By Monica Samelson

On May 28 a glacier collapsed onto a village in Switzerland. With our rising global temperatures, the ice couldn’t hold onto the mountain anymore. In June heat waves ravaged a great swath of the world at the very first breaths of summer, and in July floods in Pakistan and Texas have been unprecedented in their speed and failing response, killing dozens. I can feel a certain resonance reverberate from around the world – the ground really is shifting beneath our feet, and our view of what’s coming on the horizon shifts out of place too. As fascism surges into dominance and climate change affects more of our daily lives, it’s more and more urgent – and more and more universally apparent – that we must find a way to shape our future terrain. But what is it we should do in times of crisis and uncertainty?

We have various cultural instincts regarding our role in a crisis, which for many of us constitute keeping our heads down. I’ll never forget the manager I had in my medical training who, as the COVID pandemic hurtled into full-blown emergency, told us that the most important thing to do in times of crisis was to follow orders. Never mind that our orders were to continue on as usual. Our healthcare system lumbered on in a flabbergasting failure to adapt, and to follow orders was to endanger every patient that entered our clinic.

We didn’t follow these orders, but the instinct that we need them to prevent total chaos in times of crisis lingers (this manager isn’t alone). It’s hard to upend an assumption that following the rules well enough will protect us. Even in times such as this, when a consensus builds that it is necessary to resist an unjust regime and its lawmaking, the evidence for such assumptions reveals itself. We see it in language emphasizing that Trump is a criminal lawbreaker who should be punished according to the law, that democracy is something that can be reconstituted if we restore law and order, and that protest is best if it remains peaceful, nondisruptive, and civil. Many people hope that if we could just elect the morally upstanding representatives to make better rules, to give better orders, then we’ll be saved. And in truth, a vast mythology upholds these ideas.

The mythology dates back at least to the Seventeenth Century, when social contract theorists like Thomas Hobbes posited that humans can’t get along without an outside force to control and minimize their destructive natures – a human life without civilization, Hobbes suggested, was “nasty, brutish, and short.” In other words, without the organizing and controlling apparatus of society (and, it follows, society organized as the nation-state), we are doomed to destroy each other.

A more modern iteration of this mythology arrived in Freud’s later years of theorizing, when he described what he called the death drive. This theory suggested that we had inner workings that tended towards death and deviance and destruction, and we were doomed to suppress them somehow or risk killing each other. Freud was full of ambivalence about these naughty anarchic inner natures, but where he landed was distinctly state-aligned. The best we could hope for is a good sublimation, he suggested. Channel your death drive into something good, and thank the state for punishing those that fail to. But please, for goodness’ sake – don’t give it the wheel.

But, if you’re like me, you’ve run into scenarios that deeply complicate this idea. It’s not so much that other people’s potential destructiveness doesn’t feel like a threat – I know the dangers that can find me when a thirst for violence gleams in someone’s eye. Rather, it’s that reigning it in hasn’t kept me safe. There are times attempts to dutifully reign in inclinations towards destruction can be deadly.

I’ve learned the hard way, and maybe you have too, that someone else’s suggestion – or the generalized cultural milieu that saturates us with it – that our urges toward violence must always be quelled are often a trap. From schoolyard bullies to the effort and risk necessary to escape an abusive relationship to punching Nazis, the course of a life offers a series of lessons. It turns out that unleashing something unpredictable and potentially destructive in me can, actually, come quite in handy.

Some of these lessons are available to the collective. Now, for example, we can watch as a milquetoast Democratic party follow up their warnings of Trump’s fascism with no meaningful response at all. Our supposed progressive standard-bearers encourage us to stay civil at all costs, and go through the usual channels. Follow protocol, and wait for civilizing forces to save you, they say. Condemning and vilifying the violence of figures like Luigi Mangione and Aaron Bushnell, they put out our fires of resistance before they can spread. If we can’t be civil, they say, all is lost.

If you believe Freud’s and Hobbes’ ideas about our inner natures being scary and dangerous, then this might make sense. In that case, there’s always a reason to count on a greater show of force to keep us in line – this is some of the foundational ideology by which the state maintains a monopoly on violence (in the form of the police and military). It might feel like we’re better safe than sorry when it comes to controlling theoretical dangerous inner natures – what’s the harm in some outside pressure to avoid violence, if it might discourage the next Jack the Ripper? But what does all this state-wielded violence to prevent violence actually do?

