“There is infinite hope. But not for us.” Did Franz Kafka have humanity, the International of the Desperate, or merely his own life in mind with this remark—a life he also understood as “standing march” with no chance for progress? In any case, to many the situation seems hopeless today. “We Iranians plunged into utter hopelessness,” writer Navid Kerman recently commented on the political situation. Such reports of crisis are accompanied by the apocalyptic background noise of doomscrolling. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for example, claims that Vladimir Putin began World War III long ago. The climate crisis isn’t taking a break either, just because hardly anyone is talking about it anymore in the face of the wars.

If tipping points—that is, decisive and irreversible thresholds on the path to the abyss—had already been crossed and the world were inevitably heading toward a disastrous future, it would be all too understandable to actually abandon all hope. But—fortunately—there is no such certainty. Nevertheless, a hate-filled, right-wing attitude is flourishing that manages without hope, because resentment and the invocation of enmities suffice as its vision of the future. Eva von Redeker describes the underlying motive of the new fascism as a craving for harshness that presents itself as serenity. Unbothered by pesky facts and other signs of civilization’s decline—such as the “suicidal empathy” described by technoclown-king Elon Musk—they want to rebuild the world that has fallen apart into something it never should have been: led by white masters who dispose of women, people of color, and other underprivileged groups just as they would other resources from the fossil fuel era. MAGA is everywhere, even in Austria. The gloomy and, strictly speaking, hopeless promise of this authoritarian turn to all those who feel their claims to power have been amputated brings together both consciously formulated and unconscious desires—including those that seek to make life more difficult or to destroy it. In the process, the “passion for the new” is stifled. This is how the philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes the spirit of hope. The literary scholar Terry Eagleton refers to it as an open-ended “rift in the present”; Paulus called it a “path through the curtain.” The then-Czech dissident and later Prime Minister Václav Havel understood it in 1985 as “the certainty that something makes sense—no matter how it turns out.” The philosopher Gabriel Marcel encourages his readers: “It may well be that everything is lost, but we are not.”

Such resilience requires no optimism. Whether it comes across as naive or serene, welcome or perhaps merely worthy of discussion, hope makes us receptive to a future that values the possible over the probable. It need not be able to specify exactly what its positive purpose is. But it does presuppose an existential experience of negativity, in which it begins to take root in the first place. The happy do not need to hope; the unhappy often have little else left. “The deeper the despair, the more intense the hope,” writes Byung-Chul Han. The Austrian writer Sama Maani can confirm this. He is originally from Iran and has recently published a new novel in which, not for the first time, he transforms his hopes for the subversion of the status quo into ludicrous wordplay and thought experiments. His hope for the regime’s downfall has been dashed yet again. And yet he refuses to be discouraged: “Like the majority of people in Iran, I am always desperate whenever signs multiply that the U.S. might come to terms with the Islamic Republic, allowing the regime to survive and take revenge on its own people.

Must one block out certain aspects of reality in order to move forward or find hope again in deadlocked situations? Naivety is not necessarily an obstacle when it comes to making one’s wishes come true. It was naive to hope for, or even expect, the fall of the Berlin Wall without a single shot being fired, and yet that is exactly what happened. Conversely, it was not naive when the people of Iran—who had been disappointed so many times before—took to the streets once again in January, hoping for Trump’s support; yet the resistance ended in a bloodbath and intensified repression. In light of this tragedy and the bombs being sent by the U.S. instead of the promised aid, a mood of resignation and disillusionment is now evident—though it could soon shift again. For hope is kindled time and again. It is the glimmer of an emergency exit from the darkness, without whose fatal grip it could not appear as a light of such stark contrast.

According to the biblical view, God’s people are called to journey through this earthly valley of tears and await salvation in the hereafter. Christian hope is thus also directed toward a future that, however, seems as intangible as a doctrine of salvation from the coming dawn. But unlike revolutionary or futuristic hopes, which are sometimes outlined in quite concrete terms, it appears to be unformable and indeterminable, since fate lies in God’s hands and not in the hands of the faithful. The unquestionably passivizing dimension of religious hope has led provocative disillusionment experts like the star author Michel Houellebecq to discredit hope as the original sin of Christianity. The playwright Euripides had already sided with him a few centuries earlier and, from the perspective of tragic thought, denounced hope as a plague upon humanity. Hope, they argue, would seduce people into the illusion of a power to act that is not theirs to claim. 

Hope, so goes a standard accusation from the left—drawn from critiques of religion and ideology—is to be understood not so much as a presumption about fate, but as an ideological glue for stabilizing the status quo. Like the religion on which it is founded, it is something like opium for the people. A false illusion that clouds awareness of the present and hinders logical action for the future.

