The Death and Perfect Resurrection of Hope

Introduction: The Crisis of Our Time

To reach for hope in our current moment may feel as futile as a corpse wishing to smell the blooms of summer, or an ant wishing to fly like a raptor. Reaching for hope can feel like an impossibility.

Tremendous hurricanes of forces destroy hope at every daybreak. The men of power and capital wish to maintain us not as a species of forward individuation, but of complacency. These powerful few wish to puppet our lives on the strings of their money and ambitions.

We have been scorned by past visions of hope that grew weakly, were smothered, and bore nothing unto our souls—visions that faltered with time and grew to poison our ideas. We regard the images of the world we meet each day as the darkest night, so much so that the concept of a better future emerges as more fictional than real.

Amidst these assaults, we are castles of hope that have been besieged and invaded—corrupted, pillaged, and violated on the inside, perhaps. But our great walls still stand, and our duty is to expel the invaders rather than capitulate entirely. Attacks on our goodness, we must remember, are weak and fallible when pushed against our truly unstoppable human spirit.

There is no violence powerful enough to defeat the infinite future. Hope can prevail, but we must choose it.

Understanding True Hope

The first of our priorities must be to understand hope truly, earnestly, and deeply. Let us reject the notion of hope as some passive, transient thing that exists with all the gust of a stone sitting in a garden. To hope is not to lay idly and expect great outcomes, nor to anticipate goodness as some self-born event. This is not hoping; this is wishing and expecting.

Hope is not a task for the idle. It must have the dimension of doing, of taking part in the world, and acting with the spirit. Hope and action are inseparable parts of one another. Only from hope may we act. Within true hope, we find a determination and willingness to engage in the world to build our own futures. Hope is a path to a greater place, but it is a path we must elect to walk on. It is not a small feeling, but an activity.

Hope shall further not be some temporary sensation satisfied by mundane events. It is much more permanent and profound. It is an openness to the idea of "not now, but yet." It is a permanent receptivity to both the pain and glory of the future, to the fullness of the world, and to the fact that within such fullness, a good must certainly exist.

Hope Beyond Reason

Reason and logical thought have their place in the procedures of our lives. But like anything that nourishes us, too much can spoil. It is a marvel how inconsistently the world acts according to reason and logic. Each and every day, we are struck by people and events that come to pass in spite of what should have happened. Logic cannot predict all things. It cannot predict the newest of things—those things which spring into existence every moment we breathe.

In hope, we find ourselves prepared to thrive when reason falters, ready for a future that will surely defy the mechanical realities of our today. Hope is an openness to all things. It can hear frequencies that reason cannot. It is the assurance that despite any odds, the events of today need not add up to those of tomorrow.

True Hope Needs Effort

We should not hope for some specific target. This is not hope, in fact, but wishing. The world mutates and changes around us, so our hope must be flexible. Let us not pollute our hopes with specificity, and let us instead marvel at the simplicity of what is "not yet." A loving wife, dear friends, a grander home—these specific wishes are made of crude material, and they invite fear when fate whispers that they are further away than we once felt. These things are a mask of what we truly yearn for: happiness.

The hope for simple happiness is not only adequate but magnificent. This desire is unpolluted, flexing and bending as the winds of the world move upon it. The vague and the abstract meet us with great utility.

Too often, we approach hope in a backward direction. We must not ask what we hope for, but where we hope from. A man loses hope not because of circumstances without, but because of those within. We must seek a version of "not yet" that is strong and unfragile to the world around it. We must seek hope as a fundamental way of being rather than a way of handling what already is.

The Collective Nature of Hope

Each day I am struck by the individualism of our Western society. There is so much motivation in this world focused on oneself. But of course, it can only be this way—the individual must achieve, must better themselves, must succeed for their own sake.

Hope is not an individual act. It is the song of the collective. Inherent to hope is the expectation of events and circumstances that are out of one's own control. Hope demands not for one, but for all, and therein lies its beauty. It is a recognition of what one must do to seize one's future, while still understanding the multitude of forces that act upon that same future. It is to welcome all that may be, everyone that may be. To hope is to appreciate fully the texture of a society. Hope is not a lit match, but a fire for all to share.

The Enemies of Hope

Still, our plague of hopelessness stems not only from misunderstanding. No, our depression finds its birth in many dark and separate winters.

The Assault of Capital and Fear

The world around us screams each day, "Why hope? What could you hope for?" It assaults us with grand images of suffering and despair—goblins that feed off our collective sorrow. These goblins have implored each man, through violence and capital, to abandon living in favor of surviving. We are told that "now" is all, that the future is a bleak story which has already been written for us.