The police have extrajudicially killed 659 people in the US this year, as of this writing. ICE officers abduct people from their homes, jobs, school playgrounds, or off the street and send them to concentration camps on and off our shores, and the US and Israeli militaries collaborate to boot out established aid organizations in order to set up food stations for deliberately starved people and then massacre them when they arrive to get it. All this as our country makes moves toward World War III levels of violent contagion, with an impulsive con-man holding the nuclear codes. This does, of course, make me afraid. It no doubt has a curtailing effect on urges to destroy and get violent. What has this monopoly on violence taken from us? When we’re too afraid to use violence, or too accustomed to quelling our instincts for it, we’re often misled about the stakes. This has catastrophic consequences. What’s to be done now, when our enemy is within the state, and all the usual avenues of influence have failed?

I don’t want to be misunderstood to be blaming victims for failing to defend against the suffering wrought by abusers, in interpersonal circumstances or in instances where the abuses are enacted by state forces. I don’t believe that the protection we’re seeking can be achieved by individuals, or even small groups of people. It’s just that if we’re going to defeat our fascist enemies, we’re going to have to come together in incredible and unpredictable formations that have enough collective power to break the power elites’ monopoly on power, and discourage those who would otherwise join their ranks. Or, as Sophie Lewis (author of the brilliant and erotophilic 2021 essay “My Octopus Girlfriend”) put it in her new book, Enemy Feminisms, our commitment to anti-fascism “must walk hand in hand with the courage to draw lines and fight people if necessary. Even kin.”

Instead, we are still stuck with ideas about curbing our inner evil natures, and this being the way to avoid doom. When I look at what actually seems to have happened, I see a particular, devastating outcome of this cultural mythology: Those who really are intent on death and destruction, who seem to be motivated by something devoid entirely of love or care or connection, are given free reign. But if our love or care or connection – or, related, self-preservation – motivates us to try to stop them, we are punished. Sarah Kendzior, often called a modern Cassandra and author of They Knew, said it well in a recent newsletter discussing how Biden and the Democrats squandered an opportunity to stop Trump’s second ascension:

“That weekend was the last time I remember feeling at peace in 2022, a terrible year. No officials challenged the mafia state in a meaningful way. Musk bought Twitter and gutted its utility. Roe was overturned and Congress sang in approval. Layoffs flooded media. AI began its enshittification creep. The backlash to civil rights grew more vicious and violent. Communities fractured, inflation soared, and propaganda thrived.

Throughout it all, liberals clung to institutionalism. They sicced mobs on anyone who did not defend Biden, in a manner mirroring QAnon and Trump. People I once trusted sold their social media brands to PACs in order to parrot talking points. If they had souls, they sold those too.

It was a fake world with real victims. It was a democracy simulator with a broken mouthpiece.

It is appropriate to discuss Biden’s failures. But his tenure should be seen as part of a broader betrayal. The stakes were always existential, and while both parties said it, neither acted like it — unless the existential goal was to kill us all.”

I feel often that we are lost in a fake world with real victims, and I think there’s something about a denigration and disarming of a core part of humanness – our impulses to fight to live, for one – which make up this upside-down calamity.

So you might agree with me that there are good times and places to lean into an impulse for destruction. (John Lewis’s message about getting in good trouble comes to mind.) But we often think we can find this justified use of a destructive impulse through moral righteousness and an analytic frame that chooses to allow it. In other words, we know when violence is necessary because we see that it is strategic and right, and then when we know that, we can use it. But can we?

The fascists have crossed the threshold and started to break our things. Life-saving healthcare is being denied. They are abducting our neighbors. The capitalists continue to scrape away at the surface of our living planet and she is dying. The time to fight has already begun. What would it take to get more of us on the battlefield?

An image has come to my mind: A boot hovers over a flowerbed. I hope you’ll imagine it with me, in your vicinity. Perhaps you call to mind some brilliant summer lilies. The leather of the boot gleams in the sunlight. What do you do?

Before you answer I’m sure you want to know more. Who is it? Do they have a weapon? Do they have a good reason? Whose flowers? If we knew more about the context, we could decide what the strategic thing to do is. If we knew all these things, we’d avoid doing something rash. How horrible it would be if we had rushed someone urgently rescuing their child from falling, or your mother, or someone with a gun, or with a really good reason. But I’m telling you now, there’s a glint in their eye and the boot is descending.

Maybe you can feel a little something in you wilt with the flowers. Maybe you’re imagining how you might heal your heartbrokenness. But I fear that all this thinking, mired in the myth of a civilization that will save us from our violent tendencies, means, simply, that we’re never in a position to stop the boot.

Maybe a different orientation to our inner drives is in order. Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou is a psychoanalyst and prominent queer theorist, and author of the books Sexuality Beyond Consent and Gender Without Identity. Her recent article, “On the So-Called Death Drive and the Revolutionary Impulse” posits that our conceptualization of the death drive – as something atomized from other drives (like the libido), and needing to be sequestered, channeled, sidelined, controlled, or sublimated – is failing us. In her argument, an isolated destructive impulse is just not an intuitive understanding of people’s inner workings, nor does it make good sense of why we sometimes do despicable things. In fact, the despicable things we see people doing today seem indelibly charged with libidinal urges. Is there such a thing as a death drive at all? I deeply agree with Avgi, especially on the point that we lose something when we think of our potential for destruction, violence, spontaneity, or intensity this way.

