Rubric “Everything will be fine” about false hope: Rainbow of life

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It is true that hope knows no morals. Everyone can hope, hope for everything possible, even for small things, even for deep evil: I hope that the neighbor’s yapping dog will soon eat himself to death! And let the work colleague who makes you feel like a complete idiot rot inside and out! One who is filled with such unbearable stories hopes for redemption, even if it comes at the expense of others. Rapists, terrorists and dictators also hope that they can walk over corpses without tripping over them.

The fact that hope is overrated as a virtue and can even make people hopelessly unhappy is supported by a study that examined the life satisfaction of long-term unemployed people: it increased significantly when they reached retirement age. Why? Because now they finally no longer felt pressure to live up to social expectations that they couldn’t live up to. Because they no longer had to hope.

Even in love, hope is used as a disciplinary instrument: the beloved spreads his affection so measuredly that the flame of hope in the adoring one never completely extinguishes, but can never grow stronger, and she remains submissive without any protection. . Friedrich Nietzsche also emphasized this control over hope: according to the German philosopher, it ensures that, despite all evil, people “do not give up life, but continue to allow themselves to be tormented again and again.” This is why hope is “truly the worst of evils, because it prolongs the torment of people.”

But even Nietzsche did not crave a hopeless existence. He also described hope as “a rainbow above the tumbling torrential stream of life, swallowed up a hundred times by the spray, always reassembled and leaping over it with tender, beautiful courage where it roars most wildly and dangerously.”

Sometimes the only thing that helps is to hope, sometimes against all probability and against all understanding, that a way out will appear, that coincidences will intertwine, that a miracle will happen, that God will be merciful: I hope He comes on time! We hope the coral reefs can be saved! I hope there will be world peace soon!

The ancient Romans found a short formula for this: “Dum spiro spero,” I hope while I breathe. Everything will be fine.

Ursula von Arx did not have to rely on hope very often in her life. And he hopes it stays that way. Von Arx writes in Blick every other Monday.

Source: Blick