generate narratives of meaning. And people who share similar narratives of
meaning come together to generate religions. The more effective (or
affective) a religion, the more industrious and disciplined the adherents. And
the more industrious and disciplined the adherents, the more likely the
religion is to spread to other people, to give them a sense of self-control and a
feeling of hope. These religions grow and expand and eventually define in-
groups versus out-groups, create rituals and taboos, and spur conflict between
groups with opposing values. These conflicts must exist because they maintain
the meaning and purpose for people within the group.
Therefore, it is the conflict that maintains the hope.
So, we’ve got it backward: everything being fucked doesn’t require hope;
hope requires everything being fucked.
The sources of hope that give our lives a sense of meaning are the same
sources of division and hate. The hope that brings the most joy to our lives is
the same hope that brings the greatest danger. The hope that brings people
closest together is often the same hope that tears them apart.
Hope is, therefore, destructive. Hope depends on the rejection of what
currently is.
Because hope requires that something be broken. Hope requires that we
renounce a part of ourselves and/or a part of the world. It requires us to be
anti-something.
This paints an unbelievably bleak picture of the human condition. It
means that our psychological makeup is such that our only choices in life are
either perpetual conflict or nihilism—tribalism or isolation, religious war or
the Uncomfortable Truth.
Nietzsche believed that none of the ideologies generated by the scientific
revolution would hold up in the long run. He believed that, one by one, they
would slowly kill each other off and/or collapse from within. Then, after a
couple of centuries, the real existential crisis would begin. Master morality
would have been corrupted. Slave morality would have imploded. We would
have failed ourselves. For human frailties are such that everything we produce
must be impermanent and unreliable.
Nietzsche instead believed that we must look beyond hope. We must look
beyond values. We must evolve into something “beyond good and evil.” For
him, this morality of the future had to begin with something he called amor
fati, or “love of one’s fate”: “My formula for greatness in a human being,” he
wrote, “is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not
backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less