Description

Philosophical perspective of Pandora's Box.

Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of men.

• Friedrich Nietzsche

Belief, or faith, is the strongest emotion that humans possess. Hope can be the light at the end of the tunnel, but hope can also be the promise of gold in the mines to begin with. Hope is both the disaster and the miracle at the same time, you cannot have one without the other. While there are certainly benefits of having faith and a strong belief, the message behind Pandora's jar focuses on the concept that hope is evil, so I want to explore that concept more. The first part would be establishing how hope can delude people and extend unnecessary suffering. Let's say, an investor in the stock market develops a trading strategy he believes to be the ultimate, foolproof money making idea. Everyday, he wakes up and dedicates his life into his master plan, making trade after trade. Even though his wholeheartedly believes in himself, the trades he have been making don't generate any profit.

Despite the reality of his situation, he continues down the path of an obvious tragedy. After all, he truly believes he has found the holy grail of trading, it just has yet to pay off and those who doubt him simply don't have conviction. Eventually, after years of "misfortune", he has no resources left to pursue his dream and sacrifices generations of labor for a delusional tragedy. He loses everything in his life for a belief, and in the end, has nothing to show for it. Some will say he's truly dedicated while others call him delusional, but they are essentially saying the same thing: "He has a strong belief." In fact, delusion is nothing but a belief that happens to not align with "reality", whatever reality one wants to conceptualize reality as. The hope the imaginary (though very realistic) trader has is the same hope that kept 33 Chilean miners alive, trapped 700 meters underground, for 14 days with only 2 days of food and no chance of contacting the outside world. Hope is a shining beacon of security when there is nothing else to count on, but it is also the false idol that tempts people into delusion.

But there's also a hidden message within the idea of hope being kept outside the reach of humanity, and that is the concept that the abstinence of hope is even worse than the hope itself. Since everything evil was contained in Pandora's jar, the lack of hope must have been deemed as a far greater vice than any faithful conviction could ever be. And since hope is essentially just any form of faith, it is only reasonable to conclude that perspectives of nihilism, existentialism, and hedonism are manifestation of the lack of substantial belief. The rising rate of suicide along with the various scientific analyses suggest that the belief of hopelessness is a major contributing factor to nihilism, existentialism, and eventual suicide, which in of itself, is a tragedy unlike all others.

There, of course, is a certain sense of helplessness in helping those who suffer from hopelessness because for the average person, it is relatively straightforward to convince someone to fight for an external cause and attribute meaning to life itself. But towards those who don't even believe in their right to exist, it's hard to conceptualize a remedy for hopelessness towards society, much less a justification anyone has any real intrinsic value. This lack of belief perfectly characterizes the existential depression that ravages our modern world. If one were to not believe in any form of morality, ethics, or religion, they essentially adopt the concept that nothing truly matters and the only way to make use of their life would be to experience things that can be felt in the present because immediate pain and pleasure are the most real. Pain and pleasure do not need meaning to be felt because they are biologically predisposed to humans, so pain and pleasure do not need beliefs to be experienced. And I think it's obvious enough to understand why hedonism without fulfillment (meaning) characterizes nihilism perfectly. Hope is just as physically real as the other evils of war, famine, and death and the cultural responses of self-harm and suicide are simply the manifestation of the absence of hope. So perhaps it isn't the idea that hope is an evil, rather it's the idea that the lack of hope is so much worse than having any form of hope, even if it's just delusion.

Up until this point, I've been using hope and belief interchangeably for purposes of introduction and it was good enough to explain the ideas, but before I conclude, I do want to elaborate on the distinction between the two. Belief is the acceptance and trust in something, anything really. You can believe in Christianity, you can believe in Covid-19 conspiracies, hell, you can believe the moon was created by cheese aliens, it doesn't matter. But hope is something different. After all, you wouldn't say you hope in something you already believe in, that wouldn't be hope, that would just be believing.

Hope is that feeling when the trader sees numbers become green, that feeling those miners felt when they heard the drill carving their rescue. Hope isn't just the belief in a higher power, it's the belief in belief itself. It's the assurance that the mere concept of belief is justified and faithful. The miners might not have believed in the same things as each other. One man might have believed in God, another believed in the government, while another simply believed in the man next to him, yet they all had hope. It's not about what they believed in, is that they believed in something, and that something was belief itself. Hope is the belief of belief itself, the faith of faith, and the lack of that is the highest evil above all else.

I choose to believe that the correct interpretation of hope encompasses all 3 possibilities: the superficial, nihilistic interpretation of prolonging suffering, the meta-interpretation that it is rather the lack of hope that brings pain, and the idea that it isn't just hope being withdrawn that is evil, but the belief in hope as a construct that even exists is truly the worst evil of all.