this text in German, and translating it into English, someone drove a car into the Berlin Pride Party, killed one person, wounded others, my date and I had gone home earlier to... well, we'd left earlier, so we were safe, but the shock waves still resonate)

I'm afraid of a future in which heatwaves, floods and famines aren't exceptions, temporary breakdowns of chaos into a normality that will soon re-establish itself — but one in which catastrophe becomes the normal state of affairs, the new normal. And I'm afraid of myself within this future of permanent catastrophe: who will I be, when shit gets really serious? My German grandparents certainly didn't respond too well their time came acount.

Tear down that (fourth) wall!

I'm scared. Really, really scared. So much so that I have to admit my political outlook is currently, above all, driven by fear: by my wish, my need, to deal with these fears, to make them manageable, to avoid being completely paralysed by them. I believe — no, I'm certain — that I'm not alone with these fears, not alone in feeling that a genuinely very dark future is coming towards us, that at bottom there's nothing we can do to avert it. And fear isn't the only thing we have in common... Hang on: "we"? Who exactly is this "we," if I may ask?

Pardon the unsolicited collectivising and the direct address. I know one doesn't usually do that in political books, addressing readers directly — it's even a bit presumptuous, what do I really know about who you are? — but this book is going to deal with some genuinely difficult subjects, subjects we'd rather avoid thinking and talking about. In almost thirty years of political communication I've found that directly addressing people makes it easier to think about difficult subjects, precisely because it addresses us directly, and so makes it harder to personally opt out of the topic, to shift its contents onto a "that's interesting information, but it's got nothing to do with me" plane.

And I want to call on us — everyone reading this book, hearing about it, holding it in their hands — to think about things we need to think about, but which, so far, we don't do nearly enough. We need to talk about ecological and societal collapse, and about how we prepare ourselves for it: we need to make plans, contingency plans, for a catastrophic future that we know is coming, but for which we aren't really preparing. Most of us — with very few exceptions, and if you're one of them: kudos, I mean it! — avoid this conversation in most cases, and I want you not to avoid it. It's often no fun, but it's absolutely necessary, and if you'll trust me enough to follow the story I'm telling here, I promise you there will also be things that are inspiring and encouraging.

This book, then, has no "fourth wall," as it's known in the film business — the wall behind which the audience sits. This book is an attempt to have a conversation we otherwise avoid, so it will keep taking the form of a conversation. Between me and you. You're there in the room with me while I write, partly because I want to talk to you about feelings, and speaking about one's own feelings into an empty room doesn't feel good. It's much more comfortable for me to imagine you're in the room with me. And if you feel addressed by one of the "we"/"you" pronouns, great. If not, then not. I leave that entirely up to your own sovereign judgement.

Speaking of "the film business", that brings us straight to pop culture: this book contains roughly as many references to TV series, films and pop songs as it does to history and theory books. That's not accidental, because much of what's discussed in this book isn't only about what "is," but about how we think about it: about what Gramsci called society's "common sense", which usually expresses itself more directly and more universally in pop culture than in a theory book. And not least, we like to shift discussion of difficult political and societal topics into pop culture, mainly because it hurts less there: interestingly enough, even in our societies of denial there's a place where "collapse" is discussed endlessly. Just look at the cinemas, at Netflix, at the fiction shelves of your local bookshop: we've long sensed that things are coming to an end, otherwise there wouldn't be at least three successful television series from recent years in which people live in bunkers underground (Silo, Fallout, Paradise). Or the world-saving film Project Hail Mary, or, or, or. We sense what's going on, and then express it through pop culture. More honestly and more eloquently than in most of our political discourse.

Common ground

Where was I? Right: fear is, if I'm not entirely mistaken, not the only thing we have in common when we think about the future. We also ask ourselves what we'll do in this far more dangerous, more catastrophic, more inhumane future, how we'll behave. One of the many reasons we so frequently suppress thoughts about the future is that we don't know how to think about it in a way that's simultaneously realistic and — if not hopeful, then at least not merely despairing. How we can find inspiration and meaning in thinking about the future. Can "utopia" even function within collapse?

That's why this book is about fear of and within collapse, about unspoken, suppressed feelings that are sanctioned in public discourse, but also about other "negative" feelings such as guilt and shame. It's a book against the toxic positivity of progressive discourse in Germany, because, dear readers: things are looking pretty shite, they're not gonna get better, and telling ourselves that they will definitely soon get much better doesn't help either — however much we like to do it, and however good it feels. I'll go on a great deal, and at length, about fear and darkness, about everything that's going to change, about what that does to us, and about the fact that both of those things look, at first, pretty dreadful. It's going to be about that because it matters that we have these conversations with one another, that we prepare ourselves mentally for the fact that this is how it's going to go. Because telling ourselves comforting stories about the future — as the prominent climate journalist does, whom I'm currently arguing with on social media, who likes to tell the fairy tale of Norway as an eco-model nation, while just as happily leaving out the fact that Norway is in fact a fossil-fuel superpower — is, sadly, politically counterproductive. Rather than motivating people towards "transformative action" through "positive stories," positive stories confirm to a society of denial that it can carry on as before, confirm, at least, that someone will still save us: Obama! Merkel! Norway! The Communist Party of China! Jürgen Klopp!

