I miss having hope, I really do. Hope sustains us, keeps us moving, fuels our diligence and endurance, is the catalyst for change and a source of great joy. Hope comes to define us, and we identify ourselves with our hopes and dreams. They become the origin of our identity, the fountain from which we drink and the birthplace of the name which we give ourselves. But as much as I miss hope, for all the good and bad reasons, I can’t bring myself to embrace it, unless that hope itself is logical. I feel like Spock, which is a Star Trek reference and I hope it’s legitimate, because I have never seen a Star Trek movie or TV show except for the most recent one. From what I know, he operates solely from the base of logic; while I don’t claim to solely base my decisions and behaviors on logic, logic plays a big role. I want to be logical; I want to use common sense; I don’t want to indulge fleeting fantasies, I don’t want to become the ostrich which sticks its head in the sand and lives in its own little world at the expense of observing all that goes on around it. I’ve observed my own life, all its peaks and valleys, and I’ve observed the world: I’ve seen how hopes disintegrate, how the tyranny of evil often gets its way, how selfishness and greed run the show. I’ve seen how even the most beautiful things wilt and die; the flowers of the field, pristine in their trimmings, return to the dirt from whence they came without even a whispered eulogy. My perception of the world (as with everyone’s perception of the world) is drawn from what I’ve observed in the world and, subsequently, my interpretations of those observations. This coupling of Perception & Interpretation spawned this little diagram which I pieced together a year ago.
I call it “The Life Cycle of Hope.” It’s a continuous and unbroken circle, and for a purpose. Begin, for instance, with Resignation, which is born out of the ruining of a hope. When this happens, we take the hope which we’ve called our own and smash it apart. We refuse to give it any thought, we call it out for what it is: a mockery and parody of reality. We decide that it’s better to face reality for what it is than to self-medicate with illusions and fantasies. We take, ultimately, the stoic route of accepting what will be as that which is and seeking to live in accordance with this as much as possible. But life without hope isn’t much of a life at all; while hope itself may be called an anesthetic to numb the pain of reality, that perception is lost when the pain of reality becomes too difficult to bear. We launch into hope again, though usually not the same hope. Perhaps a close mirror-image, except with fine-tuned details here-and-there. We buy into this hope and take a breath of fresh air and move forward. But the presence of hope doesn’t negate the presence of reality, and soon enough disappointment will take place. We put our stock in an illusion, and when reality bitch-slaps that illusion, we get bitch-slapped as well. Sometimes this happens slowly, something along to slow suffocation; other times it happens in an instant, like a gunshot to the head. Hope is killed by disappointment, and we become disillusioned. This can be a quiet, unsettling disillusionment, like something tucked away in the back of our minds; or it can be the shattering of an entire worldview and system of perceiving the world, bringing us to our metaphorical knees as all that we’ve “known” is shown to be self-trickery. The next step is resignation: we resign ourselves to this new understanding of reality. But this resignation doesn’t sit well with us; because, as human creatures, we need hope. We can’t exist without it, at least not in any more-than-functional sense of existence. And so we latch onto hope again, a reworked or revisited or renewed hope. And the cycle continues unabated, albeit with breaks here and there: but even when hopes are realized, we quickly learn that the realization of this hope doesn’t come with all the trimmings we thought it would. Reality’s still hell, life’s still unpredictable, and the result is that once hope has been reached, a new hope is raised in its place, because no matter come what may, there is never any satisfaction, we are always left wanting more, and reality continues to be unsympathetic.
I wish so badly that I didn’t think so much about these things. I wish I could be like those people who blindly embrace hope without giving it a second thought, those people who buy into all that bullshit about “God having a plan for my life” and “There’s a bright future for everyone!” I wish I could be so naïve as to believe in such a thing. Tell that to the eight year old girl raped again and again and then excommunicated from her church because she’s been immoral (but the elder who raped her isn’t even dealt with). Tell that to the husband who discovers his wife’s been spreading her legs to other men despite him having served her and sacrificed for her during the duration of their relationship. Tell that to the person who’s lost everyone and everything he loves and who has been abandoned by all his dearest and closest friends, except for that age-old friendship with whiskey and cigarettes—the only thing that gives him some sort of comfort when God is incredibly silent. Tell this, as a matter of fact, to those killed in the recent Japanese earthquake and tsunami, or to the thousands killed in ethnic genocide each year. The whole “destiny” thing is a caricature sketch of reality, yet another self-medication, a sort of self-lubrication to keep things going smoothly (and, no, I don’t mean that as a sexual joke; I’m being entirely honest). I’m of the conviction that it’s best to accept reality as it is than to buy into pseudo-realities that may be easier to digest.
At the same time, the dark reality of epistemology makes such “acceptance of reality” an unsure thing. My perception of the world is no more or less valid than any other perception; adequate perceptions will both (a) observe the world and (b) make deductions based upon that observations and seek to (c) interpret these observations while integrating them with the deductions in such a manner that (d) the observations themselves fit hand-in-glove with the interpretations given. The whole “destiny” thing fails at the first point, because it assumes that I have a good and beautiful destiny, and that all my sufferings are merely the road to that point; and it fails because it doesn’t take into account the overwhelming majority who do not reach any sort of good and beautiful destiny. People who buy into this belief, when faced with the realities of the world, undergo what’s called “cognitive dissonance,” where they become, in essence, the ostrich with its head in the sand. They plug their ears, scream as loud as they can, and squeeze their eyes shut, so as to drown out all the chaos and clamor of the world around them, a cesspool which highlights, again and again, that their worldview is defunct. I’m not sympathetic to this, only because I’ve been the ostrich with his head in the sand, and the breaking of that reality was a violent and bloody and painful thing, but I’d like to think that I’m wiser for it. Nevertheless, my current perception of reality (a multi-faceted perception which can’t be dumbed down a quip or cute saying) is to be held to the same rigorous criticism. It all comes back to the dark nature of epistemology, how we know and perceive things. We are finite creatures with quite limited brain capacity, and our perceptions and worldviews are not instilled within us but are developed over time, largely in place at a young age but susceptible to transformation amidst trauma or elation. How I perceive the world isn’t from looking round about the world from an objective standpoint; everything is subjective (and I say this as a modernist, believe it or not), and I’ve found that in our quest for an adequate understanding of reality, the deeper we go, the more ambiguity we find. The truth lies behind a thin veil, visible as if in a mist, and all our scratching and tearing won’t bring that veil down. Nevertheless I bank on the criterion above when it comes to a worldview: it must embrace the facts and interpret them in such a way as to be as true to the facts as possible. Such thinking has spawned deism, naturalism, and nihilism, and while I don’t embrace any of those, I’m sympathetic to those who hold such views. Christian theism can be a difficult pill to swallow.
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