In a recent book, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, continuing this line of criticism, logically grounds his political interventions against neoliberalism and other ideological foes in a “courage to embrace hopelessness.” He argues that hope—which is paralyzing and fails to inspire political thought and action—must finally be discarded. Only once freed from it can fundamental change be set in motion. Žižek draws the possible (and thus, once again, the hopeful) not from belief in something, but from the void of nihilism. He sings the praises of a (paradoxical-seeming) Christian atheism, which he argues was founded by the community of those abandoned by God after Jesus’ death and which brought the radical personal responsibility of free Christians into the world. With this interpretation of Christianity as a community abandoned by God, Žižek finds himself in close association with Chino Amobi, a post-rap musician with Nigerian roots based in Texas. On his latest album, *Eroica II: Christian Nihilism*, Amobi seeks to express the chaos in a world devoid of any hope. He celebrates the joy of spiritually grounded sound and commits himself to an enigmatic, transcendent faith beyond any real, political glimmers of hope. His adaptation of Leonard Cohen’s song “You Want It Darker” goes: “God don’t care about the White House, come through the dark like a lighthouse.”

Stoic teachings on behavior, too, advise against—much like the supposedly comforting self-poisoning of the notoriously disappointed—speculating on concrete improvements, and recommend scaling back the ego’s expectations, hoping for nothing, and instead practicing serenity and fortitude like prisoners sentenced to death. In the therapist’s office, the truth must first come to light; hope must sometimes be swept off the table or off the couch. Perhaps it may return to the mind later. 

In any case, hardly anyone believes anymore in a universal principle of hope, as Ernst Bloch formulated it from a Marxist perspective. The unease with the idea of a general utopian potential in society is also fueled by the sobering experiences within a capitalist order that has translated the otherworldly waiting for salvation into down-to-earth solutions through money. In 1931, James Truslow Adam formulated the famous phrase “the American Dream,” which promised the ascent from the vale of tears of the dishwasher to the kingdom of heaven of the millionaire. “Yes we can”: Despite the ever-widening gap between rich and poor in the U.S., and also in Austria, this credo continues to hold great appeal. The American Dream is unquestionably a deceptive hope. It has always applied to only a few, and today to fewer than ever.

Most hopes have been and continue to be dashed, whether in election promises, job interviews, on dating platforms, or in influencer dreams. This is obvious, yet it is often forgotten. This inevitable disillusionment frequently leads to outbursts of anger and pent-up rage, as sociologist Eva Illouz points out. 

Terry Eagleton regards the American Dream—the flashing of white teeth across the United States—as a state ideology that condemns pessimism, or ultimately realism, as un-American. Trumpism, however, shows that the relationship between whitewashing and demonization is more complex. MAGA does not merely signify mindless, perpetual optimism as always, but also claims that the U.S. was in ruins before the savior Trump arrived. Biden and Obama, it is argued, created the worst of all possible worlds; this is why we now find ourselves in an evangelically fueled final battle of good against evil. Nevertheless, there is an interesting aspect to the MAGA movement’s denunciation of the recent past—governed by Democrats—in the name of restoring an older and decidedly reactionary past. The past appears not to have passed. It returns with force as a neo-fascist return to a “phantom possession” (Eva von Redecker) that was actually lost long ago. Yet the past contains not only malevolent ghosts that refuse to vanish, but also unfulfilled progressive potentials that can nourish hopes for a future different from that calculated by techno-fascists or fantasized by conservative fundamentalists. Defending historical achievements such as abortion rights, labor unions, or peace policies will not suffice on its own; it is defensive and does not spark enthusiasm for the unimagined.  Conversely, however, one does not always have to reinvent everything only to fail all the more at this Herculean task. In the discourse on the multiple crises that have long accompanied us, the multiple hopes for a realignment of these crisis-ridden conditions have always been implicit. From memories and re-examinations of the past, critical reinterpretations can emerge that trigger actual change. 

In his book *Radical Hope*, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear describes a form of hope that is born in the midst of catastrophe. Crow Chief Plenty Coups serves as Lear’s witness to a hope that had to emerge at the moment of the abrupt collapse of a way of life defined largely by coexistence with free herds of buffalo. Here, radical hope refers to the existential question of whether indigenous peoples can overcome a cultural trauma—a question that lies beyond both a resignation to despair and an unfounded optimism. From the memory of destruction emerges a sense of how to deal with the wounds of the past in an empowering way. 

The artist Anton Kats proposes a similar path. In his performance *After Hope*, he recounts the fate of the cargo ship *Vishwa Asha* (Universal Hope), built in 1974 in the Ukrainian Dnipro Delta (then part of the Soviet Union). Amid today’s turmoil of war, the ghost ship is considered lost. It functions as a metaphor and a real point of reference, weaving through narratives that traverse time and people, exploring how hope can be rediscovered in times of seemingly endless war. In this case, it is the hope for a non-fascist life.

In Hungary, too, there is renewed hope for this. And in the rest of a Europe that will—hopefully—soon be emancipated from the U.S.