Grief

By Darcy Harris

As a grief theorist and researcher, I have been exploring and writing extensively on the topic of political grief, which I define as the following:

1. A poignant sense of assault to the assumptive world of those who struggle with the ideology and practices of their governing bodies and/or those who have power/authority.
2. Losses experienced as a result of historical or contemporary political policies, decisions, and actions that give rise to division, oppression, and/or marginalisation enacted and empowered at the sociopolitical level.
3. Loss of life, safety, and/or security due to decisions and actions made by those with power, authority, and/or influence in the sociopolitical sphere.

Grief can occur after any form of significant loss, whether as the result of someone’s demise or the death of ideals, hopes, and dreams. Grief is a response and not a primary emotion, which means it can be accompanied by many feelings that are highly variable and unique. While the losses associated with political grief can be both tangible (loss of freedoms, relationships, or income) and intangible (loss of ideals, values, or identity), the primary emotions associated with political grief seem to be anxiety, disgust, outrage, and exhaustion. In contrast, the death of a loved one usually elicits sadness, anger, and, at times, guilt.

Many researchers and theorists think the political situation we are witnessing today is the result of people feeling threatened as a result of, among others, financial hardship, instability in formerly stable markets, feeling displaced by post-modernist views and ideals, and the influence of threat-based social media and biased news coverage. This creates a reactivity that is fostered by our threat system, which then leads to more division, polarisation, and naturally, an even greater sense of threat. It is a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle, and it is destroying our sense of connection with each other and the ability to think in “big picture” ways that may allow us to come together and stand up against governments and powerful oligarchs for the sake of the common good.

Thus, the first step towards navigating the political mess of our era is to find ways to “dial down” our threat system through practices that allow us to see the bigger picture. To achieve this, we must limit our exposure to inflationary discourse – such as that attacking others’ political views and personhood – and refrain from activities that drive further division. When we grieve collectively, respectfully, and with care, we can coalesce around our common humanity rather than being driven by our differences.

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Extended Reality

By Rūta Kazlauskaitė

Writing in 1922, American writer and reporter Walter Lippmann warned that democracy was increasingly at risk. He observed that media put “pictures in our heads”, or “pseudo-environments” in our minds, that can distort how people perceive themselves and others, what issues they deem important, and whom they vote for. Today, immersive extended reality (XR) technologies such as virtual reality (VR) raise the stakes of that observation. In 2021, Meta, the company most invested in advancing XR, presented its vision for “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it”. What happens when media technologies no longer merely transmit images to be looked at but instead offer an embodied, multisensory experience, allowing users to touch, move, and interact within an immersive environment? When storytelling turns into storyliving in XR, “pictures in our heads” become visceral, felt through our bodies, and remembered as personally lived experiences.

Immersive virtual worlds are spaces of meaning-making. Rather than simply representing ideas, VR allows meaning to be lived. When users are immersed in stories or worlds charged with emotional and physical intensity, cultural scripts and the values embedded in them can be experienced as if they were the users’ own, derived from lived experience. For example, in Poland, state-funded VR productions on Polish history invite users to relive immersive stories of national heroism and martyrdom. Designed to elicit feelings of victimhood, fear, pride, and belonging, these experiences simulate hostile encounters with enemies and encourage users to align themselves with their in-group.

Authoritarian and illiberal regimes are increasingly harnessing XR as a technology of emotional conditioning. In China, immersive “red culture” education pavilions allow users to experience, with full-sensory stimulation, the history of the Chinese Communist Party. In Russia, state-controlled media network RT has produced a VR experience that repurposes Holocaust memory to reinforce the narrative of the “Great Patriotic War” (1941-1945). Such applications of XR are not about historical understanding but emotional scripting.

With XR hardware now increasingly incorporating a variety of biometric sensors and neurotechnologies, immersive realism becomes a vehicle for data extraction, surveillance, and behavioural influence. These technologies create new possibilities for tracking and influencing emotional states. Even the European Commission has proposed the creation of Citiverses and virtual worlds to facilitate policymaking with citizen participation using VR, neurotechnologies, and brain-computer interfaces. The danger here is not just manipulation but the gradual erosion of cognitive and emotional autonomy: the capacity to reflect, to dissent, and to recognise that what is felt as “real” may, in fact, be a designed experience, made to alter how you feel. Freedom, in this context, means resisting affective manipulation and upholding cognitive liberty as a fundamental human right.

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Hope

By Charles Devellennes

The French art de vivre is characterised by a range of emotions. For Charles Baudelaire, it was ennui – boredom associated with the Belle Époque; in Jean-Paul Sartre’s work, it was a certain malaise, i.e., an anxiety about one’s own existence in the world; and for Victor Hugo, it was pathos, or the love of desperate situations. It was thus surprising when Emmanuel Macron mobilised the emotion of hope leading up to and during his two terms as president. Hope seemed too American, too optimistic for the French obsession with ennui, malaise, and pathos. When he moved into the Élysée Palace, Macron put up the work “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” by Shepard Fairey, the artist who designed Barack Obama’s iconic “Hope” poster. It symbolised a new hope for Marianne, the personification of the nation in art, depicted as a classical beauty with flowers in her hair instead of the revolutionary figure in Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting “Liberty Leading the People”.

This hope underpins Macron’s vision for France: hope for creating a start-up nation able to compete with Silicon Valley; hope for European unity under French leadership; and lastly, hope against the “extremes” – the political rivals that threaten to pull France away from centrism.

Hope is a natural human emotion. In the face of great disasters, the uncertainty of life, or unlikely odds, hope can be a powerful motivator. But hope, as the philosopher Spinoza saw it, is essentially an emotion of uncertainty. We mobilise hope only when we cannot know the outcome. The problem, for Spinoza, begins when hope turns into disappointment, and when the desire for a particular outcome is left unfulfilled. Macron hoped to defeat the far-right Rassemblement National when he called for snap elections in June 2024, but after the election, the party had gained a record number of seats in the National Assembly, plunging France into political instability. At the same time, as recession reared its head, hope for French economic leadership in Europe faded.

Instead of hope, as I argue in my book The Macron Régime, it is better to mobilise other emotions, such as solidarity. In the face of natural disasters, uncertainties, and conflicts, hope’s high chances of devolving into despair are too dangerous for 21st-century politics. Solidarity can be much more helpful in mobilising society to create a more liveable future. It can also equip us with the tools needed to navigate the current period of political crisis by establishing networks of mutual aid, enabling a redistribution of resources, and promoting fair access to care.