QIn classical Hellenic thought, hope was an evil, the last to come out of Pandora’s box. The gods, offended by the man’s continued signs of rebellion, sent a woman with a box. This woman was not just anyone, the gods had given her all of her qualities (Pan = everyone; Dora = gifts). Inside the box were all the evils and calamities that would plague human beings; and when it was opened it unleashed the beginning of the historical misfortune of man, who glimpses his deities but can never reach them. This perspective of hope as something negative and harmful has little to do with the modern sugar-coated versions, where hope is green (like money) and where the message has been transformed to take on another meaning. “Don’t let them take away your hope. When everything else is gone, there will still be hope.”
This idea, in our times used ad nauseam by cheap loan houses – which are also identified with the color green or yellowish green or yellow, but always within that range – is somewhat fictitious, solid only for a naive and childish criteria. Hope has become a desired good. “You have to have hope”; “Let’s hope…”. It has become something that can comfort us when reality punishes us. However, the ancient Greeks, who are at least the authors of the myth or those who created a record that reaches us, did not think this way. They did not consider hope as something benign, as a wild card for when the dealer deals us ugly cards; On the contrary, they grouped it together with the rest of the evils. Because?
“Don’t let them take away your hope. When everything else is gone, there will still be hope.”
According to Hesiod (The Works and the Days) Zeus ordered Hephaestus to make the first woman, “worthy of love.” Each of the gods gave him a talent. And they also gave her a strange jar (the box) in which they placed all the evils, all the misfortunes, and all the suffering that will plague humanity. She was then sent to Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus, the benefactor of men, who had received warnings from him not to accept gifts from the gods. Epimetheus made Pandora his wife but kept the box closed following the advice of his brother. But Pandora’s curiosity got the better of her, and she opened the box from which the evils escaped. She hurried to close it but only hope (Eris) remained inside. This story, so archetypal that it reminds us of others from other cultures, addresses so many critical issues for human beings that it can be interpreted in multiple ways. But for the Greeks, hope was not a gift, rather it was another misfortune, since to hope is to always be lacking something, it is to lack, it is to desire what one does not have, it is to be dissatisfied. You wait for what you don’t have, and this makes the lack conscious. Like Adam and Eve under the tree, who only noticed that they were naked after eating the forbidden fruit, with hope man notices everything he needs to be complete.
Schopenhauer (2005) maintained that the human being is connected to the infinite, to the universal mechanics of the cosmos. But due to his constitution he can only sense the whole through an inexhaustible feeling of incompleteness. Man connects with the whole through the feeling of dissatisfaction with it, the persistent lack of anything. So men, despite what we may think about it, will always handle hope as part of the solution to our dissatisfaction. Whenever we want something and we convince ourselves that getting it will give us even momentary but valuable satisfaction, there will be hope to deactivate any possibility of action. Our way of perceiving time, which invariably takes us forward, and the constant and persistent dissatisfaction that characterizes us and that connects us with everything, makes us easy prey to enter a state of mind where hope seems the last thing, a solitary rock in a rough sea. Hope seems useful when we feel dissatisfied, which is all the time.
But for the Greeks, hope was not a gift, rather it was another misfortune, since to hope is to always be lacking something, it is to lack, it is to desire what one does not have, it is to be dissatisfied.
But if hope was in a jar along with all the evils, it also seems like an evil, but not just any one. If it was last in the jar, it is legitimate to think that it was put first. It was the first thing Zeus kept in the jar that he would send with Pandora. What motivated Zeus? Revenge and pride. He was determined to take revenge for Prometheus’s theft of the seeds of Helios (fire). He also wanted to give an exemplary punishment to that creature that tried to resemble him, in such a memorable way that he would never again try to reach the high spheres of Olympus. Thus, hope is not just any evil, it is the first thing that occurred to Zeus when he was choosing the evils with which to take revenge on humanity.
