The evidence that hope survives
I have lived for years with two apparently incompatible assessments of humanity. One is marked by a profound distrust of what human beings will tolerate, rationalise, imitate and inflict upon each other. The other is an almost unreasonable conviction that we remain capable of becoming considerably better than we are. Neither feeling is ornamental. Each is a serious response to the evidence of life, and each is capable of becoming overwhelming. I have come to think of myself as roughly fifty per cent misanthrope and fifty per cent optimist. The proportions are figurative, but the internal division is real. I love people, and I am frequently appalled by humanity. I believe in our capacities, and I am dismayed by the uses to which we put them. For more than a decade I have had a word for this position: misanthroptimist. What began as an absurdly specific title for an imagined show has gradually become an accurate description of my adult life.
Today, unusually, the optimistic half has some rather public evidence on its side. In the United States, the November 2026 midterm elections have produced what commentators are calling a blue wave, even a blue tsunami. Reporting from Reuters and the Associated Press indicates that Democrats have won control of both houses of Congress, after extraordinary swings against the governing Republican Party [1]. I do not mistake an election result for a collective moral conversion. The electorate is neither a single mind nor a single conscience, and voters can reach the same destination for contradictory reasons. Nevertheless, the result is evidence that a direction of travel can be contested, that apparently fixed political circumstances can change, and that institutions still leave some room for collective correction. After the dismay I felt in November 2024, the distinction is emotionally considerable.
There is a small and revealing detail in how I learned about the result. My wife told me. I had not seen it in a feed, because I no longer organise my attention around feeds. The news arrived through a person I love, in the ordinary course of domestic life. It was almost quaint: news passing between two human beings, without an algorithm trying to calculate my reaction, prolong my engagement or select the next outrage. That form of arrival made the event feel better. It belonged first to our conversation, rather than to a platform's system for extracting attention. I was able to receive a piece of hopeful news without submitting myself to an endless machinery of emotional provocation. The experience was a small enactment of the kind of society I wish we could recover.
I am often reluctant to write directly about party politics. Partisanship tends to narrow every argument until a complex social question has been reduced to badges, teams and the personalities of political leaders. Yet politics is inseparable from what I think of, metaphorically, as the greater Gaia spirit: the condition of the living planet and the moral condition of the species residing upon it. Governments make decisions about bodies, borders, hospitals, families, languages, land, water, violence and the future. Elections reveal something about what communities fear, what they accept and what they are willing to change. Political outcomes are therefore symptoms of a wider human ecology, although imperfect ones. An election does not tell us everything about a civilisation's soul, but it tells us something about the arrangements a sufficient number of people have chosen to sustain or interrupt.
I first played with this contradiction around 2013, during my Eclectic Content Network period, when I was inventing projects with the extravagant confidence of someone for whom a title could already imply a fully realised programme. Among those ideas was The Misanthroptimist Show. I describe this early history from my own recollection, rather than pretending that every ephemeral project from that period has survived in an accessible public archive. The name endured beyond the show. In June 2026, writing about my MISCELLABRA apparel designs, I described the Misanthroptimist shirt: a solemn seal in icy water, a creature that appears to have seen enough of civilisation to be suspicious of it, but retains a strange tenderness [2]. The garment carries a sentence about a world of equal parts good and evil. Its little animal prophet understands the mood perfectly.
The word is formed by asking misanthropy to make room for optimism. It begins in suspicion and ends in possibility. The intrusion of the optimistic syllables changes the direction of the whole expression, as though a grim diagnosis were being overtaken by a final refusal to surrender. I do not mean that the human population literally divides into equal quantities of goodness and evil. Such an account would be impossible to measure, and the moral lives of actual people refuse such neat partition. Fifty-fifty describes the tension of my own response. There are mornings when I think the species has forfeited every claim to maturity; there are evenings when a stranger's kindness, an artistic achievement or a conversation with my wife makes the opposite conclusion feel equally defensible.
The philosophical question is whether these attitudes can coexist without cancelling each other. Psychology provides a useful distinction. C. R. Snyder's hope theory treats hope as a combination of imagined routes toward valued goals and the motivation to pursue them [3]. Hope, in this account, involves agency rather than a promise that events will turn out well. Albert Bandura's work on collective efficacy adds that groups are more likely to act when they believe coordinated action can have consequences [4]. These ideas permit a person to judge present conditions severely while preserving a disciplined belief in improvement. Disappointment can supply the diagnosis; hope can preserve the reason to work on the cure. Neither requires a falsified picture of the world.
