Everything Is F*cked(36)

Spoiler alert: people suck. Somebody opened Pandora’s box—surprise, surprise, the men would all blame the woman for it—and out flew all the evils into the world: death, disease, hatred, envy, and Twitter. The bucolic sausage party was no more. Now men could kill each other. And, more important, now men had something to kill each other for: women, and the resources that attracted women. Thus, began the stupid dick-measuring contest also known as human history.

Wars started. Kingdoms and rivalries arose. Slavery happened. Emperors started conquering one another, leaving hundreds of thousands slaughtered in their wake. Entire cities were built and then destroyed. Meanwhile, women were treated as property, traded and bartered among the men like fancy goats or something.18

Basically, humans started being humans.

Everything appeared to be fucked. But in the bottom of that box there remained something shiny and beautiful.

There remained hope.

There are many interpretations of the Pandora’s box myth, the most common being that while the gods punished us with all the evils of the world, they also equipped us with the one antidote to those evils: hope. Think of it as the yin and the yang of mankind’s eternal struggle: everything is always fucked, but the more fucked things become, the more we must mobilize hope to sustain and overcome the world’s fuckedness. This is why heroes such as Witold Pilecki inspire us: their ability to muster enough hope to resist evil reminds us that all of us are capable of resisting evil.

The sickness may spread, but so does the cure, because hope is contagious. Hope is what saves the world.

But here’s another, less popular interpretation of the Pandora’s box myth: What if hope is not the antidote to evil? What if hope is just another form of evil? What if hope just got left in the box?19

Because hope didn’t just inspire Pilecki’s heroics. Hope also inspired the Communist revolutions and the Nazi genocides. Hitler hoped to exterminate the Jews to bring about an evolutionarily superior human race. The Soviets hoped to instigate a global revolution to unite the world in true equality under communism. And let’s be honest, most of the atrocities committed by the Western, capitalist societies over the past one hundred years were done in the name of hope: hope for greater global economic freedom and wealth.

Like a surgeon’s scalpel, hope can save a life, and hope can take a life. It can uplift us, and it can destroy us. Just as there are healthy and damaging forms of confidence, and healthy and damaging forms of love, there are also healthy and damaging forms of hope. And the difference between the two is not always clear.

So far, I’ve argued that hope is fundamental to our psychology, that we need to (a) have something to look forward to, (b) believe ourselves in control of our fate enough to achieve that something, and (c) find a community to achieve it with us. When we lack one or all of these for too long, we lose hope and spiral into the void of the Uncomfortable Truth.

Experiences generate emotions. Emotions generate values. Values generate narratives of meaning. And people who share similar narratives of meaning come together to generate religions. The more effective (or affective) a religion, the more industrious and disciplined the adherents. And the more industrious and disciplined the adherents, the more likely the religion is to spread to other people, to give them a sense of self-control and a feeling of hope. These religions grow and expand and eventually define in-groups versus out-groups, create rituals and taboos, and spur conflict between groups with opposing values. These conflicts must exist because they maintain the meaning and purpose for people within the group.

Therefore, it is the conflict that maintains the hope.

So, we’ve got it backward: everything being fucked doesn’t require hope; hope requires everything being fucked.

The sources of hope that give our lives a sense of meaning are the same sources of division and hate. The hope that brings the most joy to our lives is the same hope that brings the greatest danger. The hope that brings people closest together is often the same hope that tears them apart.

Hope is, therefore, destructive. Hope depends on the rejection of what currently is.

Because hope requires that something be broken. Hope requires that we renounce a part of ourselves and/or a part of the world. It requires us to be anti-something.

This paints an unbelievably bleak picture of the human condition. It means that our psychological makeup is such that our only choices in life are either perpetual conflict or nihilism—tribalism or isolation, religious war or the Uncomfortable Truth.

Nietzsche believed that none of the ideologies generated by the scientific revolution would hold up in the long run. He believed that, one by one, they would slowly kill each other off and/or collapse from within. Then, after a couple of centuries, the real existential crisis would begin. Master morality would have been corrupted. Slave morality would have imploded. We would have failed ourselves. For human frailties are such that everything we produce must be impermanent and unreliable.

Nietzsche instead believed that we must look beyond hope. We must look beyond values. We must evolve into something “beyond good and evil.” For him, this morality of the future had to begin with something he called amor fati, or “love of one’s fate”: “My formula for greatness in a human being,” he wrote, “is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”20