Optimism over Despair

This book is a collation of interviews by C. J. Polychroniou with Noam Chomsky about the state of the world in 2017 - and boy, lemme tell you, it's bleak going. I got it chiefly because I hoped from the title that Noam was going to slice through the despair-inducing series of global events and trends dominating the headlines of this past year with a knife made of pure hope, but no, it's basically just a thorough, concise, and horrifyingly well-informed exploration of just how fucked we are, but of course resorting to despair will only make us get more fucked, and so the only morally or politically viable course for all those with progressive agendas to maintain as an attitude is a resigned, stoic, optimism.*

   Throughout, C. J. and Noam discuss:

• Collapsing American hegemony
• Unravelling European integration
• The new phase of the global 'war on terror'
• ISIS, NATO, Russia, and the shitstorm in the Middle-East
• Inequality and unsustainability in the plutocratic model of post-neoliberal 'really existing capitalism'
• Trump and the decline of American civil society
• Republicans (the most dangerous group of people on the planet) and global warming
• US meddling in other countries' elections/societies/etc
• Religion's dogged resistance to separating from politics
• Utter failures of US healthcare and education systems
• The potential of anarcho-socialist democratic change when all these trends/events are placed with optimistic consideration in their historical context

   It is very scary stuff. To be honest, with the level of detail and insight Noam brings to each of these broad fields of discussion, one is left with an overbearing sense of dread at the state of the world far moreso from reading this book than if one had read separate books on each issue or even a potent digest of leftist critique-responses to most of the actual news items comprising these larger problems over the past year. I'd recommend it as an oh-shit-inspirational text for progressive activists, but really most of those already know to a large degree just how fucked we are on all the fronts discussed herein, and so this book effectively just serves as an educational reinforcement from that raspy old prophet of contemporary western anarchism. You would probably learn a lot from this book, especially historical blips of detail that often elude mainstream narratives on these big issues - but overall I don't feel there is as much to be gained from reading this as there is by simply reading the news and maintaining one's dedication to taking action, if one is politically inclined similarly to Chomsky or myself, which if you're thinking of reading this you probably are. But yeh. It lives up to the title in prose conclusion only.

* That's not to say good things aren't happening, because they are. Just nowhere near big or fast enough to substantively offset some of the bigger and more pressing factors in why we're fucked.