The Tyranny of Inevitability: How the Crisis of Imagination Threatens Democracy
Photo by Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash
By Ikram Ben Said
Many people celebrated the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of one of the world’s wealthiest cities. They weren’t New Yorkers awaiting rent freezes or free buses. Still, people elsewhere are searching for a flicker of hope, a proof that even in this moment of global crisis, someone can still defy the tyranny of inevitability. In a democracy dulled by cynicism and increasingly governed by capital, where money so often dictates political outcomes, Mamdani’s victory was a quiet revolt: A reminder that something different is still possible.
In the Middle East and North Africa, where I engage with civil society and social movements, that tyranny feels heavier by the day. Through years of work, activism, and conversations with organizers and civil society actors, I’ve come to recognize a painful pattern: we are excellent at diagnosing problems but far less able to imagine alternatives. It’s not because we lack creativity, it’s because exhaustion has become our political condition.
Frontline activists across the region are, for entirely valid reasons, deeply burned out, worn down by dictatorships, shrinking civic space, and wars that have become background noise. In such conditions, survival becomes a full-time job. When people are running on empty, the mind instinctively focuses on the next crisis rather than the next decade.
There is growing evidence that trauma doesn’t just live in the body; it reshapes the brain’s ability to imagine the future. Neurological studies show that the hippocampus, a brain region essential for memory and imagination, is often impaired in people exposed to chronic stress or trauma. When that happens, people can struggle to envision alternative futures. In societies under siege by dictatorship, war, or collapse, imagination itself becomes a casualty of violence.
But there is another, quieter force behind this crisis of imagination: the INGO-ization of our movements. The professionalization of civil society over the past decades has reshaped activists into project managers, trained to operate at the speed of funding cycles. The logic of logframes, KPIs, and quarterly deliverables has disciplined us to think in increments — quarters, not generations. We’ve become skilled at managing risk, less so at taking creative leaps. Imagination, once the beating heart of movement-building, is now treated as a luxury rather than a strategic necessity. Unlearning this mindset will take time, intention, and care.
Further, the shrinking of funding will not just limit what civil society can afford, it will reshape how it thinks. As resources decrease, a scarcity mindset begins to dominate. People become more protective, less collaborative. Competition replaces solidarity, and survival eclipses strategy. When activists are preoccupied with securing the next grant, it becomes harder to imagine, let alone build, alternative futures. The psychological shift is profound: scarcity doesn’t only constrain budgets, it contracts vision. It pulls people out of the horizon of the next decade and locks them into the urgency of the next deadline.
“Creativity means to revolt against injustice,” said Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi. In our region, that revolt begins not only in the streets, but in the radical act of imagining something beyond what we’re told is possible. Still, I refuse to live in a future designed by others simply because we were too exhausted to imagine our own. Naming exhaustion is not surrender; it’s a form of truth-telling. It frees us, myself included, from the romanticized expectation that grassroots activists are always ready to envision bold futures and map creative paths to get there. Many are simply surviving, and that is not a failure. It is a testament to the conditions we’ve been forced to endure. But if we want to recover our capacity to imagine, we must widen the circle.
There is a second line of actors: Thinkers, writers, artists, and public intellectuals, who may not be in confrontation with the regime. You won’t always find them at protests or in conferences, but they move fluidly between the worlds of activism, strategy, and ideas.
Our role is to bring them together and create the conditions for their imagination to breathe again. This is not about establishing a hierarchy, but about recognizing that movements require diverse forms of energy. People contribute in different ways, at different moments. When frontline activists are exhausted, as many are, it is not a failure for others to step in; it is a necessary act of continuity. We lose too much when we exclude this group from our collective struggle.
I learned this lesson early, growing up under Ben Ali’s dictatorship in Tunisia. I was fortunate to be exposed to, learn from, and build friendships with people in the opposition. Back then, resistance didn’t exist only within harassed political parties; it thrived in parallel spaces. It lived in the theatre of Jalila Baccar and Fadhel Jaïbi, in the discreet gatherings of leftist lawyers and feminists, and in the union halls of the UGTT. They didn’t need donor funding to convene or spend their energy on logistics. They met in homes and in doctors’ offices after the last patient had left. These were doctors, artists, professors, and teachers who dared to envision democracy under authoritarian rule. They met, they debated, they wrote, and in doing so, they kept alive the fragile but vital belief that change was still possible. From them, I learned my first lessons in activism before I, too, became co-opted by the very system I am seeking to challenge.
When the revolution finally broke through, it was this same circle that helped hold the country together. They defended the civic nature of the state, drafted electoral laws, ensured women’s equal participation, and worked to keep institutions from collapsing. It wasn’t perfect. They carried the trauma of dictatorship, and their reflexes sometimes betrayed it, but they showed what imagination can do when history cracks open.
I share Gil Scott-Heron’s conviction that the revolution will not be televised, but I would add: it must first be imagined. I’m too realistic to anticipate another wave of revolutions in our region. But cracks in the system are inevitable. Whether sparked by a surprise election in New York or a protest in Khartoum, history has a way of rupturing what once felt permanent. When those moments arrive, we must be ready with people, with purpose, and with ideas that dare to dream beyond the now.
Let us resist the dictators who silence and suppress, but let us also resist the quieter tyrants that take root in our own minds: the ones named despair, fatigue, and inevitability. Because the deepest tyranny is not only the brute force of authoritarian rule, it is the slow erosion of our capacity to imagine that something else is possible and the creative will to bring it into being.
Ikram Ben Said
Feminist
Co-Founder of New Visions.