I'm not invoking these negative feelings to trigger defensiveness; I'm addressing them because there's considerable power in jointly acknowledging feelings that have so far been repressed or denied, or at least left unspoken. We know this from the experience of queer people ("coming out"), and, for instance, from the "consciousness-raising circles" of the second wave of the women's movement in the 1960s and 70s. And that's why the "emotional" part of this book is also about my feelings and experiences and fears — not those of other, generally less privileged subjects: my fears, those of a white gay cis man in Germany, will be different from those of a white cishet woman in Germany, will be different from those of a POC in queer Germany, will be different from... The magic of collective storytelling doesn't lie in one storyteller telling a shared story for everyone, but in everyone telling their own story (more on that in the closing chapter). That's where the power to create common ground lies.

The second part of my story, then, is about how I deal with my negative feelings, how I work through them and, at best, get them under control: the second part of the story is about "collapse movement-building." In conversation with my therapist, I realised that the rather frenetic pace of my work since 2023, helping to build a movement of solidarity around collapse, is also rooted in the fact that I've found a way, through it, to deal with my considerable fears about the future. And this book is, among other things, testing the communicative hypothesis that talking to you about my fears for the future will trigger emotional resonances that will then allow us to talk to one another about collapse in a relatively rational way, and about how we can develop collective, “solidaristic” agency within it. (side note: the English language sadly lacks an adjective for “solidarity”, so I'm just gonna use “solidaristic”, knowing full well it's not an actual word)

This book, then, is also about developing collective, solidaristic agency: against fear, against fascism, against the injustice that keeps escalating within collapse — developing a politics of solidarity for collapse.

Weird structure

Even in the best case — when everyone involved plays by the rules of intellectual honesty instead of actively denying reality — collapse communication is a constant attempt to anticipate and steer around psychological defence reflexes, in others and in oneself. Every conversation about collapse is a difficult conversation.

I want to talk about ecological and societal collapse, and I know from bitter personal experience that most of us would rather not have this conversation. That's why this isn't a "normal" political book: it wants to talk to people who, on the global average, are very likely privileged — if you're holding this book, we very probably both belong to the top ten per cent of global consumers who are "disproportionately responsible for breaching planetary boundaries and causing harm whose costs are borne by society as a whole" — about a societal demise that is at once unavoidable and yet somehow jointly self-inflicted, and therefore laden with fear, guilt and shame. That's about as easy and pleasant as talking to a heavy smoker about her almost-certainly-imminent death from advanced lung cancer. Not only has the heavy smoker, who's known for at least fifty years that she really ought to quit, but is too addicted, and simply enjoys smoking too much — not only is she terrified of the slow, cruel death that lung cancer causes; she also somehow feels guilty for her own death, and ashamed that she carried on puffing away against her better judgement, no matter how many studies and articles proved that smoking is deadly.

Having the "collapse conversation" is, in most cases and with most people, genuinely about as possible as persuading someone to go to therapy who believes all this psychobabble is just woke-feminist nonsense. And yet here this book is, in front of you, some 200-odd pages about collapse: about why it's so hard to talk about how it feels, what it is, and above all, how we can become jointly, solidaristically capable of acting within it. This book is the attempt of a person who has spent nearly twenty years engaging in strategic political communication on capitalism, climate and collapse (alright, for a few years it was also about gay sex and crystal meth, but that's another story), who had some successes with it, but who in the end hit such a wall that he lost his job, fell into a depression, and very nearly killed himself with drugs in the Berlin party scene — to communicate about collapse with you anyway, to talk with a society about its coming death, a society that doesn't want to have this conversation.

So in thinking about the structure of this book, I not only had to develop a political-intellectual argument, I also had to build it in such a way that it could get around the many traps of denial that our society of denial has built between itself and a rational discourse on collapse — traps that turn up in all our heads, too. If it strikes you as a slightly odd structure in places: that's why. It isn't a "normal" political conversation; it's a mixture of political debate, group-therapy session and movement-strategy agitprop. So if, in what follows, you get the impression that you don't quite know where things are heading — trust me, in this book it's always heading towards joint, solidaristic agency. Within a collapsing future, sure, but one we're preparing for together, and through this shared preparation — even though it will never be complete — we can also fight for, and sometimes experience, community, meaning, and occasionally even success and a sense of our own agency.

This is a book for everyone who, faced with the question "who do I want to be when the catastrophe comes?", wants to answer: I want to be one of those who can help themselves and others, so that even in future, despite collapse, catastrophe and fascism, there can still be spaces of the good life, of love, of solidarity, of light and of warmth.