Anyway, All The Dogs Are Howling a POSSIBLE FUTURES Podcast Exploration 1: Basics Conversation 3: Hopium More on this POSSIBLE FUTURES podcast at https://decolonise.possiblefutures.earth/anyway Samantha Suppiah: Hi, this is Samantha Suppiah and you are a fly on the wall here amongst the POSSIBLE FUTURES Collective. European colonisation has built what we now know as modern Western civilisation. This took centuries. This is a global civilisation that is busy consolidating what little that is left unconsolidated, reaching into the last frontiers to satisfy its commodification and profiteering mechanism to enrich its ruling classes. Why do we uphold this? What does it have going for it? It offers a paradigm that has always been incompatible with life on Earth. But what it offers is a veneer of progress, development, of hope. But is it really hope, when what is hoped for has never materialised, not for its subjects, the exploited classes, who have only experienced further or different forms of exploitations, different evolutions of colonial harms that continue to enslave without outright owning or governing overseas territories, or overtly seeking to destroy cultures and knowledges? In the early 18th century, China enjoyed a trade surplus with Europe, trading porcelain, silk, and tea in exchange for silver. By the late 18th century, the British East India Company was smuggling chests and chests of opium into China. This amounted by 1797 to 4,000 chests of opium per year. The British sought to force open China's markets to global trade by infiltrating mercantile centres with opium, leading to the Opium Wars that began China's Century of Humiliation. This was when China was compelled to sign unequal treaties granting favourable tariffs, trade concessions, reparations and territory to Western powers. This weakened the Chinese government's authority and forced China to open specified treaty ports (including Shanghai) to Western merchants. In addition, China ceded sovereignty of course over Hong Kong to the British Empire, and they maintained control over it until 1997. So this is how Britain used brute colonial force – which was only possible because of the looted colonial wealth – to do this opening up of China to exploitation. And the same is being done to everyone on earth through soft power of the Western development narrative, the sustainability narrative, infiltrating our cultures with a different drug called hopium. It's a narcotic based upon hope that is designed to cause addicts to cede power, agency, critical analysis, political integrity, you name it. It has created cultural narratives that feed identities through financial profit incentive structures based upon extractive and destructive processes of globalised capitalism. We are individuals with agency who continue to choose, today, this insanity, this hopium, that seeks to assure us that the powers that be have a good plan to bring us all into a beautiful wondrous future. Oftentimes today it’s based on the promise of technology, because – let's be real – every other so-called benefit that modern Western civilisation has tried to convince us all of has now been irrefutably proven false all along. Benefits like democracy, science, and comfort. Our ruling classes have proven time and time again that their rhetoric cannot be trusted. They say one thing and they do another. They act with impunity through brute force, and control narratives through their Giant Propaganda Machine, again, built with stolen colonial wealth. We have seen it many times through the decades since the end of WW2. How does hopium work on the level of the individual? How does it work within the cultural ideology instilled by modern Western civilisation? What does hopium addiction look like? What makes it powerful? How can folk tell whether something is hope or hopium? And how will the Hopium Wars end? — Anna Denardin: If opium was the drug of Empire, hopium is the drug of its decline. It’s pharmaceutical-grade optimism: glossy, palliative, and mass-distributed to keep people numbly functional through micro-doses of dopamine as the world around them falls apart. Hopium activates a cocktail of coping neurotransmitters: serotonin to soothe illusions of wellness, oxytocin to stimulate a sense of false community and false belonging, and cortisol anesthesia to dull the panic of existential dread. It piggybacks on denial, dissociation, willful blindness, and compartmentalization. It doesn’t solve collapse, it sedates the feeling of collapse. Hopium helps people endure uncertainty, offering the illusion of control, because confronting the truth and disinvesting from the fantasy often feels more painful than staying inside it. Letting go of hopium is like surrendering the last shreds of safety, certainty, and coherence that modern Western civilization promises. But does it truly deliver? Or is that just hallucination? A side effect? Is it anything more than wishful thinking in an expensive yet cringe designed package? We want to believe, so we do. False hope keeps us bound to unlivable situations, while blinding us to real, radical possibilities. It comforts colonial power by reframing collapse not as consequence, but as opportunity, a playground for innovation, branding, tech fixes, and profitable “solutions” offered by the same dominant actors who caused the crisis in the first place. Transformative change has never truly been attempted, because real transformation would require the system to reckon with its own obsolescence, and more than that, with its historic and ongoing violence. Hopium allows power to