Hope

[The2ndWheel]

I found this article in relation to another post, but thought it might be a decent enough topic by itself. Maybe it won't be, but I hope it is.

http://www.orionsociety.org/pages/om/06-3om/Jensen.html

We've all been taught that hope in some future condition—like hope in some future heaven—is and must be our refuge in current sorrow. I'm sure you remember the story of Pandora. She was given a tightly sealed box and was told never to open it. But, being curious, she did, and out flew plagues, sorrow, and mischief, probably not in that order. Too late she clamped down the lid. Only one thing remained in the box: hope. Hope, the story goes, was the only good the casket held among many evils, and it remains to this day mankind's sole comfort in misfortune. No mention here of action being a comfort in misfortune, or of actually doing something to alleviate or eliminate one's misfortune.

The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.

Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying "Hope and fear chase each other's tails," not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is.

More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn't believe—or maybe you would—how many magazine editors have asked me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to leave readers with a sense of hope. But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here's the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

[phusion]

1. Derrick Jensen is an amazing writer and person...

I recommend his book The Culture of Make Believe...It's really an eye opener.

Thanks for the link!

[PATRICK]

2. Like anything else

it can be and very generally debased. My power of hope is fueled one way. That evil cannot endure. That the good is always better, wiser. To say that mankind with its debased, escapist versions of everything good but difficult, can always, certainly, win out against easy and potentially totally destructive evil and that certainty of winning(or being rescued ignominiously) is somehow guaranteed with a complete mystery as to our present participation is illogical. Most religions realistically offer the doomsday scenario and hope thus transcends the human condition. Since that is granted in wisdom it is taken advantage of in foolishness by aforementioned weak humans to make things possibly even worse than they would have been without that particular abusive illusion.

The certainty is that reality will usually or eventually prevail and that human evil is not based on hard-nosed universal darwinism but on suicidal illogic, its own twisted version of absolutely delusional hope in a box. By the math, hope is a loser on most if not all fronts, can sneak in by chance or luck or by allying to real wisdom and real opportunities. When good times are or seem on a roll hope looks so good even the bad guys are encouraged to use it more to their advantage in all its popular forms. Twisting the addled myths destructively to a black hole.

Without thinking inordinately too high of ourselves and our opinions or our abilities in a large, seething universe that seems to have pretty harsh limits and mortality of its own, hope has to be present
in building ideals that may come or may not, but are better, more real and more like the progressing universe than the reverse. I know false hope is doomed. I know real hope is possibility. Possibility doesn't mean inaction or no responsibility or assuredness of result or superiority or the absolute of absolutes. It means a foretaste, a longing, a goodness as a signpost and a work in progress. If we were totally there it wouldn't be hope. Hope is reality in the universe as long as we participate toward life. Sometimes, not unrealistically, we can be carried away by its power into having that absolute feeling of hope no matter what the present circumstances. Hopefully, the future will find this affirmed and the lies gone. So hope can build on hope while the false rots away in the lie. Behind all stripping away of all delusions is courageous hope.