Plinth

As a refresher, then, hope is an optimistic state of mind. I'm no social scientist, but the idea that hope is universal passes the eye test: look at the determined way children make it through the day, voicing whims, desires and dreams, trying out new stuff, falling on their arses, getting up again. We’re born with a curiosity about our future successes and will keep shunting the wooden giraffe block at the elephant-shaped hole with good grace, thank you very much, until one day Giraffey passes straight on through. Hope, along with its colleagues Resilience and Hankering, has helped humanity endure catastrophe and tragedy over the millennia; we would be nowhere without the catalysing thought, Things could be better.

The word ‘change’ was a key part of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign rhetoric, but what I recall in its place is ‘Hope’, largely thanks to street artist and activist Shepard Fairey’s iconic poster. Certainly, it felt that pre-2010 you could vote for something, whereas the vibe ever since in U.S. and U.K. shit-slinging marathons I mean election campaigns has been to try and usher voters to the ballot box with ‘not the other one’ written on their slips.

For now, Keir Starmer’s Labour campaign is rolling with ‘change’, too, but in comparison with Obama’s, it seems less clear whether that change will be good, bad or fine. Leaving it up to voters’ imagination, at this moment in time, it feels like the change will be welcome in the same way a dry rice cracker would be after years of David Cameron, George Osbourne, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg all taking turns to sit on your chest, throat and head. Sure thing, but any oxygen? Rather than optimism, we are being offered realism. Maybe even Stoicism — which happens to be one of the -isms I learned about to cope with the bound, gagged, hobbled feeling of Tory austerity and chronic underinvestment. Cope, of course, is just hope with a ‘c’ that stands for ‘cut’.

Hardcore Stoics like ancient Greek philosopher Hecato would say hope is dangerous: Cease to hope and you will cease to fear. And look, if someone wants to pay me to go to Rhodes and study some lovely books, I’ll go! But I’m here. It’s strangely hard to remember, but the first part of 2024 felt at times so bleak Hans Zimmer could have scored it. In Dune: Part Two, which Zimmer did score, the Fremen society live in a brutal desert environment where they must remove the water from corpses to stay hydrated; in the U.K. outside the cinema, there are security alarms on the baby formula and Dune’s story of a religious war resonates uncomfortably with the escalation of violence in the Middle East. In the film, Timothée Chalamet plays Paul Atreides, a would-be messiah who leads fundamentalist militants across the desert in a quest to overthrow imperialist forces. You’d be forgiven for thinking that some of the most recognisable faces in Hollywood had been deepfaked into a three-hour marketing campaign for Isis that turns out is actually made by Russian trolls to disrupt European democratic elections (similar to their recent efforts with fake Tom Cruise and Star of David graffiti).

Hope, Dune says, can be powerful, galvanising, and definitely dangerous — we should question who is instilling it. At the same time, it’s as necessary as corpse-water. In comparison, in the TV series Fallout — another apocalyptic sci fi hit of the year set in a desert wasteland — hope is silly. In a vault deep underground, doused in 1950s social mores, Lucy (Ella Purnell) is sustained by the idea that her community will emerge one day and repopulate the earth above. The series draws a lot of dramatic irony and humour from just how wrong she is: her myth of social progress seems preposterous, peppy and Summer Camp Leader when juxtaposed with the giant-roach-eat-roach world that is waiting for her. Forced to leave the safety of the vault, Lucy soon becomes desensitised to violence and must become just as brutal as her environment to survive. Furiosa — 2024’s third, infinite-sand-dune-filled vision — similarly follows a woman hardening scab-like to an unfeeling, barren world. Its flop at the box office suggests audiences are a little parched.

Human beings do of course dissociate from their own thoughts and emotions as a defence mechanism to cope with the harshness of life (or even if your life is pretty cushty, you may dissociate aesthetically anyhow just for fun / a book advance, like Brett Easton Ellis or post-political alt-lit Zoomer socialite Honor Levy.) Obviously, the desensitised, gun-toting person who quips instead of feeling things is entertaining as a flat character in a film, but it is not so cool when governments fight harshness with more harshness. Tory austerity has proved both brutal and bad economics.

While the right wing understandably sees the left wing as feelings-are-facts virtue signallers — and to be fair it is annoying when we do that, promise I’ll stop in a couple paragraphs – maybe it is also reasonable to want to not live in a Boris-eat-Boris desert with bigger locks on the baby formula and turrets on the cliffs of Dover.
While the change needs to come from the top down, maybe the electorate has a part to play in softening and re-associating. I’m not saying we go full Mr. Whippy in the dune, but maybe unclenching might be a small part we all have to play. Today, for instance, I did my bit, sitting with some of the hurt feelings, letting the hot sand pour through my fingers, and a bit of hope scurried up to the surface. Joey Essex is in the villa. It’s entirely possible that the giraffe will finally go through the giraffe-shaped hole. I get knocked down, but I get up again. It’s coming home.

By Sammi Gale