"Work, toil, and worry for your today so that we may abdicate tomorrow to our so-called elites." It is easier for the capitalist to function when we only have circular days—lives which exist only to fulfill their own needs.

The goblin of fear is another enemy of hope. Within a climate of fear, we find ourselves obedient and without the courage to voice for progress. Fear infects us to our cores. It infects even our ability to think. It deteriorates the imagination, and suddenly our "what-ifs" are mired in doom. It is a suffocation that mutilates the vast infinity of our futures into a narrow, single road.

The False Dichotomy of Optimism and Pessimism

Our spirit of hope has further been distracted by the clumsy prescriptions of optimism and pessimism, both of which alleviate man from his responsibility to act. These modes of thinking are the jurisdiction of the lazy.

To be optimistic or pessimistic is to accept the future as already prescribed. Things will either be good or they will be bad. And so what reason does either person have to act? What will be done is already done.

Hope acknowledges that we do not know what the world will bring, but that there is a vast expanse we can harness to bring about goodness despite whatever else our days have in store. These runs of thought are brothers, and each offers us only a locked room for our world. It is an easy place, and maybe it is even a comfortable one. But it rejects the fluidity, the chaos of time, which is the bedrock of hope.

Navigating Hopelessness

Even equipped as best as we can be against such depression, all people will encounter moments and periods of hopelessness. Goals slip into the distance. Perceived realities seem to dissolve like mists into a pond. Such is our life. The great tragedy of our days does not come from a loss of hope, but from the loss of an ability to hope—the loss of having anything in this grand world for which to hope.

It is in precisely these days that we must understand hope not as a tool of life, but as an existent part of the world within us and without us. The world, no matter what turmoil it contains, will always have room for hope. The future possesses all, and the stirring of days can never be strong enough to render this untrue.

Our world is like a great forest in this way. Even through the darkest of winters, trees drop seeds and new life creates itself. In the darkest and most crowded forest, where the canopy blocks all light, new life still creates itself in the deepest part. A man may look to the ground and invariably find it littered with acorns. There will always be room for the new.

Embracing Fear and Darkness

Who among us would enjoy the feeling of fear? Of course, there is none—but fear comes parcel with hope. To hope is to embrace the unknown. And within the unknown, there always lurks fear. We must take fear with hope in the way that we take all other fear.

There is indeed an inherent darkness to hope. It springs forward from pain, suffering, and misery. These things must exist for hope to exist. The society of utopia has no utility for hope. Why should hope be when all is perfect? But it is a fact that such a place does not exist. Our world has texture—so much beautiful and painful texture, if we can only see it.

So to have hope, we must be brave. As hope becomes action and we set out to begin something new, we can have no idea of the results or consequences. The specter of guilt may emerge from the shadows of brave action, and such is the heavy burden that man must carry when he walks with hope. But it pales next to the heft of a rancid life of existence that rejects possibility.

The Gift of Forgiveness

Humans have been granted the incredible and often ignored gift of forgiveness. In forgiveness to ourselves, we recognize that the world creates unforeseeable events and consequences. We revitalize our openness to the new. We restore our ability to hope. To forgive is not only a talent of humans but a necessity.

Forgiveness is the domain of the past, and hope is the domain of the future. Together, we have eternity. We hope so we act; we act so we may forgive. And we hope anew.

Hope as Freedom and Labour

To have hope is to be free. What man among us is all-knowing and all-seeing? What arrogance and foolishness it requires to say that one's future is a locked door? The world is not so obedient as to obey our expectation that all will be the same as it ever was. We live in an infinite sea of possibilities.

Even our own selves remain a mystery forever. Who knows what we will do as the seasons and years turn over and over? Who can say what butterflies our cocoons create? When we recognize this, suddenly we know we are not on some predetermined course. We are not objects waiting for our next rebound. It is through a profound hope that we know today is not tomorrow, that this year is not next. Suddenly we become free beings, unshackled by arrogance and prophecy.

How lovely it would be if discovering hope were an easy thing. What a paradise this could bring us. If only hope could be plucked like a ripe apple from the trees of our days.

There is so much fear in this world, so much pain. There is such grand suffering that to search for hope where there is none requires a fundamental realignment within the soul. No person can say that hope is easy. Hope is a great and difficult labor. But it is a great stupidity to declare strife as a reason for inaction.

So let us have hope forever. And in those most grotesque of our days when none can be found, let us still hope for hope itself.

References

• The essay is a transcript from a youtube video with link.