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Action and health
What other option do we have other than waiting for something to come to us? Go out and look for it. If hope is a lonely rock in a rough sea, there is always the option of swimming. If I don’t want to wait for good to turn the same corner as I do, what do I have left? Seek good, promote it, produce it. Every time I decide to wait for something to arrive to me, I lose the possibility of going out and looking for it, and something much worse: I abandon all pretensions of being the one to generate that good. It is possible that for the Greeks, the one who waits is the victim of a curse. Because waiting for him does not in itself mean that he will not achieve anything, but it does mean that it does not depend on himself and that his chances have more to do with chance than anything else. From the myth of Pandora and her box it can be deduced that waiting for something to happen, with nothing more than faith and without any intention of modifying the conditions or the environment, is a curse. Men who wait do not do, and not doing is synonymous with death. Seneca (1943) already said: “Our nature is in action. Rest portends death.” The gods, threatened by man’s pretensions to reach Olympus, sent him an evil so that those who previously built stairs would now wait for something to come down from the worn steps, so that the plans to reach the heavens would degrade until they were just a dream. repetitive.
Hope is not just any evil, it is the first thing that occurred to Zeus when he was choosing the evils with which to take revenge on humanity.
He who says “I hope things will get better” will surely do nothing to make things better. It is a proclamation that denotes our inability, our failure. We don’t know how to make things better, so we wait.
We know that activity involves mental health. Stagnation, both of the body and the mind, implies degradation, illness and death. There are plenty of examples in this regard, such as the prevention of Alzheimer’s. Two elderly people with Alzheimer’s who die have their respective autopsies performed. One of them suffered from the disease, to the point that it degraded him in recent years and even generated certain ruptures or difficulties in family ties. The other never had any symptoms, and it was only discovered that he had the disease during the autopsy. Apparently both brains are greatly affected by the disease, even the damage is similar, but why did only one of them show symptoms that negatively affected their daily life? The difference between both men is the quality of life. One of them was much more active than the other, he had a very good intellectual base, he had been constantly educated, and his neuronal synapses had been strengthened. He had remained active until the last moments. The other had not, he had had a rather sedentary life and had not advanced in intellectual aspects. Does the reader dare to risk which of the two is the one who showed symptoms of the disease and which one does not? Physical activity strengthens our body and helps prevent diseases and delay the inevitable effects of aging. The same goes for mental activity. Keeping your mind active is the best remedy to prevent Alzheimer’s, but not only this, but also all types of diseases. Activity, in any sense, is synonymous with health.
He who says “I hope things will get better” will surely do nothing to make things better.
Know and believe
We believe in what we don’t know. And therefore hope attacks reason. Let’s say we can work very hard and build something, but we can also sit back, stop working, and wait for someone else to finish the task or for a superhuman force to intervene. I don’t expect it to rain if the first drops are already falling and I have a favorable weather forecast. I don’t expect things that I know how and when they are going to happen. I wait for what reason tells me is difficult, complicated. I hope for what I believe that only with faith I can achieve. That is, for what I can’t imagine how to achieve any other way. Thus, hope attacks reason, in the sense that when reason tells me that it is very likely that something I want will not happen, I have hope as a resource; where I will always be welcome, and where I will always be received with open arms if I feel like crying my sorrows.
Karl Jung was asked if he believed in God. He responded “I don’t need to believe in God; I know it”. (Bennet, 1966). Which could be simplified into “I don’t believe; HE”. It referred to the idea that all human beings are religious, beyond our practices and speeches. We all wonder about life after death, about our transcendence, about our soul. They are universal questions and questions. Another reasoning that emerges from Jung’s (not at all naïve) response is that there is a big difference between believing and knowing. I don’t believe I have two hands, or that I breathe air, or that sea water tastes salty and stream water tastes sweet, etc., I know. These are things I don’t believe in because I know them. Now…, I don’t know what there is after death, I don’t know if there is something that I can call a soul, and so on. These are questions in which I develop a certain belief. These are not things I know. And therefore, to fill that gap in knowledge, I use belief, which allows me to fill the gap with something that in some way defines me, something impossible to verify but statistically probable.
Throughout history, hope has been used as a mechanism of social control.
If we maintain the reasoning that hope distances us from reason, to the extent that I only resort to hope when reason denies me any other path, and that something similar happens with belief in the same…