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Sometime in 2010 I was having dinner with a conservative friend of mine, the topic had drifted to things we were learning in our first year at university. My political science teacher taught me about the impermanence of the nation state, that one day there wouldn’t be a Canada, nor even a western world order. My friend bawked at this as liberal nonsense, he held steadfast that the status quo was forever despite my attempts to persuade him. We had many political disagreements that we often hashed out over nachos at this overpriced casual restaurant, but this was the first time he was outright offended by something I had said. His exact words were “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,”

Fast forward to 2026. I’m on a bus ride to Dungeons and Dragons night. That conservative friend and I had long stop speaking to one another, and the political polarization had intensified and calcified into hardened positions. I had become an avowed communist, and the last I saw of him he had become a Trump supporting racist (and rapist, for that matter. I digress.) The bus takes me past blocks of Vancouver’s dark and uninteresting neighbourhoods. I think a lot about how a society builds its spaces says a lot about what it believes in; in Vancouver’s case it’s a city more for cars than people. I knew I had some time to kill before the game but there was basically nothing to do that didn’t involve spending money, a predicament that struck me as very deliberate. In a walk-able environment you bump into people, you make new contacts or run into old ones. A properly designed walk-able environment is interesting to the pedestrian, you have history or green space, art installations, places to sit and be part of the environment as much as the trees or plazas. My bus ride took me from point a to b efficiently, but it didn’t let me exist in the world around me as a participant, merely an observer.

It occurs to me that we’re probably just going to keep building cities this way until some massive change happens, but as a society we stopped envisioning change. The repetitive blandness of capital has permeated culture, the same Starbucks popping up a dozen times on my bus ride is the same genre as the back-rooms creepypasta or the endless corporate labyrinth in the series Severance. We’re awash in reboots, remakes, sequels but nothing original. My conservative friend hated the idea of impermanence because he was incapable of imagining an alternative to what was around him: the shitty overpriced nachos, the mass produced art on the walls, the same chain restaurants in every small city in Canada.

This is the mentality of the right. They do not believe in a future, and the consequence is that they believe in a death cult. Society isn’t supposed to evolve, merely looted under their purview. Things like climate change are dismissed because it gets in the way of their permanent status quo, imperialism continues unabated because they cannot conceive of consequence, and at the heart of it all is bland, sterile, faceless capital, infinite in hunger but singularly unremarkable in form. There’s only one way out of this: we must think of society like Dungeons and Dragons where story is collaborated upon, created, and imagined.