skip the reckoning. It is the myth that keeps the machine running as it cannibalizes itself. It’s how empire keeps breathing, even as every organ fails. And hopium just delays the funeral. — Luiza Oliveira: For me, hopium is the cultivated confusion that tries to camouflage itself as something positive, using good intentions as justifications. At the same time, that relies on the denial of the harm that has been created and that is still happening. Hopium is what allows abusive relationships to continue to be abusive in the name of “greater good”. Hopium permeates the individual and the collective experiences, and the many levels of hopium feed into one another, meaning that the individual ones feed the collective ones, and vice versa. Hopium is what keeps many entrapped, stuck, paralysed in the confusion from where to start breaking from these harmful cycles. Again, from personal to collective experiences. From an abusive family member to an exploitative social structure. The dynamics are very similar in many ways. And I’m not trying to say that breaking from hopium is easy. And yet, it’s a necessary step and process. Breaking from hopium requires one’s courage, strength and humbleness to look into the harm that has been done, that has been unfolded in many layers of trauma, without trying to justify it. And to go back and identify what has been harmed, who have been most harmed, what voices have been silenced, and for whose benefit. This might be a way to start to look at the power dynamics present in a certain context, that maybe back then, we, you and I, didn’t have, neither the intellectual understanding nor the emotional maturity to understand these different levels of power dynamics back then that were being played. This is an important step to start facing radical acceptance, and radical acceptance of what has happened, radical acceptance for what is happening, and radical acceptance for the magnitude that an unfolding of the harm inflicted. And hopium is addictive. It’s addictive because in a colonial context, it feels rewarding. But with time, it empties you from yourself, and everything around, and within you. Hopium is addictive because it encourages a specific kind of reward, colonial reward, that you learn to internalise as if they were your own values. With hopium, you don’t need to reckon with the past, you don’t need to face responsibility, you don’t need to look at your own heritage confusion and its unfoldings in your current relationships or context. And intentionally or not, you look for ways to focus on how to keep yourself alienated. Like all the colonial structures around you that have nurtured that in you for decades, influencing your decision-making process, modulating your memory and tempering your judgments. — Samantha Suppiah: Anna, your breakdown of the drug hopium's very real biochemical addiction mechanisms – that was FIRE. This is the validation that modern Western civilisation provides on the level of the individual, a mode of ethnocide that can be described as the carrot, while the stick of systemic economic and financial slavery strikes colonised bodies on the hour, every hour. Luiza, you raised how hopium strengthens through influencing relationships between individuals and their societies, a divide-and-conquer strategy destabilising entire nations while cultivating well-behaved, autonomous mental slaves who fervently trip over themselves to become the most visible and celebrated pro-bono hopium dealers. Precisely, these effects are what makes hopium powerful as a colonial strategy for ethnocide – the killing of traditional and indigenous cultures. It's what makes the development narrative work: the hope for progress, improvement, comfort. Making colonisation more palatable to the colonised. If you convince those you enslave that you can make slavery comfortable enough over time, the enslaved no longer seek freedom. They instead seek compliance, excellence and validation within slavery. They build identity complexes around these systems of compliance, excellence and validation, nurturing patience and so-called "resilience" in accordance with the slavemaster's whims. When this colonial system faces any form of challenge or attack, the enslaved, whose identities depend upon the success of this system, are well trained to jump up to defend it. Hopium works best when there is already a strong history and momentum of societal destruction via individual narcissism. This has been done by colonisation over the centuries. This is a society that has lost its will, knowledge, skills and experience in collaborating for collective liberation. This type of society exists across the Global South. Hopium is what breeds human population under modern Western civilisation's colonial hegemony, indoctrinating the enslaved to procreate so that the ruling classes have more to gain through extraction. This is not new. Hopium has brought us to planetary systems collapse. Colonial ethnocide at its finest, a propagandised drug cartel that faces little resistance. — Anna Denardin: Picking up from what Sam and Luiza laid down, hopium is designed to keep us emotionally hooked on the system that exploits us — willingly. So how do we tell hope from hopium? The test is simple: follow the power. Who benefits from the narrative? Who profits off the so-called “hope” being sold? At the systemic level, hope means changing who holds power: Returning land and decision-making to those harmed Building new systems to replace violent ones Stopping extraction at the root, not managing its symptoms Hopium pretends to change while power