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Introduction: Organizing hope: Narratives for a better future

According to thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman (2017a) and Wolfgang Streeck (2016), the current social world is ruled by a crumbling, morbid system. Old social institutions are failing and no new ones have yet emerged. This state in between ruling institutions has been labeled the interregnum by Bauman (2012), using Antonio Gramsci’s metaphor. “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 276), Gramsci foretold. Rather than literally denoting an era after the death of one sovereign yet before the enthronement of a new monarch, in today’s late global capitalism an interregnum denotes “times of uncertainty, and while [it is] raising many questions, three of them seem particularly pertinent to address at a time when rulers no longer can rule and the ruled no longer wish to be ruled: institutional disparity, the future of migrants and the endurability of the planet” (Bauman, 2012, p. 51). The structures that once supported collective social action (Bauman, 2012) and which enabled more or less smooth self-regulation of economic mechanisms (Streeck, 2016) have lost their taken-for-granted character and often reveal their powerlessness to solve any of the mounting problems that face humanity and the planet. The usual resourcefulness and responsibility that seemed to be found at the bottom of modernity are giving way to direct violence and what looks like a relentless raid on the common good, blatant malice, greed, mounting fear, uncertainty and a sense of powerlessness. Humanity seems to have betrayed its values or, with the rapid dismantling and discarding of the institutions that once held memory and social identity, such as academia and eldership, it may even look as if it never really had them, as if it all were a dream or a lie. Humans however depend on making sense of the world and life, perhaps as much as on nourishing their bodies for survival and so on. In times of rabid meaninglessness, we fill the unbearable void with whatever we are able to find, such as simplified and idolized images of “what it used to be