“On the lips of the powerful, pronounced with a hypocritical sigh and a feigned weariness but genuine self-importance (‘What can you do? That’s how things are …’), what reality means is specifically that which has to be accepted.”

Excerpt From
A Philosophy of Shame: A Revolutionary Emotion
Frédéric Gros and Andy Bliss

Reality is over. If, as Gros says and I believe, reality is what we are forced to accept: it has collapsed. There is no reality any longer. There is nothing we need accept.

Across the globe, we have entered non-reality. The discontented in countries of all sorts are standing up to declare they do not accept things as they are any longer.

Technocrats and oligarchs, of course, tried to get in front of this with AI. There, they could simulate the reality they wish us to accept. Women stripped naked against their will, children sexualized and exploited as property, not-white people uniquely criminal and buffoonish.

But, since Elon Musk did not come house-to-house to lock us inside, the billionaire hope of people conceding reality to their AI version has yet to materialize.

If reality is over, the question quickly becomes: what’s next?

Democratic politicians implore us to return to a status quo that no longer exists (if it ever did). They cajole us with “kitchen table issues.” Please return to reality. ICE is an immovable force. Racism is an American ideal. These are the realities they demand of us.

But now is the time to dream. To look beyond what has, in the past, been deemed “possible.”

“Be realistic: demand the impossible.” - the call of Parisians during the 1968 uprisings

We must dream and demand a world better than the one seen as “possible” or “probable” or “realistic.” We must stop trying to answer age-old questions with age-old answers. You cannot look at something that exists to see the reality we can create. You must dream of the reality you wish, and we will—by hook and by crook—discover together the ways to make it so.

The world faces many existential crises created by the feudalism-tinged capitalism under which we all live. We face climate catastrophe. We face a profound surveillance state created and controlled by the few. We face genocide, racism, war, famine, and degradation.

We face all these issues together. Not divided by fake nation states, but as people, as humanity.

In her book, Solidarity with Children, Madeline Lane-McKinley writes: “Within the left, this language of infantilization is consistently employed to demarcate what and who has gone too far, too often for the sake of defending the status quo, if not to moralize reformism.”

As we dream of a world beyond this, people in power will tell us time and again that we are not being serious. But there is nothing more serious than acknowledging the truth: reality is over. We are forced into a position where we must create a new reality. And to create it in the shape of the old is truly the silly thing. Why create something we know is so easily broken?

To quote Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed: “…If it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

Now is the time to dream, beyond limits, created or imposed.