Monsters, Trust, Nihilism, Hope

Newt: My mommy always said there were no monsters--no real ones--but there are, aren't there?
Ripley: Yes, there are.
Newt: Why do they tell little kids that?
Ripley: Most of the time it's true.
Aliens  (1986, James Cameron, dir.)

Most of the time, it's true.

I concluded yesterday that trust may be a precondition for hope. When we tell young kids that everything's going to be all right, we're not offering a literal prediction of the future. We know, being humans who have lived for a significant amount of time, that things are often not all right. There are monsters. But "everything's going to be all right" isn't a factual description. It's a performative gesture. It brings into being the reality of love and trust. I love you and will do my best to be with you and protect you.

That trust, in turn, enables hope. I knew you would come, Newt says as Ripley rescues her. There are real monsters. But I hope. I hope.

As I waver between hope and nihilism, I wonder whether the passively or actively nihilist forces animating so much activism on the right and the left stems from a loss or lack of trust. I can well see how strains of Afro-Pessimism have at their root the charred remains of trust in whiteness. Trusting whiteness, from this point of view, has repeatedly proven lethal to black people. Whiteness is the zombie-bit person who swears they won't turn, only to savage you at the earliest opportunity. We have (collectively, generally) squandered any right to request or expect the trust of black and brown people.

Lack of trust subtends an absence of hope. There's no hope of a racial utopia, the realized dream of the beloved community. Whiteness is, from the Afro-Pessimist view, definitionally about maintaining and deepening the oppression of black people. It will never get better so long as whiteness exists. And whiteness--like captialism, misogyny, greed, bias--seems immortal.

That certainty itself resembles a kind of trust, however. The nihilist trap lies in its own smug-depressed-more-cynical-than-thou surety. I trust that there is no hope. I thus hope for nothing. Such a view founds the thanatopian urge reflected in the nihilist political bumper sticker: Giant Meteor 2020. As in The Neverending Story, the Nothing acquires substance, agency. It becomes a kind of dark deus ex machina for intractable situations, an anti-miracle, salvific entropy. When in doubt, trust nothing. Put your trust into the Nothing. Hope in the Nothing.

That's a bit more Cthulhu-esque than the average Afro-Pessimist, I'll wager.

What creates trust? Philosopher Keven Vallier distinguishes political trust--our trust in the institutions of government, our faith in peaceful transfer of power after elections, etc.--from social trust--our trust in strangers to abide by the codes that keep society more or less orderly. I wonder if that insight leads to distinctions in hope and nihilism. Is there a meaningful difference between political hope and social hope? Between political nihilism and social nihilism?

Maybe, in other words, I can find a way to talk about hope and nihilism, have my cake and eat it too.

There are monsters, after all. But, at the end of the film, Newt asks if she can dream. Ripley, knowing that monsters exist, affirms that "we both can."