On Hope

Barack Obama has been criticized for his fluffy overuse of the word hope. Though I like Obama very much I know this criticism is completely justified. He is not the first to abuse the word, nor the first to bury a thoughtful platform in vapid reiterations of sugar-baited words. That the American public tolerates this indicates a problem with our use of the word. Many a sappy film's moral revolves around it, but do we think for a second what the word means or why it is assumed it is a virtue? I mean, surely everyone knows that hope is a double-edged sword. In the progress of life, mostly we make baby steps. But every now and again we run into a daunting gap, where a stark canyon deep and hard threatens us with a nasty fall. To proceed requires a leap of faith and risking that fall is better than halting progress. In short, progress requires hope. Too little and people stunt like mountain trees. Too much and people jump into every abyss without regard for reason. Thomas Edison needed hope to invent the lightbulb, but he didn't continue his attempts thousands of times merely based on hope. He kept trying because he could see the "light" at the end of the tunnel. People say that "hope keeps us going" and that is true, but I don't think most of us are hope deficient. We should never keep going when we're on a doomed path. You can hope all you want that the pretty girl will like you, but at some point you've got to call it a day. The same goes for slot machines.

Since cultural assumptions tend to be utilitarian we must ask ourselves why our culture promotes hope to the point of impracticality? The answer is that people like the sensation of hope. Independent of its practicality people enjoy hoping. This is a sensible human quality that encourages a needed trait. However this pleasant sensation makes "hope" ripe for romanticization. In public statements using a word like hope brings warm bubblies to the audience. This builds an irrational valuing of hope, which forms a feedback loop, producing a more and more positive connotation to a word whose definition never changed.

Hope remains a double-edged sword and on an internal level people naturally work to find the balance between those two edges in spite of a constant cultural barrage. So if we find the same balance regardless of a cultural barrage, what purpose do these inspirational speeches and story morals serve? I cautiously propose that the glorification of hope serves only as an exploitation of a knee-jerk reaction for the purposes of selling something.