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