No One Is Coming to Save Us

There, simply, is no one coming to save us.

I know we often desire to behave like our chemical constituents and want to take the path of least resistance, yearn for the easy way out. But one does not exist.

There will be no magic Dark Brandon legislation. There will not be a Canadian invasion. There will not be an equitable, cheap, universal emigration path to Europe or Canada or Australia or New Zealand. And, most saddening to me, The Culture will not park a GCU at the White House. No alien will come out and say, “Not only are you not alone, but this capitalism thing? Completely fucked up. We have ships that are god-like AIs that can destroy solar systems without so much as blinking and by the way they’re also communists.”

I think many of us turn to despair at this realization and either just give up on any possibility of improvement to the material conditions or go back to deluding themselves that somehow the System will solve everything actually and it’ll be ok if we have a Black trans president.

But this would be in bad faith. We should let this radicalize us rather than have it lead us to despair.

For forever we have never needed a savior. We have never needed the System. We possess the power to create a just society within ourselves and our relations to each other. No one is coming to save us because we are the ones that will save ourselves. But this means we have to act like it. The only people who will begin to build alternative methods of care and justice are us, and the only time this will happen is now. It is not enough to be sympathetic and say “It can’t be helped in this world”.

The next world has to start somewhere. The future exists first in the imagination, then in the will, then in reality. Generations have already imagined the future. We must make it exist now in the will.