Our Insistence on Beauty and Love Is our Defiance
| Rob Brezsny Dec 30, 2025 |
Rebellious Hope
I want to talk about hope. But not the soft-focus, denial-based version that collapses the moment reality gets rough. Not the pastel-colored platitudes that dissolve under scrutiny. Not the decorative optimism that functions as spiritual bypassing.
We’re living in a time when hope feels suspect—and rightly so. To some people, it sounds naïve or irresponsible, especially amid the ongoing Trumpocalypse and the political, cultural, and ethical upheavals it has unleashed.
It almost feels obscene to speak of hope as we witness the systematic dismantling of institutional safeguards, the gleeful cruelty elevated to policy, and the sickening lies repeated until they metastasize into widely believed “truth.”
To some, hope is treated like a belief system that we cling to regardless of evidence. It’s a quasi-religious optimism that refuses to look directly at what’s happening. Like a sedative, it’s a way to avoid the uncomfortable work of recognizing and naming what is actually occurring.
I’m not interested in either of those approaches.
The kind of hope worth cultivating now is rebellious hope. It’s sober and alert. It’s militant in its refusal of both despair and fantasy. It doesn’t flinch and doesn’t artificially sweeten.
Rebellious hope doesn’t avert its gaze from the damage being done. With forensic precision, it sees clearly the enormity of the curses unleashed by the Trumpocalypse: the erosion of democratic norms, the normalization of cruelty as entertainment, the weaponization of disinformation, the corrosion of truth as a shared framework, and the debilitating exhaustion carried by so many of us who are trying to live with integrity while the rules keep changing.
The rebellious hope I aspire to embody and express doesn’t pretend that things are “basically fine.” Nor does it traffic in the delusion that positive thinking alone will save us from authoritarian impulses or ecological collapse.
Rebellious hope thrives because surrendering our agency is not an option. We won’t stop building our capacity to respond, to create, and to resist. We won’t hand victory to those who profit from our demoralization.
Rebellious hope is not a feeling we wait for like good weather, but a daily practice and discipline. We wield it as a lively, nourishing form of resistance. It’s a tool we use even when it would be easier to let it rust.
Rebellious hope thrives on truth-telling, even when the truth is brutal. It survives on discernment: the ability to distinguish between what we can influence and what we can’t, between strategic action and performative outrage. It grows stronger when we refuse to let cynicism become our personality, our brand, and our default setting.
Right now, many people are understandably tempted to believe that the world is irredeemably broken. I won’t be upset with you if you fear that everything is sliding toward chaos or if you believe that effort is pointless and the decent people have already lost.
That belief is seductive in its simplicity. It offers a perverse kind of comfort: If everything is doomed, we’re absolved from the responsibility of trying. But it’s also paralyzing. And paralysis is exactly what destructive forces rely on. Despair is the most effective weapon of authoritarianism.
Rebellious hope rejects paralysis without denying reality. It refuses the false choice between naive optimism and corrosive despair.
This means learning how to stay emotionally and ethically (and aesthetically!) alive while taking in hard news. It means developing the stamina to witness atrocities without becoming numb or collapsing into helplessness. It means choosing, consciously and repeatedly, where we focus our attention and how we spend our limited energy and which battles we engage.
It doesn’t mean letting outrage and despair claim every inch of our inner landscape, turning us into walking embodiments of emergency.
We who practice the martial art of rebellious hope don’t ignore what’s wrong. We don’t minimize the dangers or pretend that cruelty is just a difference of opinion or that the erosion of rights is merely a “political disagreement.” But we also refuse to let catastrophe monopolize our consciousness, to become the only story we tell ourselves about who we are and what is possible.
Instead, we cultivate a grounded, clear-eyed awareness of what still works: what still nourishes, connects, heals, and empowers. We notice the unglamorous but profound infrastructures of care that persist even in dark times: the people who show up for one another without fanfare, the systems that quietly function despite being underfunded and undervalued, and the acts of competence and kindness that don’t make headlines but keep the world from unraveling completely.
We stay aware of the fragile miracles we depend on: shelter, food, water, electricity, transportation, community, the intricate web of cooperation that sustains modern life. And we don’t pretending these treasures are guaranteed forever or evenly distributed. We acknowledge their precariousness. We honor their existence while they last.
Rebellious hope holds fragility and resilience in the same frame, refusing to choose between them.
We train our perception this way. We practice seeing both the damage and the persistence, the cruelty and the care, the collapse and the continuity. As we do, an important source stabilizes inside us.
We feel that while the world is deeply troubled, our life is not merely a passive casualty of history. We retain the power to choose how we respond, how we care, how we create, how we love, and how we resist.
Rebellious hope doesn’t ask us to be cheerful or relentlessly positive. It asks us to refuse the seduction of numbness: to be present, honest, engaged, and fiercely committed to our own aliveness.
Rebellious hope invites us to build inner structures that can withstand external turbulence. It empowers us to reinforce our foundations while the weather remains unpredictable and possibly worsening. It inspires us to become internally fortified not through rigidity but through flexibility, not through denial but through clear-eyed endurance.
Cultivating rebellious hope becomes easier when we stop expecting certainty and start practicing stamina. We shift from demanding guarantees to developing capacity. We accept that we may be in this for a while.
And here is a subtle but crucial truth: As we strengthen this hope—rooted in realism, sustained by attention, and expressed through practical action—we begin to notice more evidence that our efforts matter. Not miracles, necessarily, nor dramatic reversals of fortune. But confirmations. Small proofs of efficacy. Signs that we still have agency and our choices still creates ripples in the world.
We see that the systems of mutual aid we build actually help people. The truth we insist on speaking does reach others. The beauty we create does provide sustenance. Our refusal to surrender our humanity is, in fact, a gift to others.
So here is a simple, ongoing practice, which functions as both a spiritual discipline and a strategic intervention:
We keep a record of everything that genuinely supports us. We track what works. We name what steadies us. We acknowledge, with specificity and gratitude, the people, routines, places, and capacities that help us remain intact and responsive.
On my list today might be the friend who checks in, the tasty meal that nourishes me, and the walk that clears my mind. I might put a gold star next to the line on my list where I note how much I love the creative work I do.
You and I keep adding to this record regularly. We treat it as essential infrastructure.
This isn’t escapism or self-soothing denial. It’s strategic nourishment, building the resilience we need for sustained engagement.
In times like these, clarity and stamina are radical virtues. It’s revolutionary to see clearly what’s happening without being destroyed by that seeing.
We build our capacity to remain engaged without burning out. We don’t just survive but actually thrive as we tend to our own aliveness while also working for collective liberation.
Rebellious hope is how we cultivate vibrant, robust, intelligent LOVE. Not sentimental love, nor abstract or theoretical love. But the fierce, protective love that fights for what it cherishes. Our love says: I won’t abandon myself, my people, or my commitment to a more beautiful world, no matter how bleak the current chapter appears.
This is the rebellious hope that outlasts empires and builds the future while the present burns.
How we can not just survive but thrive during the Trumpocalypse: