My dream is that we can break free of the binary.

It is, at the present moment, difficult not to feel all around us a sense of profound disillusionment with the systems under which we live. When they aren’t failing outright they are horribly broken, horrifically skewed in favour of the very, very few.

The parole board fails in its own due diligence and violent offenders are released into the community where they commit further acts of violence among the populace. We live in a global surveillance state made possible by the collusion of the world's remaining superpower and the world's largest, most far reaching, privately-owned tech companies. Capitalist structures continue to oppress the poorest of our population in unassailable totality while the Government does nothing to ease their financial constraints but rather further penalises them for being poor. In pandering to voting bloc minorities our politicians break international conventions of human decency and send the world’s most vulnerable people to a hellhole they warn our own citizens not to travel to. The cost of tertiary education continues to rise while the job opportunities for graduates in their chosen fields dwindle exponentially. The cost of living in our major cities has risen, unchecked, to such previously unimaginable heights that an entire generation is locked out of the property market unless they are in a position of inherited wealth, dashing the hopes of young people to whom employers show no loyalty and for whom financial insecurity and its attendant anxiety has become a way of life.

The games are rigged. It is impossible, at times, as a rational, thinking person, to feel anything other than despair. The reality of the present moment is that these systems continue to function without us. That in actuality, their continued march is dependent on that very fact. Our present western liberal democracies do not tolerate well the kinds of mass-mobilized protest that in the not so distant past were able to affect real change: they have been so successfully in the intervening years neutered and dismantled. And so for us as individuals the only reasonable response that remains to these situations is pure, unadulterated anger.

But anger not tethered to action only coalesces into impotent rage. That kind of anger is masochistic. The anger that spurs action – meaningful action – is the only valuable kind that isn’t just self-serving. Perhaps it is too easy to confuse self-identifying as someone who is angry about the way things are with being someone who is actively engaged. What does it mean to be engaged? Within our democracy I take this to mean being well informed. Reading widely. Listening to people who don’t share your inclinations and points of view. Exercising your democratic rights, to vote, to assemble. Giving money to causes that you support. Petitioning your representatives. Beyond that there is lobbying and real-world – not digital – activism. There is joining the system in running as a candidate. These are things available to us, as individual agents. And it behoves us to remember that that is what we are, all we are.

Extraordinarily few people have ever or will ever live to reach a point of cultural saturation with their work so that it meaningfully changes that culture. This doesn’t mean that we should not strive to create that work ourselves, to hold that out as a hope or a goal or a reason for why we write. But only to be realistic about what each of us can really do, meaningfully do with our work in the public sphere and to not confuse howling into the void with having the rare and privileged position available to us where we possibly can change even one other person’s way of thinking with our ideas. Because in doing that lies real power.

In the wake of the George Zimmerman verdict in the United States where the defendant was acquitted of shooting dead an unarmed teenager it was clearly self-evident that a system had woefully failed. Anger coursed through the public discourse and spilled over into the streets where people in vast numbers protested the decision. Pressure was brought to bear on the legislature which allowed for the defence to be raised in the first place. But the law remains unrepealed. What also remains is a broiling sentiment of extraordinary anger.

On the day of the verdict the novelist and Twitter soothsayer Teju Cole posted an update:

“The basic question which no public event alters: how can I, myself, in my limited sphere of influence, be more just?”

We might not all be active political agents, but we do each have a life to lead. Please don’t confuse this sentiment with resignation, or with defeat. It is, for me, the opposite. In the face of the totalising systems that rule us, it is the power of personal agency that is our only recourse. To live a meaningful, admirable and responsible life treating well the people in our immediate, tiny world, that is the only true power we have. Let’s each of us never squander, or lose sight of that rarest of opportunities: to be alive, and not living in fear for one’s own life.

But to the question, what, as writers, do we do?

Begin with speaking only when you have something to say. Don’t, in the words of Charlie Brooker, contribute to the “vast cloud of blah,” that is the contemporary realm of Internet commentary and opinion. Don’t be “yet another factory mindlessly pumping carbon dioxide into a toxic sky.” Ask the first and most pertinent question of any writer: whose interests do I serve?

Anecdotal evidence is not evidence, a focus group of one is not a sample pool and neither are your friends. Your onus is to be right – not as in to win an argument, but to be correct, factually. Whose interests are being served? If it’s mainly your own, then rethink that piece. Can its essence be boiled down to a tweet? Then that’s all it warrants being. Just, shut up, mainly. Let other people speak. Speaking on behalf of minorities only oppresses them further, remember that. Editors, look beyond your insular world and grasp the responsibility of your position: not clicks and pageviews, but the public interest.

Our biggest responsibility is to not give up in the face of all this bullshit no matter how badly we might want to. Don’t let our anger curdle into apathy. Never disengage, as your tiny individual agencies are all we have. Borrow the Hippocratic oath and do no harm. Rather, – and I can never resist quoting song lyrics at times likes these – baring in mind to be more just in your limited sphere of influence, first look inward and then ‘do what you should’.

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