stays the same: Flashy sustainability plans while extractivism grows. Diverse faces in high places, but the same institutions beneath. Social programs that “help the poor” without changing why poverty exists. Offsetting harm, branding it, managing it, but never stopping it. Hopium preserves power and keeps empire running behind the scenes. On the individual level, it shows up just as clearly. Hope makes you aware of power and pulls you toward accountability. Hopium tells you to stay comfortable and bypass collapse. Hope is messy, grounded in accountability and discomfort. Hopium is rooted in fear: of losing privilege, image, certainty. Hope invests in slow, imperfect, consistent work. Hopium invests in quick fixes, gurus, and empty promises. That’s why hopium serves empire: It promotes passivity, self-soothing, and replaces real change with optics. If your “hope” demands selective amnesia, comfort for the privileged, sacrifice from the Global South, violence disguised as innovation… It’s not hope. It’s hopium. Once you see you’ve been microdosing hopium your whole life, how do you quit? Replace forced positivity with honesty. Sit with discomfort: let grief sharpen you. Swap performance for commitment: show up consistently. Prioritize repair over image: drop the masks. Collectively, break the performance contract: Stop diversity theatre, eco-theatre, healing theatre. Pull labor, money, attention away from extractive institutions. Instead of “reforming from the inside,” move your time, skills, care and resources into places that are building beyond empire, not polishing it. Practice accountability Here’s the truth: if your hope feels easy, convenient, risk-free, that’s not hope. That’s hopium. Real hope demands facing the pain we’ve been trained to avoid and dismantling power we have been trained not to question. So, what will you choose? The narcotic that numbs, or the truth that fuels transformation? — Luiza Oliveira: Exactly. I think this distinction that you made, Anna, between hope and hopium, is crucial to understand how to start breaking these cycles. And I think another thing that you mention that is important to remember, and I think it helps to navigate these spaces, to understand the difference between hope and hopium, is this element that hopium is designed to keep you emotionally hooked and blind to power dynamics. So, another important step I think is developing, as we often say, beyond the critical thinking, the critical feeling, and how colonial structures benefit and profit from our emotional vulnerability. So to develop this critical feeling is to develop emotional maturity, to learn how to go beyond our reactions, and reclaim our decision-making process. Knowing that this is not going to happen overnight, but where are the spaces that this kind of practice is possible? As you mentioned, if hope feels too easy, there is something wrong there. Not to romanticise suffering, it’s not that. To reckon with the present and the past, there’s a lot of tension involved. And if we are not able to lean into conflict, as a learning opportunity, there’s something there that is very harmful. — Samantha Suppiah: How can we tell hope from hopium? We live in an age of double-speak. We can no longer be sure what someone really means when they say something, like for example, that corrupted word "sustainability". Or even, as we discussed in our first conversation, "decolonisation". George Orwell grew up in British India, witnessed violent colonial systems in practice, and was extremely disturbed by it, even as he was himself of the colonial class. He acknowledged his positionality and took responsibility for it, becoming one of the greatest decolonial thinkers Britain has ever produced. This is how he wrote the book 1984, demonstrating colonial and fascist patterns in societal control, be it imposed by government, or self-policed. In 1984 we are introduced to what he called doublespeak, demonstrating in the infamous slogans of the Ministry of Truth: Peace is war, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. 1984 was a future prediction that coloniality would come home to roost, that the core of Empire would also become the colony of the increasingly wealthy coloniser class. But Orwell was merely extrapolating his experience, his observations, what he had witnessed growing up in Britain's largest colony, the wealthiest economy in the world that was drained of the healthy ecosystems, societies, cultures, and knowledges that made it wealthy. The Global South has been living in this world for centuries. This is a world in which co-optation and misappropriation are so rife that mistrust and skepticism dominates. In which facts are so difficult to access that most take the easiest path to comfort, to avoid confrontation and to nurse their false identities as a survival mechanism within a colonial world order. In this context, in this environment, it's not always possible to separate hope from hopium. This is an extremely blurred line – until you gain clarity, until you set your own boundaries, your own indicators, that you can justify and moderate. This is something we are very strict about as the POSSIBLE FUTURES Crew – communicating and enforcing our boundaries. How will the hopium wars end? Reality will bring the hopium wars to an end. Either the addiction will kill the addict, or the addiction will destroy the world. Perhaps we are now coming very, very close to doing both at the same time. — POSSIBLE FUTURES Crew: This is Anna Denardin. This is Luiza Oliveira. This is Samantha Suppiah. Anyway, all the dogs are howling.