Hope is Catalytic (Exclusive For Members)

Hopium. That curious neologism of our digital moment, a word forged in the meme-forge of the internet to describe hope as if it were a narcotic, a delusory vapor inhaled by the naïve to dull the sting of reality. The cynic wields the word as a weapon, sneering: “You’re just smoking hopium,” meaning your optimism is not courage but a chemical fantasy, a way of refusing to face the brutal truth.

And yet, let us examine this more carefully. Is hope always a drug, an intoxicant that blinds? Or is it sometimes a medicine, a plant ally that expands the horizon of the possible? The line between anesthesia and initiation is thin. Yes, hopium can be a form of anesthesia—think of the endless promises that “change is around the corner,” while the machinery of exploitation grinds on. In this sense, hope becomes not an act of courage but a sedative, keeping populations passive, docile, always waiting for tomorrow’s miracle rather than demanding transformation today.

But dismissing all hope as “hopium” is itself another kind of intoxication—the intoxication of despair. For despair, too, is a drug, a narcotic of certainty: “Nothing will change, nothing can change.” The problem is not hope itself, but the quality of the hope. False hope—hope that demands no action, that requires no imagination—is indeed hopium. But fierce hope, hope that burns, hope that drives people into mass organizing and uprising, into art, into experiment—that is not narcotic, that is catalytic.

So when someone accuses you of inhaling hopium, you might ask them: “What is the alternative you are offering? The opiate of despair?” Better, perhaps, to risk the hallucination of hope, for at least hallucinations have a way of becoming reality if believed in strongly enough. All great changes, all revolutions, began as “hopium”—dreams derided as naïve until they crystallized into the world we now inhabit.

The real question, then, is not whether hope is a drug, but whether it is the drug that numbs or the drug that awakens. Psychedelics themselves are often dismissed as delusion, but we know they can open the psyche to realities more real than the so-called real. So too with hope. It can sedate, or it can illuminate. The work is to learn the difference.