“It is not the literal past that rules us… It is images of the past.”
—George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle
Infinite Discontent is an anti-fascist multimedia project created by Alasdair Cannon, Nick Purdy, and Jacob Smith. Across posts written by Alasdair, and audio episodes and interviews featuring Jacob and Nick, it hopes to explore one of our most pressing political questions: how have liberal people and nations been seduced by far-right political movements today?
The Name
Our name comes from a statement made by Yanis Varoufakis in episode five of the excellent new documentary series, Eye of the Storm: The Political Odyssey of Yanis Varoufakis:
‘The establishment has always been in denial… They were the ones who used the name of social democracy in order to do favours to the bankers and in order to shift all the pain onto the innocent victims of the financial sector. Once you have the political centre, whether it’s the centre left or the centre right, participate in this crime against logic, the result is infinite discontent. Out of infinite discontent and hopelessness, one thing grows. Xenophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny. It is a mistake to believe that there is an almighty political clash between the establishment and the populists. I think of them as accomplices. They need each other… there is this vicious cycle, a process of positive reinforcement, between authoritarianism, austerity, and economic failure.’
Our Approach
Inspired by Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Adam Curtis’ documentaries and more, we tell a story about the last 80 years of the Western world’s political, economic, cultural and intellectual changes to develop an ‘emotional history’ of our present moment.
Moving between the stories of singular figures—David Bowie, Kanye West and Jordan B. Peterson among them—and panoramic views of historical events like the bombing of Hiroshima, the moon landing, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and 9/11, we show how a sense of groundlessness gradually opened at the heart of our culture. The anxiety and narcissism this groundlessness inspired, we say, eventually gave rise to the ‘infinite discontent’ and authoritarianism of today.
Our story is just that—a story, one of many one could tell about our era, our present, our futures. What our story hopes to show, though, is that politics is always emotional, and that our emotions are always political. That society defines our psychic life, while our psychic life makes up our society. That history is inscribed in our bodies, and that our bodies write history, too.
With these beliefs, we hope our story opens a new perspective on today’s far-right political movements, both for ourselves and our readers—one that might change the way we think and act in our world.
About the Author
Alasdair Cannon is a British-Australian writer based in London. The lead creator of the Infinite Discontent writing project, he is the author of Infinite Discontent: Writings on the Allure of Fascism (eidolon ink, 2024) and Holding Patterns (Bonfire Books, 2022). Co-editor and co-author of Psychoanalysis and Fascism: A Reader (Routledge, 2026), he holds an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies from Birkbeck, University of London.