Just like Fight Club or The Matrix, the wave of revolutionary protest-battles also has a mindblowing ending. When those outside the neoliberal west defeat their regime in the streets, they face a daunting choice: a return to even greater despotism, or an advance into a neoliberal realm whose foundations are rotting away. Decadent, venal, ineffective, stratified, anxiety-ridden, stumbling from one declared crisis to the next—who wants that? People convinced there is no alternative, that’s who.

Well, here’s something about humans: for us, there’s always an alternative. We’d rather dream like amateurs than turn professional at living out our nightmares. For still-growing numbers in the neoliberal West, life is marked above all by a disabling collapse of meaning, vitality, and possibility. Ostensibly free, we discover how grueling it is to compete for position with the billions of people on an equal playing field. Ostensibly free, we discover how our inequality with the talented, ambitious few makes competition against them pretty much impossible. Ostensibly free, we watch as the most powerful 0.01% fuse public and private life into a closed system of lowered horizons and narrowed choices.

It took Tyler Durden a while to accept he was Tyler Durden. It took Neo a while to accept he was Neo. This is no coincidence. The president of the United States even told us that we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for. But if this is not true in our hearts, it can never be true in our world.