This is also the relationship between misanthroptimism and my adjacent philosophy of hopelosophy, developed through MISCELLABRA's HYPELOSOPHY monkey [2]. That design argues, with deliberately cheerful arithmetic, that hoping for a good outcome gives the anticipatory portion of life value even when events ultimately disappoint. Misanthroptimism addresses a different problem: what to do when the object of hope is not a film, a trip, a creative project or an anticipated announcement, but the future conduct of the human race itself. The first philosophy asks why we should risk hoping. The second asks how we can keep hoping once we have seen so much that ought to make hope difficult. Their common principle is that uncertainty should not automatically be surrendered to despair.
The evidence that makes misanthropy reasonable
There are substantial reasons for my darker assessment. The result of the 2024 United States presidential election affected me more profoundly than previous elections. Donald Trump's return to the presidency was an established democratic result, confirmed through the electoral process [5]. For me, it also represented the public rehabilitation of conduct, rhetoric and political impulses I believed ought to have been repudiated. My dismay was not simply that millions of people disagreed with me about policy. It was that repeated exposure to cruelty, humiliation and contempt seemed to have diminished their power to disqualify a person from enormous authority. In such moments, the ordinary reassurance that history bends toward improvement feels difficult to defend. History has no automatic ethical mechanism. People can learn, and people can forget. Democracies can correct themselves, and they can consent to their own deterioration.
I have a particular revulsion toward the collective willingness to be manipulated. The human mind is extraordinarily capable of reason, empathy and independent judgment; it is also vulnerable to repetition, group allegiance, emotionally charged suggestion and incentives it barely recognises. We have built digital environments that exploit those vulnerabilities on an industrial scale. The research literature does not support the simplistic proposition that social media manufactures every bad political belief. It does, however, describe systems in which moralised and emotional material is especially capable of attracting attention, and where platforms can amplify outrage, social comparison and conflict [6]. The commercial architecture is not incidental. Capturing and monetising attention is part of the business model. In the process, people become audiences, measurements, demographic segments, targets and products of prediction.
Experimental and observational research helps explain how the machinery sustains itself. A 2021 study in Science Advances found that positive feedback for expressions of moral outrage increased the likelihood of later outrage, while social norms also shaped what users expressed [7]. This is not proof that every angry person has been engineered by an algorithm. Anger can be morally appropriate, and public exposure of abuse can protect people. It is evidence that reward systems can train the outward expression of indignation. When emotion is repeatedly rewarded for being visible, emphatic and shareable, one should not be surprised that the public sphere begins to resemble an endless competition in indignation. We become proficient at broadcasting moral identity while remaining uncertain how to practise moral responsibility.
A particularly grotesque example is the conversion of state coercion into social-media entertainment. Reporting has documented an increasingly elaborate United States immigration-enforcement publicity apparatus, including highly produced footage of arrests and deportations distributed through the language and conventions of popular internet content [8]. I find the video-game aesthetic profoundly disturbing. Images of real human beings being detained are not gameplay. Actual state violence, military action and death are not a trailer, a punchline or a spectacle offered for applause. Public servants have a duty to explain government activity transparently; they do not acquire a moral licence to turn another person's fear into promotional entertainment. That such representations can be produced, defended and consumed as ordinary content captures something deeply wrong with our media environment.
The deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January 2026 sharpen that feeling considerably. Both were United States citizens fatally shot during encounters involving federal immigration officers. Reporting by Reuters examined inconsistencies between official accounts and subsequently available evidence, while the Associated Press documented the involvement of two officers in the shooting of Pretti [9]. These were real people whose families were left with irreversible loss. The circumstances and accountability questions deserve careful, independent investigation, not immediate conversion into competing memes or automatic declarations of innocence and guilt. In a functioning public culture, the first response to an avoidable human death should be seriousness: an insistence on facts, law, restraint and the dignity of the dead.
The destruction inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza belongs to an even more devastating register of moral failure. In September 2025, a United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza [10]. The International Court of Justice has issued binding provisional measures in South Africa's case under the Genocide Convention, although, as of this writing, the Court has not delivered a final judgment on the merits of the genocide allegation [11]. These distinctions in legal process matter; so does the scale of human suffering. My moral outrage is directed at the government, leaders, armed forces and political ideologies responsible for abuses, including extremist forms of ethnonationalism, not at an entire people or religion. Collective guilt is part of the moral disease I am describing.
