The current state of U.S. politics feels dark. I am reminded of the same uneasy feeling I had as a teenager reading Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”
The novella was not simply a story about a man’s journey up the Congo River; it was a journey into the human psyche, an examination of what happens when morality is eroded by power, and when ambition becomes unmoored from conscience.
As I watch the unraveling of civility in our political life, I am reminded of the moral decay Conrad wrote about more than a century ago. The parallels are uncomfortable, but undeniable. Then, as now, the darkness was not an external enemy. It lived within men and women who believed they were righteous.
Today, our national discourse has grown caustic. The current administration and much of the political apparatus surrounding it seem governed by a grim worldview: that one side must win and the other must lose. The architecture of this worldview is zero-sum. A mindset that insists on the success of one group must come at the direct expense of another. It has turned our politics into a perpetual struggle for dominance rather than progress. The dividend of triumph for one faction is, implicitly, the forfeiture of opportunity and dignity for someone else.
This is the darkness that now clouds D.C. The American people, weary and anxious, are once again collateral damage in a political war fought by those who see governing as a competition rather than a calling.
Conrad wrote of the journey upriver as a descent into a moral abyss, a place where “the wilderness had found him out.” In our own time, the wilderness is ideological extremism. It has found us out. We have built a system that rewards outrage over integrity, division over collaboration. Every televised debate, every online comment thread, every campaign ad seems to reinforce the belief that there can be no shared light, only opposing shadows.
Our leaders have forgotten that governance is not a zero-sum game; it is a collective endeavor. Democracy was never meant to be about crushing one’s opponent into submission, but rather about reconciling differences through reason, dialogue and compromise, words that seem like relics of a bygone era.
The consequences of this mindset are not abstract. They are painfully real. Millions of Americans face mounting challenges and the most vulnerable among us become pawns in a cynical game of leverage and delay.
What’s worse is how accustomed we’ve become to this dysfunction. Outrage has become background noise. Scandal fatigue has dulled our sense of urgency. Many citizens, exhausted by the endless churn of political warfare, have retreated from public engagement altogether. That, perhaps, is the most dangerous darkness of all: not the corruption of leaders, but the quiet resignation of the governed.
But I refuse to believe that this is who we are destined to be. History offers us a different story, one of resilience and moral renewal. America’s greatest progress has always emerged from its darkest hours — from the embers of civil war, from the depths of economic depression, from the blood-stained streets of the civil rights movement. Each time, light has returned because ordinary people refused to surrender to despair.
We must reclaim that spirit. We must reject the false notion that for one person to succeed, another must fail; that for one community to rise, another must fall. America’s promise has always been expansive enough to include everyone. The true measure of our democracy is not how much one side wins, but how well we lift each other together.
To do that, we must first confront our own inner darkness. Each of us carries, as Conrad wrote, “the fascination of the abomination.” The temptation to dehumanize those who disagree with us, to dismiss them as ignorant or evil, is strong, but it is precisely that instinct that feeds the zero-sum machine. If we want our politics to heal, we must start with empathy. We must learn to see humanity in one another again.
We also need leaders who understand that light is not found in dominance, but in service. Power without purpose corrodes the soul of any nation. Leadership, at its best, is not about the accumulation of authority; it is about stewardship, humility and accountability. We should demand no less from those who govern in our name.
I have faith that we can still find our way out of the wilderness. It will not be through one election cycle or one administration, but through a collective awakening. A recognition that our destinies are bound together. The health of our democracy depends not on who wins the next argument, but on whether we still believe in the same fundamental truth: that every person has equal worth and every community deserves light.
When I first read The Heart of Darkness, I was haunted by the closing words, Kurtz’s dying whisper: “The horror! The horror!” It was a warning about what happens when people lose their moral compass in pursuit of power. Yet, even in that darkness, Conrad suggests that awareness is the first step toward redemption. To recognize the darkness is to begin seeking the light.
That is where I find myself today, searching for the light amid the dim corridors of our political age. It will take courage to turn the lights back on in Washington, to remind our leaders, and ourselves, that democracy was never meant to be a contest of annihilation. It was meant to be a covenant of hope. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Johnny V. Boykins is a political organizer, husband and bow tie aficionado.
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