285: Hope and Freedom

Dear friends
 
Yesterday, 21 March, was South Africa’s Human Rights Day. It commemorates the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, when armed apartheid police opened fire on an unarmed group of protestors. 1,300+ rounds were fired in less than a minute, killing at least 69 people. It was not the first mass murder committed in the name of racism and empire in the world. Sadly, it was not the last. They continue.
 
This moment is horrific. Israel has spent, conservatively, $50bn on direct military costs in its assault on Gaza. The first week of the US’s war on Iran cost more than $11bn. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is starting to approach $1trillion in combined costs. There are, of course, tragically, others, equally awful. 
 
That’s only the weaponry cost, not the damage, nor how it ripples through the world. And not the unquantifiable cost: the trauma, the violation, the loss of mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, grandmothers, grandfathers; wounds to the collective and generational soul.
 
The apartheid state’s atrocities did not end in 1960. 3.5 million black people were forcibly removed from their homes, rupturing communities and histories; some removals took place as late as the 1980s – a mere 8 years before apartheid fell to its knees.
 
Thousands more were murdered and tortured. Millions were denied a decent education, healthcare and a home. In 1994, democracy dawned – the product of decades of principled struggle. The intervening years of violence were unnecessary, a waste.
 
Tyrants fail to remember history – they will fall.
 
South Africa, today, is flawed in many ways and yet remains a symbol of hope. It would be a lie to say it is a universally tolerant country – xenophobic violence has flared repeatedly since democracy, and its language is increasingly and horrifically used with impunity by prominent politicians, gender-based-violence is pervasive, not a minute goes by without a woman being attacked violently: a country at war with itself, racism continues in practice and under the language of ‘standards’ or ‘excellence’ – and still South Africa offers hope, not just to those of us that live here but to the world.
 
Last Thursday and Friday, one of the country’s most prominent media groups, News24, convened ‘On the Record’, bringing together hundreds of individuals of differing perspectives, all committed to building (and removing the impediments to) a better society and economy. Supported by a thorough-going integration of the country’s best research (you can read a summary here), it was critical and hopeful.
 
It modelled something that can both frustrate and offer hope – the South African willingness to challenge, listen and be persuaded. Frequently, the dialogue stalls at the point of action. Quite often the challenges – particularly to state policy – are discarded and yet, at critical points, South Africans find each other and what they’ve never lost, in the last 30 years, is the willingness to return to the table and find a new way.
 
In a world that parodies and belittles discussion, dialogue, diversity, inclusion, and compassion, South Africa finds its way to do that. It should and could do better. Sadly, we too are beleaguered by the strong man caricatures of the moment. But events like this, ones that engage willingly with complexity, ones committed to deep dialogue are essential ingredients in imagining both a different future and the various paths to it. They both shape the future and model a way to get there.
 
Action changes the world. Imagination directs the action.
 
/strategy
 In her 2014 Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, celebrated science fiction author Ursula le Guin told us why events like this are critical:
 
“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.”
 
And provoked, “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words”.
 
The hard times are unequivocally here. And, like black holes, they have a powerful gravitational pull. It’s not only writers who must use their imagination for hope and freedom. We all must. Without them, no strategy can survive.
 
//self
Although Le Guin means writers when she says, “our art, the art of words”, we can all be artists in how we use language, choosing words with intention for the worlds they call forth and create.
 
When we speak, we hear.
What we hear shapes what we believe is possible.
Our words weave the world we walk in.
Our symbolic actions inspire others.
 
It is easily forgotten in the context of an overwhelming world. Nevertheless, the truth remains: how we arrive in the world, the way we choose to act, the words we choose, the friendships and connections we form, shape our worlds and ripple into others’.
 
///soul
 I read Hari Kunzru’s 2024 Blue Ruins in early January 2025. I loved it in the first few pages, but by the end felt battered by bleakness. In a sense, mirroring how we all felt in that time: first both anxious and excited, and then just overwhelmed.
 
I am only slowly discovering novels set in, or post, Covid and I’ve yet to discover ones that truly capture the existential weirdness of that time. If you’ve got recommendations, please do share them.
 
Blue Ruins is set in upstate New York in the heart of Covid-isolation time. Jay delivers groceries. He’s ill. Maybe Covid, maybe long hours, poor food, essential worker poverty. He delivers food to a mansion that is occupied, by amongst others, his former lover, Alice, who, when he collapses in the driveway, smuggles him into an outbuilding.
 
Once he recovers he explores the property and encounters Marshall: a nervous, slightly built man wielding “one of those sinister mass-shooter weapons that are marketed to American men like motorcycles or small-batch whisky, signifiers of rugged individualism” and “trussed into some kind of body armor… the clothes underneath, weren’t military, rolled-up skinny chinos and some kind of long white linen shirt that flared out from under the tight vest”.
 
Marshall is a gallerist, but in his costume, his language is, well, martial – “Comply or I will not hesitate to shoot you… I’ve had eyes on you for an hour…”  
 
The symbols we embrace shape us. Without care, we become them.
 
Jay was once a famous artist, who disappeared from life, initially as an artwork – Fugue – but then, he just kept going, stayed away, didn’t return to the art world, becoming – in that ironic, terrible way we treat artists – even more famous in his absence.  
 
Theoretically, all the intervening years were part of that performance, but the reality was different.
 
“My experiences were now just experiences. When I did something, it wasn’t an action. It had no surplus meaning. The pipe was just a pipe. And yet, I was still performing Fugue. Whatever I happened to be doing was art. Perhaps in some way this made me free, but it was unsatisfying. People don’t exist alone. We exist in relation to each other. Maybe I was free in my mind, but it was the kind of freedom that would wilt when exposed to the world”.
 
Initially, the others reject him – an almost vagrant delivery worker – then embrace him as the long-lost genius, but Jay no longer saw himself as the myth they embraced. “It’s a fiction we seem to demand, that a person be substantially the same throughout their lives – human ships of Theseus, each part replaced, but in some essential way unchanging. We are less continuous than we pretend. There are jumps, punctuations, sudden reorganizations of selfhood. I’d always had goals, even if they weren’t ones that other people could understand, but at some point I’d lost touch with the person who’d set them. If you asked me what I was doing, delivering groceries in upstate New York, I would have been able to only give you a superficial answer”.
         
Life can just happen. If we’re not conscious, we lose touch with our goals and wake up years later, confused about where we are and how we got there. We must choose to have choice.
 
All the best
 
Karl
 
PS: Many of you know that I am experimenting with longer-form writing. Some of it has appeared in the form of the occasional more essay-like newsletters, much of it rests in my computer in the form of Tables of Contents, and even a few drafts of chapters. 2026 is my year of writing. But for it to be so, I must create space. Accordingly, I have decided that every 8-10 weeks, I am going to take a 4-week production break to give myself the space to work on long-form writing. April will be my first production break, which means that next week’s letter will be the last in this ‘season’.