Israel is lovely. Jewish people are lovely. Palestine is lovely. Palestinians deserve safety, dignity, self-determination and an ordinary future. Israelis deserve safety and freedom from terror. Jewish communities everywhere deserve protection from antisemitism, just as Palestinians and Muslims deserve protection from dehumanisation and hatred. I want coexistence, reciprocal recognition, honest communication and the protection of every civilian life. The killing of civilians by Hamas and other armed groups cannot be justified; nor can atrocities or collective punishment carried out by a state. I reject the demand that compassion must be distributed according to allegiance. A civilised human community should be capable of sustaining several elementary truths simultaneously, without making one population's suffering a precondition for acknowledging another's.
At the same time, it would be intellectually lazy to conclude from these catastrophes that human beings are intrinsically monstrous. The people who document abuses, shelter neighbours, rescue the wounded, defend civil liberties, tell the truth at personal cost and refuse to inherit hatred are human beings too. Misanthropy often commits the analytical mistake of judging humanity exclusively by its worst institutions while treating its best impulses as exceptions. I know this temptation in myself. But the existence of a nurse caring for a stranger, or a journalist investigating the exercise of state power, matters every bit as much to any complete account of what our species is capable of. A genuine fifty-fifty philosophy cannot be constructed by selecting only one half of the evidence.
My withdrawal from algorithmic feeds is one small attempt to make that distinction more clearly. I am not withdrawing from knowledge or public life. I still read, investigate, converse, vote, create, work and care. I simply refuse the assumption that citizenship requires permanent exposure to an optimised procession of crises. The result is that I can take moral problems seriously without granting a commercial interface control of my nervous system. It also leaves room to notice a less theatrical reality: families caring for each other, people making beautiful things, neighbours doing their jobs well, and whole communities maintaining the civil arrangements upon which everyone else silently depends. These quiet forms of human decency rarely resemble an algorithm's definition of a compelling post. They are nevertheless the infrastructure of civilisation.
The eyes that return me to hope
Then I look at my daughter. She was born in February of this year, and the force of that event has reorganised my understanding of time. Before her, the future could remain an idea, a subject for essays, films, politics and occasional private anxiety. Now the future has a face, a breathing rhythm, a pair of eyes looking directly at me. I feel complete love when I look into them. The same species that builds humiliating spectacles, tolerates atrocities and converts attention into a commodity is capable of this astonishing vulnerability and trust. My daughter does not know what a political party is, what a feed is, what an ideology is or how many categories of person adults have invented to excuse their indifference. She knows warmth, care, hunger, voice, security, closeness and the gradual discovery of a world. These are not trivial foundations. They precede almost everything we later call civilisation.
I think of the rubber band: the possibility that a human history stretched painfully away from generosity, restraint and direct human connection might yet return toward them. A rubber band does not reverse history mechanically. No natural law guarantees moral correction. Societies improve only when people preserve what is worth preserving, abandon what harms others and build institutions that reward better behaviour. But an infant's existence changes the scale on which those decisions matter. It forces an encounter with consequences that extend beyond the current news cycle and beyond my own lifetime. Her future cannot be secured by my optimism alone. It can, however, be served by what I choose to model, to oppose and to create.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt treated natality, the fact that new human beings enter the world, as central to the human capacity for fresh beginnings and unforeseen action [12]. I find that idea more compelling now than I once might have. A birth does not erase an atrocity or cancel a political defeat. It introduces a person who has not yet decided what to make of the world. A new life is not a guarantee that humanity will improve; it is a new locus of freedom, imagination and relationship. My daughter's future is open in a way that no adult's accumulated record of disappointment can entirely close. I cannot know whether her generation will build a wiser civilisation. I can know that the possibility remains unfinished.
It would be sentimental to claim that parenthood automatically transforms people into guardians of the long-term future. A longitudinal study of more than 18,000 people in the United Kingdom found little general support for the assumption that becoming a parent by itself increases environmental concern or behaviour [13]. Love does not substitute for policy, understanding or effort. This finding makes my own feeling more demanding, rather than less meaningful. If I say that becoming a father has enlarged my concern for the human future, I ought to make that concern observable in decisions: in how I use my time, how I speak about other people, how I resist dehumanisation, what I teach by example and what kinds of cultural objects I leave behind.
