I read some of these books in good faith but with a degree of scepticism, given how quickly they emerged after the phrase proliferated in 2016. Ultimately, I was frustrated and underwhelmed by how simplistic they were. They tended to reassert the importance of concepts like ‘truth’ without acknowledging how complex and contested these terms actually are, and addressed pathologies that capitalism had produced, including ‘post-truth’ itself, without actually talking about that system of capitalism. I wanted to push back against this Enlightenment-focused, ‘vanilla’ analysis which reveres and accepts concepts like truth, science, and facts at face value, and then just blames naughty populists and other evils without any understanding of them either. That kind of naivety is exactly what got us into this mess.

When trying to have conversations about these issues over the last four years, I have found there’s often a lack of understanding about the history of how our society came to be so cynical, transactional, nihilistic, and short-termist. When you have an urgent environmental crisis, a mental health crisis of epidemic proportions, an actual pandemic, and the rise of far-right reactionary politics as well, and most of these can arguably be traced to origins within that time period, it’s essential for this history to be visible and present as a sort of backdrop to understanding these problems.

My guiding questions in this book are these: what kind of society produced these problems, and how did that society come about? In approaching these questions, the idea of a ‘market-driven society’ felt like a more useful framing for what is more commonly referred to as ‘neoliberalism’.

The point about conspiracy theories is that suspicion as a political instinct is actually perfectly reasonable. In one chapter of my book I delve into a number of major conspiracies perpetrated by, for example, the tobacco industry and its lobbyists, the oil industry with climate change denial, and the pharmaceutical companies who get millions of people addicted to pills. All of these conspiratorial acts involve lying to the public on a massive scale and concealing the harms caused to society by certain ideas and products. So there is plenty to be suspicious of, but that suspicion needs to be guided.

This is where the concept of literacy comes in. As a society we lack a proper working understanding of capitalism because of course, why would it be in the interests of capitalism as a system for us to understand how it really works? We are deprived of that understanding, and capitalism relies on our ignorance of its processes to continue. Every time we erase economic questions or belittle criticisms of capitalism that are offered, we make it more likely that people will opt for other kinds of suspicion in their attempt to make sense of their circumstances. And these narratives reflect their creators – racist or misogynist people will conjure up racist or misogynist conspiracy theories.

I tried my best in the book to make it clear that to talk about literacy in this way should not be heard as elitist, because I think we’re all illiterate about one thing or another, and so calling for greater literacy is actually about calling for a richer commons. We require each other’s knowledge of the system to be as developed as possible, and this is an issue that concerns the economic gamut. Elon Musk, for example, is someone who is a billionaire but is totally illiterate about capitalism in my view – whatever his fanboys think.

Both of these chapters are about the politics of suspicion insofar as suspicion can be over-abundant in some cases, or it can be sparse, or entirely absent. Whereas conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct, which achieves the opposite of its intention by taking us away from the kind of discoveries we need to make, the ‘politics of shallow understanding’ represents a naive and complacent belief in Enlightenment ideals like law, science, or facts. All of these are important, of course, but all too often, people who mean well fail to interrogate these systems or acknowledge the possibility that they may not be serving us as intended.

I have nothing in common with the Right, but I have been able to have a coherent political argument with right-wing people before. Yet when I speak to so-called ‘centrists’, I find their response is almost like putting hands over their ears and refusing to accept any significant flaws in the systems in which they have placed their faith. There’s an arrogance about the great oxymoron that is ‘liberal capitalism’ and the hastily announced ‘end of history’ that it appeared to herald in the 90s and in the 2000s.

And now, in 2020, we’re all supposed to be cheering about Biden’s election victory. But Biden and Harris are both absolutely archetypal of the type of politics that adopts socially liberal language in order to, figuratively-speaking, ring the dinner bell and then not serve dinner; to announce itself as fair and socially liberal, but not actually address the missing piece of that picture—economic liberty—because ultimately that missing piece is not compatible with capitalism as we know it. So this syrupy, positivist liberalism exists in this weird mutual orbit with the far right, and I think they actually fuel each other, while the Left looks on in despair. I want us to stand up and fight against both these camps.

‘Cruel optimism’ describes an emotional attachment in which ‘the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that you brought to it initially’ [Berlant, 2011]. The idea is that our yearning for an object or goal can be the very thing that frustrates our ability to achieve it. Just as with an unrequited love you continue to hold out hope instead of setting yourself free, there is this uncritical reverence for the ideals of democracy, law or science which fails to apprehend the way these systems are actually failing people in reality because of the ways that they have been taken over by markets.

This chapter of the book is based on Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, in which he talks about the White Moderate. He says the ‘shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will’. In my head there was a connection there with Berlant insofar as shallow understanding is both fuelled by and perpetuates cruel optimism. Certain people are so invested in the idea that our institutions already work that this over-investment itself becomes the obstacle that prevents the change needed to make them truly functional for everyone. Of course, this position is only inhabitable for people with a certain amount of privilege: we can’t build a society that works for everyone if we have people in power who already believe that society is working.

I think there’s something in that. I was recently asked why I’m not a conspiracy theorist if I believe there’s anything defensible about a politics of suspicion. My answer was that I’ve had the opportunity to draw on great writing within the Marxian tradition, and I’ve been fortunate to have grown up in a household which gave me the tools to talk about the system critically and demand something better. But I think this applies both to the hyperactive suspicion of conspiracy theories and the naive complacency of shallow understanding. Once you have some grasp of how to criticise the system a little bit from a structural perspective, you can begin to focus a bit more on making it better for others without going down the dead-ends of believing in a flat Earth, or conversely to go on about science, facts and technology in response to issues that are ultimately political.

I’m critical of social media corporations, but don’t think social media is necessarily the main issue here, so much as strategy. There’s a quote by Mark Fisher that was spray-painted on the wall at Goldsmiths [where he taught] shortly after his passing, which has helped me think through this problem. I think some of my friends are sick of hearing me say it:

‘Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.’

Calling out the appearance of a ‘natural order’ rather than calling each other out is a good place to start. I want us to come together not around process or identity, so much as around the question of how we are going to make our ideas powerful, and eventually dominant.

As Fisher, Jameson and others have pointed out, it’s easy for anti-capitalist ideas to be widely disseminated under capitalism. But instead of allowing that just to make the capitalism stronger by appearing to be more emancipatory than it really is—which Fisher calls ‘interpassivity’, drawing from the work of Robert Pfaller—we must always look to challenge the normality of the systems we live under with more strategic nous. I think on the left we sometimes have the tendency to bang the drum about the fact that we’re on the left. We should be proud of our morals and our principles, but in the end, if we’re not going to normalise them, then drawing attention to their precise ideological provenance is a bit of an obstacle.