I wonder if others feel, as I do, that the liberal insistence at every turn on curtailing, alienating, quelling, and caveat-ing our more mysterious and potentially destructive impulses is actually deadening us. So long as we agree that we must find a fighting instinct to defeat the billionaires who continue to dig oil out of the ground even as we hurtle towards planetary extinction, it’s indisputable that it’s literally killing us not to fight. But I think we feel dead, too.

In an exploration of Jean LaPlanche’s perspective on Freud’s death drive (less than stellar; he called it the “so-called death drive”), Dr. Saketopoulou reminds us not just of what we’ve lost in being repressed out of self-defense or strategic maneuvering. If we embrace what in us is anarchic and destructive – and see the way it is threaded through with the erotic (or per Marquis de Sade, “the sovereignty of the erotic”) – then we might move past analysis and into action. Dr. Saketopoulou calls what drives this process the revolutionary impulse.

Maybe we don’t have more-or-less evil so-called death drives, inertly divorced from the erotic. If our tendencies toward destruction aren’t sorry facts of our inner natures, but perhaps sacred ones, then perhaps we can get curious about them – maybe even give them some free reign. We might find that, under the right circumstances, the so-called death drive might position us towards life.

If I’m honest, if our species must go up against the elites in power to save ourselves, I can’t see how except by unleashing something in us that’s willing to fight for our lives. Maybe you know a little of what I mean, or maybe you don’t. We’re looking for an affective shift, aren’t we? Last year, at an action blocking the entrance to Barclays Bank offices in downtown Chicago (Barclays has billions of dollars of shares in companies weaponizing Israel), I felt embarrassed and silly until a pugnacious man in a suit put hands on the protester next to me. Suddenly, it was all very clear. Still, scores of people walked on by thinking we were the odd ones. But something in me had woken up: the stakes were clear, deep in my gut, and they were life itself. It was right to slow down the machinery of genocide. We tightened our protest line, protected each other better from assault, and made it very difficult to get through. We gave them trouble.

These are times of plethoric discourse about what it is we should do on the left. Fascist act after fascist act comes forth, and we wonder whether each will meet antifascism in turn. Have you felt something like what I felt at the protest that day? Don’t you think that feeling might help us bring antifascism to bear on these fascist attacks?

Some people seem to have figured this out. People are organizing their communities to protect their neighbors from ICE abduction. These efforts in Los Angeles blossomed into uprisings around the country meeting increasing fascist violence. Eleven activists, including Greta Thunberg, aboard the Madleen were kidnapped by Israeli forces on June 8 in their efforts to bring aid (food, medications, baby formula) to Gaza under blockade and bombs – the last time the organization tried this, they were bombed. The next flotilla’s sailing is already underway. On June 14, 5 million people were in the streets. What next?

In a recent discussion with Vicky Osterweil, Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton reported back from a conversation with anonymized Palestinian listener “S”. This listener S had communicated their consternation over a movement in the US that “organizes like they’re writing a screenplay.” We rely too heavily on multi-step, imaginary plans that can’t adapt to the current moment. Our planning doesn’t channel in us anything that visions and prefigures a transformed future, that energizes us and keeps us alive, that can put anything on the line. Rather, Beatrice reports, S advises we “organize like [we’re] gardening in a war zone, organize like you’re gardening in Gaza, like you don’t care what you’re told the outcome is supposed to be.” Because, after all, the outcome is supposed to be annihilation. Our fascist enemies really are driven towards death. Our only winning strategy is to respond accordingly: to respond with a stance that understands the stakes and meets them.

It’s true that following these threads of loving chaos that urge us to resist, to tear down, to fight, don’t guarantee any particular outcome, and in fact they invite risk. Good trouble is trouble indeed. Planting in Gaza has no sure promise of sprouted success. And yet: what would it be like to be more run through with these feelings, to give them some measure of free reign? What might it lead us to do? How else do we expect to one day enjoy a garden?

Let’s revisit the boot hovering over the flowerbed. I know it’s easy to feel paralyzed, but can you feel something stirring in you? Does it matter so much – in this short moment in which the flowers are yet undisturbed – who the boot belongs to? What stirs and what is its character? I can tell you a bit of what I feel: A shout in my throat. A lunge sprouting in the muscles of my legs. A brace for impact. Do you feel it too?

Author Bio: Monica Samelson is a parent, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst in Chicago. You can find her at Bluesky or subscribe to her newsletter.