From a comment by me, elsewhere

We as a species have always suffered from various depravities, be they slavery (which continues to this day in a black market), murder, rape, and war. These things existed a thousand years ago, and I highly doubt that they will be eradicated 1000 years in the future. What has changed is the technology that allows us to kill (and save lives) much more efficiently, and the media that allows for the rapid dissemination of information. I don't know the ultimate end of these changes, but my guess is that as broadcasting information gets cheaper, the forces above he despises will lose power, or have already lost some power. I think we're in a better place than we were 90 years ago, when women in this country were first allowed the ballot.

That doesn't mean that the future cannot be seen as black now, but instead that the future was black in the American Revolutionary War, when Washington's army froze at Valley Forge, and that the future was black at Gettysburg as the South fought to retain a right for slavery and the Union fought to retain the South in a war that was enabled by decades of failed leadership, and that the future was black when Bull Connor unleashed dogs and hoses at the marchers in the civil rights movements, and that the future was black all of those years Nelson Mandela sat in prison.

But the King's army was defeated, and the Union maintained, and slavery ended, and civil rights won, and apartheid ended, not because we saw the world as inherently flawed and worthy of condemnation, but because we know that " the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." - MLK

I think hope is a much better motivator than despair.