Despair is rational. AND despair is self-fulfilling. Both are true at the same time. Despair is accurate about the present obstacles. The obstacles are real. But despair about inevitability is a prediction, not an observation. You can accurately see every reason things might fail and still be inaccurate about whether failure is inevitable.
Dystopian imagination is alive and well. We can imagine horrible futures just fine. But we have lost the capacity to imagine better futures. We have taught ourselves to treat optimistic imagination as a character flaw, as naivety, as privilege. We have made it a sign of weakness to imagine that things could improve.
Imagination without belief is just fantasy. You can imagine a better future in art and entertainment, then accept that it is impossible and move on. We have created a cultural moment of exactly this. We rehearse dystopia as a way to work through anxiety and prepare ourselves for catastrophe.
But underneath the collapse of imagination and belief is the collapse of coordination. And unlike imagination or belief, this is something we can actually rebuild.