There is a specific rot settling into how people relate to the world right now, and it has less to do with individual moral failure than with the material conditions that produce a particular kind of despair—one that mistakes itself for insight.

Two encounters in the city recently, while waiting for fried chicken, made the mechanism visible. The first was crude and legible: a drunk person stumbling past someone seated, muttering slurs, the whole interaction lasting seconds and resolving itself almost immediately—the target threw shade back, shrugged, moved on. Whatever harm existed there was confined, transparent, and easily dismissed precisely because it carried no pretence of reason.

The second was quieter and far more corrosive: a person walking with friends, speaking casually and without friction about how the world is full of “degenerates,” the word deployed not as an outburst but as a settled conclusion, offered in the same register one might use to describe the weather.

The distinction matters because it is structural rather than merely tonal. A slur from a drunk stranger operates within recognisable aggression—it arrives without justification, asks nothing of us intellectually, and dissipates on contact. But the second encounter belongs to a different order entirely: it is ideology performing itself as common sense, hatred dressed in the language of observation, cruelty that has already convinced itself it is merely being honest. This is not a person losing control; this is a person who has built an entire interpretive framework in which contempt for others registers as clarity.

What produces this framework is not some innate cynicism or personal failing but the real conditions under which we all labour. Late capitalism generates alienation at industrial scale—from our work, from each other, from any coherent sense of collective purpose—and then sells back to us various narcotics of the self, among which this posture of generalised contempt is one of the most accessible. When every institution demonstrably serves capital over people, when the state functions as landlord enforcement and corporate subsidy, when the media ecosystem profits from outrage and despair, the conclusion that “everything is bad” is not irrational—it is, in a crude sense, empirically supported. The problem is not that people arrive at pessimism but that the material conditions which produce it also strip away the tools for distinguishing between kinds and degrees of badness, between systemic violence and personal inconvenience, between the destruction of ecosystems and a rude barista.

This flattening serves power. When war and loud neighbours occupy the same affective register, when corporate ecocide and a political disappointment produce the same shrug, the capacity for political analysis—which depends entirely on the ability to identify where power concentrates and how it reproduces itself—collapses into aesthetic disgust. We stop asking who benefits and start performing exhaustion. The people who hold this posture never stand for anything because standing for something requires identifying a material contradiction and committing to its resolution, which is labour, which is collective, which demands precisely the solidarity that alienation has made feel impossible.

The ideological function of this nihilism is demobilisation dressed as sophistication. Capital does not need us to love it; it needs us to believe that nothing can be otherwise, that all positions are equally compromised, that commitment itself is naive. The person calling everyone a degenerate is not outside the system they claim to diagnose—they are its product and, in their paralysis, its instrument. Their beliefs do not cohere because they are not beliefs in any meaningful sense; they are reactions, mood-states elevated to worldview, shifting daily because they are anchored to nothing structural, no analysis of who owns what, who labours for whom, who decides and who suffers the decision.

We need commitments that are rooted in material analysis rather than sentiment—not a flag or a creed but a clear-eyed account of how the world is organised and for whose benefit, from which actual positions follow. This is what prevents the slide from legitimate anger into undifferentiated contempt: not optimism, which is just pessimism’s liberal twin, but the capacity to perceive gradient, to recognise that beauty persists next to rubble not as consolation but as evidence that the conditions which produce suffering are historically specific and therefore changeable.

If we look at the world and perceive nothing worth defending, no kindness operating against the grain of its incentives, no collective effort persisting despite every structural discouragement, then what we are performing is not realism but the learned helplessness that those who benefit from the present arrangement would prefer we all adopt. Misanthropy with a vocabulary is still just misanthropy, and it remains, in the final analysis, a gift to the people who made the world this way.