The Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
~Marcel Proust[1]
One thing that is particularly characteristic of our epoch is nostalgia. We see nostalgic tropes shaping mainstream culture, with music and movies reproducing older ones, while political leaders emphasize past greatnesses. There is a general feeling of loss of a collective horizon for the future, with the only thing that’s left being distorted images of the past.
In an article on what they call “End Times Fascism”, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor identify the project articulated by the ruling elites and their support bases as:
a vision of the future that follows a nearly identical script, one in which the world as we know it collapses under its weight and a chosen few survive and thrive in various kinds of arks, bunkers and gated “freedom cities”.[2]
This apocalyptic vision does not come from nowhere. It emerges within a specific global environment and the consequences of human activity. For a very long time a system based on the logic of domination – of humans over other humans, as well as of humanity over nature – has submerged the world into a multidimensional crisis that threatens to make the planet uninhabitable.
Its multidimensiality results from a multitude of interwoven crises that are provoked by specific underlying features of the current system. Under capitalism, domination is being measured and exercised through the profit motive and the logic of unlimited economic growth. With the passing of time, these features have degraded the environment, depleted resources, and disturbed fragile planetary balances. All this has led to a climate crisis that threatens to radically alter the face of Earth, the spread of pandemics, eruption of wars and conflicts over who gets to exploit scarce resources, genocides of entire populations (like that of Gaza), etc.
It is no wonder that apocalyptic visions thrive in such an environment as scientific models repeatedly show that if humanity continues doing what it currently does, then there will be dire consequences. And the ruling elites, whose profiteering is at the heart of all these crises, do everything in their powers to obstruct any substantial change that could avert the catastrophe we face, because this would mean transitioning away from domination, and thus for them losing all their privileges. So, they prefer feeding this feeling of inevitability, of things being as they are.
There is, understandably, a loss of hope when faced with such a dire situation, and furthermore, when you are also lacking the public space necessary to organize with your fellow human beings and seek substantial solutions for the aversion of the crisis. With decision-making being narrowed to political and business elites, there is very little one can do in terms of institutional action. The most one can do is vote for “greener” candidates, but as years of state (mis)management of the environment has shown, there are very minor and insignificant results from this state-centered strategy.[3]
It is no wonder that amidst these existential crises, entrapped within a political system designed to give decision-making power only to the top echelons of society, that there will be little space for collective positive horizons for the future. Instead, pessimism and cynicism begin dominating the psychological landscape, which in turn translates into feelings of nostalgia for the “good old days”.
Nostalgia is the opposite of utopia. If the latter expresses hope and visions for a better future, then the former locks its sights onto the past. But not the memory of the past as it was, but the past as a kitsch, as an invention that stems from selfish and egotist drives. Emerging from conditions of broad social disempowerment, nostalgia leans strongly on nationalistic tropes. It comes with belief in strong messianic figures (due to the infantilization of the majority of the population because of the lack of political power) that will take care of its supposedly “chosen” people, in opposition to utopias where collective empowerment is often the path forward.
Philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis underlines this eschatology of nostalgia’s longing for “the golden age”, which like all golden ages, is, moreover, perfectly imaginary, and moves forward in history only by proceeding backwards, constantly wishing to return to the era in which, as the nostalgist believes, things (like theory and program) were indisputable, established once and for all.[4] In a sense, what nostalgia enforces is the logic of heteronomy – a condition in which society accepts uncritically laws and institutions as deriving from extra-social authorities (gods, tradition, nature, etc.), rather than self-instituted by society itself.
This poses a serious problem in times of crisis (such as ours), when the social order needs to be altered in a drastic manner. Rather than leaving space for the collective interrogation of potential alternatives, nostalgia calls for the reactionary clinging to the artificial past of conservatism. In this line of thought social ecologist Murray Bookchin suggests that “the assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.”
Nostalgia operates within the temporality of loss, as opposed to utopia’s temporality of expectation. The reactionary nature of the former stems from the mourning of imagined pasts. This is a problem because it provides fallacious responses to a very real crisis – the loss of organic communities. With capitalist consumerism and the growth-or-die doctrine, alienation has been spreading in societies, disintegrating genuine communal connections, replacing them with an egotistic anthropological type that is concerned primarily with itself. Thus, a vicious cycle is created where a situation of hopelessness and disempowerment creates alienated individuals that further reproduce the feeling of desperation and disenfranchisement.
A potential path for overcoming this deadlock is by rebuilding communal relations through the opening of a genuine public space where collective power can be reclaimed and exercised by all members of society. After all, the foundational basis of an organic community is that the individuals that compose it take active part in its management and assume complete responsibility for the way their collectivity is and acts. One such environment is the fertile ground for the emergence of civic communities of stewards that see beyond short-term profit, that see the interconnectedness between the individual, the collective, and the natural world humanity is integral part of.
If today nostalgia and alienation are among the main forces that keep the status quo intact, thus permeating the desolation of our world by the dominant system, then it is the recreation of the civic community and the genuine public that can help the 99% to self-empower themselves and enact crucial changes. It is from such an grassroots approach that a collective horizon for a livable future can emerge. As Hannah Arendt underlines, “the faculty of action, which, after all, is the political faculty par excellence, can be actualized only as one of the many and manifold forces of human community.”[5]
[1] Larry Christopher: “The Cult of Nostalgia,” PlanetAgora, March 28, 2023, accessed July 2, 2025, https://planetagora.medium.com/the-cult-of-nostalgia-5e863816476
[2] Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor: “The End Times,” The Guardian, April 13, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk.
[3] Dimitrios Roussopoulos. Political Ecology: Beyond Environmentalism (Porsgrunn: New Compass 2015) p9.
[4] David Ames Curtis (ed.): The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p108.
[5] Hannah Arendt: “Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt”, Hannah Arendt Center, July 03, 2025, https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/quote-of-the-week-2011-11-14
Teaser image credit: Tweed run, 2013. “Some effort to recreate the spirit of a bygone era is always appreciated.”By Elisa.rolle – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57760069.