I want her to inherit a world in which the ordinary human voice is valuable again, in which people can disagree without treating each other as disposable, and in which our enormous technical abilities are directed toward health, stewardship, education, beauty and freedom. I want her to discover things by curiosity rather than instruction from an engagement engine. I want her to know people in their full particularity, rather than as avatars of an argument. Such hopes can sound impossibly broad, so I return them to practical scale. They begin in the household, in the way one parent speaks to another, in whether attention is available when she needs it, in the example of an adult who can change his mind without humiliation and show compassion without first checking who deserves it.
Psychologist Maria Ojala's research on climate engagement draws a distinction between constructive sources of hope and optimism that merely reassures. Hope connected to pathways for action is more consistently associated with engagement than hope treated simply as a pleasant feeling [14]. This is the discipline my misanthroptimism needs. If I mean to believe in a better world, the belief should make me more useful to other people. It should increase my patience, my willingness to investigate, my standards of argument and my resistance to despair. Hope ought to enlarge my participation in reality, not protect me from seeing it.
The word misanthroptimist begins with misanthropy because dismay is an honest part of the story. I cannot unsee the suffering, the manipulations or the voluntary submission to degradation. But the word ends in optimism because humanity has not exhausted its capacity for change, and because I refuse to let those who behave most destructively become the sole representatives of the species. My daughter is not a symbol whose purpose is to repair my political mood. She is a person I love without qualification. In loving her, I have discovered a clearer reason to care about people I will never meet, including those who will inhabit the world after I am gone.
I remain divided. I expect to remain divided. Some new injustice will appal me tomorrow, and some quiet act of kindness will restore a part of what it damages. There is no inconsistency in demanding an unsparing account of the present while cultivating an ambitious picture of the future. Misanthroptimism is the name I give to the effort of holding both positions responsibly. Hopelosophy reminds me that the journey toward a hoped-for future can contain value before its outcome is known. My daughter reminds me why that future is worth hoping for. I want the most humane possible timeline, and I understand perfectly well that wishing will not produce it. The wish is where responsibility begins. The best possible version of humanity remains possible only to the extent that human beings decide to make it real. I would rather spend my life helping to pull the rubber band back than insisting that it can never move.
References and further reading
[1] Reuters, “As Democrats savor big wins in Congress, Trump shows off his ballroom project,” 4 November 2026. Reuters report
[2] Albert Chessa, “Introducing Miscellabra: Making ‘Garments for the Guileless’,” 30 June 2026. Original MISCELLABRA essay
[3] C. R. Snyder, “Hope Theory: Rainbows in the Mind,” Psychological Inquiry 13, no. 4 (2002): 249–275. DOI
[4] Albert Bandura, “Exercise of Human Agency Through Collective Efficacy,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 9, no. 3 (2000): 75–78. DOI
[5] United States National Archives, “2024 Electoral College Results.” Official results
[6] Jay J. Van Bavel et al., “Social Media and Morality,” Annual Review of Psychology 75 (2024): 311–340. DOI
[7] William J. Brady et al., “How Social Learning Amplifies Moral Outrage Expression in Online Social Networks,” Science Advances (2021). Study abstract
[8] The Washington Post, “Inside ICE’s Social Media Machine Creating Viral Arrest Videos,” 23 December 2025. Investigation
[9] Reuters, “Evidence Contradicts Trump Immigration Officials’ Accounts of Violent Encounters,” 27 January 2026; Associated Press, report on Alex Pretti, 27 January 2026. Reuters reporting | AP report
[10] UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, “Israel Has Committed Genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission of Inquiry Finds,” 16 September 2025. UN report
[11] International Court of Justice, South Africa v. Israel, Orders on provisional measures, including 24 May 2024; merits proceedings ongoing as of November 2026. Official court text via UN
[12] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Hannah Arendt,” section 4.3, “Freedom, Natality and Plurality.” Philosophical overview
[13] “The Impact of Parenthood on Environmental Attitudes and Behaviour: A Longitudinal Investigation of the Legacy Hypothesis,” Population and Environment (2018). Peer-reviewed study
[14] Maria Ojala, “Hope and Climate-Change Engagement from a Psychological Perspective,” Current Opinion in Psychology 49 (2023): 101514. DOI