Three fugitives, one Wookiee and two droids run for their lives, Imperial stormtroopers in hot pursuit. Our heroes burst through a side door, blasters firing, but just as it seals, the floor drops away, plunging all but R2-D2 into the Death Star's garbage compactor—a filthy stinking mechanical swamp. In the eerie silence before the walls start closing in, Han Solo delivers the telling line: “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Fifty years on, that science fiction scene has become our collective reality. Climate change and biodiversity loss, twin drivers of the planetary crisis, close in from one direction; inequality and armed conflict from the other. With every passing day, our collective room for maneuver is further diminished.
How did our heroes escape? Not by accepting their fate. R2-D2 figures out how the compactor works and shuts it down. Inside, the others refuse to surrender to inevitability. They keep moving, keep experimenting, keep buying time. Even then, danger remains in the form of the Dianoga, the unseen predator that suddenly drags Luke under. He fires blindly and it releases him—wounded but very much alive.
Entering the year 2026, what monster lurks in these dark waters? Artificial intelligence? Billionaires and their broligarchs? Fossil fuel conglomerates? Authoritarians? No. The monster lies within, inside our heads. It is defeatism itself, the misplaced conviction that the walls cannot be stopped, so putting up a fight is pointless.
Like the Dianoga, defeatism will always be there, lurking beneath pressure and fear. The task is not to destroy it (impossible in any case) but to refuse to let it decide the outcome. If you have a bad gut feeling, act on it!
