Prisoners of Hope
Posted: Monday, November 16, 2009
by Joel Hirschhorn
http://www.delusionaldemocracy.com
Hope is a wonderful thing. How can we live with sanity in this seemingly crazy and inexplicable world without hope? More than ever, hope seems an absolute necessity. Considering all the advertisements for antidepressants, we cannot avoid thinking that if we lose all hope then serious depression may await us, with only an expensive prescription medicine to save us. Add overeating to a hopeless existence and killer obesity awaits us.
Politicians have always sold us hope also. In the annals of hope marketing surely President Obama will forever remain champion. In a way, he got a Nobel Prize for selling hope. He made millions of voters feel more than a little guilty if they rejected not him but rejected hope itself.
For huge numbers of people hit hard by the economic meltdown and facing hunger, homelessness, health crises and a very bleak future, hope stands between holding on to life and oblivion. They cannot afford to buy hope, like the rest of us, so they must find free hope that they can cling to, waiting for the storm to pass.
Now you see it. Don't you?
We have become prisoners of hope.
We are vulnerable. We are waiting for hope either to materialize more strongly, to get more of it, or hit the unthinkable, because so much of the time we need more of it.
We have become addicted to hope.
We are made to believe through multiple cultural forces that hope is all around us, waiting for us to buy just the right product, vote for just the right politician, watch just the right movie, wear just the right piece of clothing, visit just the right place, believe in just the right religion. In other words, if we just alter our behavior in just the right way, take just the right action, we can relax by achieving more hope.
Here is the dirty little secret: Hope is a fiction. Hope is never meant to materialize. Hope always remains a mental fiction of our own creation.
We are inexorably prisoners of hope.
To give up hope can only take us to despair. So, we keep ourselves imprisoned, ready and anxious to accept the next offer of hope. They I mean THEY know this truth. So, they keep creating new hope-things to sell us. Buy them, believe them, consume them. Keep hope alive.
There is no key to get out of this prison.
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Top-level comments on this article: (3 total)People power Joel .. people power .. people give hope to one and other instead of accepting the corporate ersatz .. it is in the power of community to heal the world because cynicism cannot hack it.I think we need an antidote to excessive, almost compulsive hope, such as a more Zen - staying in the present - approach, with much less living in the future.
Hope is a crutch that allows people to take neither action nor responsibility."I hope I get a good job.""I hope I win the lottery.""I hope I can afford this car/house/big screen TV I just bought.""I hope someone will give me free health care because I don't want to earn it myself."
Very nice article, yet I don't think hope is a commodity to be bought or sold. It all depends on who the target is and how easily he can be duped. Hope for a better world without war is a much different kind of hope than the one offered by the gym or candy bar or diet aid: in other words, we have our own deeply personal hope, which is without price and unable to be bought, sold, or transferred. And then we have the false hope, which is what is offered by companies, politicians, and everyone who has something to gain by one's misfortune. There is a difference, and while false hope can become a prison, your own personal hope can make you seem indestructable.
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