The year that’s past was a season of fear. Next to the onslaught of anxiety, hope and optimism seem powerless, if not downright foolish. As a motivating force, hope is more fragile, harder to inspire, easier to lose sight of. Fear is a powerful motivator and easy to conjure – but only hope can lead us into a better world.

In 2015, the brutal violence of the Syrian civil war, which gave rise to a wave of refugees on Europe’s doorstep, metastasized into bloody terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. In the US, fear and xenophobia is now the theme of the Republican presidential primary. Donald Trump led the way, openly appealing to bigotry in his call to bar all Muslims from the US, but the other candidates weren’t far behind.

It’s not just war and bloodshed that stirred up anxiety in the past 12 months. Between global economic stagnation, a ballooning wealth gap, the ebbing of the middle class and the routine spectacle of gun violence, many voters feel as if the tectonic plates are shifting under their feet, breaking up all old certainties, carrying them away from the world they’re used to.

It’s this sense of dislocation and worry for the future that fascist-inflected, rightwing demagogues like Trump exploit by promising a return to an imaginary past era of greatness.

There’s no doubt that fear is a powerful motivator. It’s a primal emotion, easy to stoke, easy to exploit. The specter of losing your home, your job, your country is a visceral image, readily conjured up by a few choice words. Once unleashed, fear quickly turns into anger – and people who are afraid and angry can be counted on not to think calmly, logically or critically. In the throes of emotion, they’re readily convinced to march behind a strongman who vows to protect them whatever the cost.

But while it’s a valuable tool for demagogues, fear is corrosive to society as a whole. It can’t help us solve our problems; it can’t nurture compromise, foster peace or encourage us to make wise choices. Fear can only lead us to retreat from the world, shut out new ideas, harden our defenses – or, worse, lash out in random spasms of aggression.

Still, if you look beyond the tumult of sensational headlines and well-publicized atrocities, there’s a quiet trend of improvement throughout the world. But although it’s sometimes drowned out by the drumbeat of fear-mongering, the progress that gives rise to hope is real and ongoing.

The biggest story of the year, and perhaps for years to come, was the Paris climate accord. While this deal won’t fully decarbonize the economy or completely halt the ravages of climate change, it represents a clear milestone: a recognition of the urgency of the problem and the global will to stop it. Even if all it does is buy us time, that may be enough: renewable energy is growing exponentially, plummeting in price and displacing dirty, poisonous fossil fuels.

Steven Pinker writes of the “rights revolutions” in which disfavored groups like people of color, women and children spoke up to demand recognition of their humanity, and LGBT people are experiencing that same transition. The cause of equality took some giant strides in 2015, as the US enacted marriage equality and Ireland, shrugging off its Catholic-theocratic past, became the first country to do the same by overwhelming popular vote.

Beyond advances in human rights, the world is also getting better in more tangible ways. The World Bank estimates that as of this year, fewer than 10% of people are living in extreme poverty, for the first time ever. In China and India, economic growth has lifted a billion human beings out of grinding poverty. Africa, long stereotyped as a permanent backwater, is also improving in nearly every measure: literacy, education, food supply, democracy, economic growth. And despite the looming specter of climate change, the world is better prepared than ever for natural disasters, as we saw when a massive earthquake in Chile and one of the most powerful hurricanes ever caused virtually no casualties.

We can glimpse even bigger changes coming in the near future. Self-driving cars offer the promise of responding with software speed and unblinking alertness, promising an end to the tens of thousands of deaths from car crashes every year. A versatile and powerful new technology called CRISPR could wipe out dreaded inherited diseases. Medicine continues to advance, creating new therapies – face transplants, organ regeneration, robotic prosthetics, even suspended animation for trauma victims – that would have been the stuff of fantasy a generation ago.

There are no guarantees in history, of course, and it’s possible that any of these progressive trends could stall out or reverse. But it’s equally possible that they’ll continue their upward climb.

In spite of the prejudice, ignorance, selfishness and all the other impediments that drag us downwards, there are billions of people who want a better, brighter life for themselves and their descendants – who want to be free from fear and want. When combined with the foresight and ingenuity we’re capable of in our best moments, this is a powerful force for good that congenital pessimists are far too hasty to dismiss.