"Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man." - Friedrich Nietzsche
We can't give up hope, I'm often told. Keep hope alive, the saying goes. If we lose hope, nothing will ever change...or so they believe. Well, I'm here to say: Fuck hope. We live on a planet brimming with hope yet that same planet is under perpetual assault...and the hopers are losing. The corporations raping our eco-systems don't hope they can steal more land, exploit it, poison it, and make boatloads of cash. They make a plan and make it happen...damn the torpedoes. (You might even call it "direct action.")
Monsanto doesn't put its faith in candlelight vigils or humans standing in the shape of a peace sign. They get busy putting their people into positions of power, writing legislation, and bullying and smashing anyone opposed to their insane agenda.
General Motors doesn't reserve its opinions for government sanctioned "free speech zones." The television, Internet, magazines, movies, songs, radio, etc. are all inundated with GM's taxpayer-subsidized propaganda...just as the planet is inundated with GM's output.
McDonald's doesn't waste time hoping things will go its way when its days are chock filled with brainwashing, killing, poisoning, destroying...and counting its profits. Hope never enters into the equation.
"Hope is a bad thing," sez Henry Miller. "It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It's a sort of spiritual clap, I should say."
Author Derrick Jensen explains the impotency of hope as good as anyone: "I'm not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just will. I don't hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn't crash. To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it. Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they've assumed that the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they've stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it."
If Jensen makes it sound an awful lot like religion, well, for most folks, the verb "hope" is virtually synonymous with "pray," while "hope" the noun is often interchangeable with "faith."
Hope is for suckers.
How about some good old-fashioned anger, rage, and passion? (Che sez: "If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.") Let's forget hope and aim for vision, clarity, strategy, courage, and finally: some goddamned results. "Creativity comes from trust," sez Rita Mae Brown. "Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work" (as they say in South Florida: bingo).
At its worst, hope is a dangerous cop-out. At best, it's a frivolous idea. But even so, as Henry Miller sez: "Ideas have to be wedded to action."
since if I didn't have that hope, I wouldn't do a damn thing, and I do quite a bit as it is. Indeed, why do anything if you don't have hope? A great many things I've hoped for have come to be, and they would not have done so if I had given up and not had hope. I hope you can understand that...
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Daniel Geery (26 articles, 95 quicklinks, 126 diaries, 912 comments [27 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Thursday, Apr 10, 2008 at 5:23:31 PM
a time and place for hope, but action saw the desire of turning the idea into tangible results.
Unless your willing to back up hope with deeds, hope is another prayer that will go unanswered. It is a wish lacking in achievement, and should have been addressed with a maybe in the first place.
Many confuse trying with doing, to try is not giving 100% effort and doing is giving ones total commitment. er...I do?
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Stanimal (2 articles, 226 quicklinks, 38 diaries, 1254 comments [234 recommended, 2 rejected]) on Thursday, Apr 10, 2008 at 8:27:12 PM
You must understand the background in which Nietzsche wrote the quote (it's in Human All Too Human, aphorism 71, if I remember correctly).
As a student of philology, Nietzsche believed--like the ancient Greeks--that hope was a waste of time, because fate has already decided the future.
There are two types of Hope: Wishful thinking, and real hope.
Wishful thinking (without action) is a torment. On the other hand, real hope is like Thomas Jefferson's comment about luck, "I believe in luck, and the harder I work the luckier I get." (I think that is the whole and correct quote, but I don't have a Bartlett's Familiar Quotations handy to double check.)
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Richard Girard (28 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 59 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Friday, Apr 11, 2008 at 3:07:19 PM
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