The Weirdest Yet Most Helpful Advice I've Ever Gotten

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There seems to be two hopes. One type of hope is a force for good and the other a force for great evil.

Put simply: when hope motivates action in the interest of the person taking action it seems to be a force for good, when hope demotivates action it seems to be a force for evil.

So when is hope a good thing? Possibly never. If we are going to speak strictly of hope in the purest sense it originally meant “faith in a desirable outcome” and had a religious overtone to it.

The word was Hopa, it came from the North Sea Germanic Languages, in Frissian there is a word Hopia, and we can see in modern Swedish the word Hoppas.

I encourage hope in my clients and people who follow my content. I encourage hopefulness when people are frequently in a state of learned helplessness or despair. Typically my stance would be "Okay, you think things can't get better, but they actually can and we do need to create some space for proactive optimism, rather than a passive hopefulness," and this could be said euphemistically to be a good hope.

Maybe we should stop saying the word “hope” if it has a dreamy passivity built into it.

After all, in reality there is no guarantee that things will get better. There is no universal law that says all things drift inexorably towards good outcomes. No, this isn’t a Hollywood script and actually things can and often do get catastrophically worse.

If we are drifting in our kayak towards the waterfall, I would not advocate “hope” as a policy for generating a positive outcome but rather instead I would recommend paddling like hell to get away from the danger.

Catastrophes and tragedies occur daily to all humans regardless of ethnicity, class, culture or education. Is it wise to think some invisible guiding hand will protect us from the edge?

I think it is not.

I would propose we need to be active, cynical, skeptical and brutally rational when looking at the course of our lives. Many people drift into the weeds, still more drift right over the edge.

Perhaps we should abandon hope altogether in favour of proactive, pragmatic optimism.

Pragmatic optimism puts the locus of control (the power centre of control) back into the individual.

Blind hope puts the locus of control outside the individual and potentially into the hands of anyone who would be of a mind to take it.

In hope there is a potentially malignant passivity implied. In this darker version hope, we don't have agency, our locus of control is external. We are just passively wishing that things will get better without us doing anything, without us changing anything, or taking any kind of control in our lives. As I present it here, so far, you might think, "Well, that doesn't sound too bad. It sounds like Nietzsche really was overstating the case when he said that hope is the worst of all things."

So let me put it this way.

Hope can become a doorway, an opening, a breach in the armor through which bad actors and their plethora of platidunal poisons can quietly and silently pass through.

A door way called Hope into which all manner of corruption may pass.

Passive wishful thinking is an infantile response in the face of stressful or overwhelming situations. Because it comes from passivity, because it comes from an infantile childlike place, it is irrational. When we are infantile, and when we are being irrational, and not looking properly, and reasonably with an adult head on our shoulders at the data, we become very impressionable and easy to manipulate.