The Pathology of Hope

[Jcrowley]

Pathologies of Hope

Barbara Ehrenreich
Harper’s Magazine February 2007

I hate hope. It was hammered into me constantly a few years ago when I was being treated for breast cancer: Think positively! Don't lose hope! Wear your pink ribbon with pride! A couple of years later, I was alarmed to discover that the facility where I re­ceived my follow-up care was called the Hope Center. Hope? What about a cure? At antiwar and labor rallies over the years, I have dutifully joined Jesse Jackson in chanting "Keep hope alive!" – all the while crossing my fin­gers and thinking, "F*** hope. Keep us alive."

There. It's out. Let pestilence rain down on me, for a whole chorus of voic­es rise up to insist that hope, optimism, and a "positive attitude" are the keys to health and longevity. The more acad­emically respectable among them – the new Ph.D.-level "positive psycholo­gists" – like to cite a study of nuns in which the ones professing a generally positive outlook in their twenties went rather tardily to their maker while the glummer ones dropped off like flies a decade earlier. The average author of motivational materials – books, CDs, and audiotapes – needs no studies to buttress the warning that negative thoughts "can be harmful to your health and might even shorten your life span."

Not only is health at stake; so is your credibility as a citizen, employee, or social entity of any kind. "Ninety-nine out of every 100 people report that they want to be around more positive people," claims the self-help book How Full Is Your Bucket? Many champions of positivity urge one to ostracize negative people – complainers and "victims" – because they are "committed to lose."

It's everywhere, this Cult of Posi­tivity, at least in America, the birth­place of Mary Baker Eddy, Norman Vincent Peale, and est, where 30,000 beaming "life coaches" ply their trade and a pessimist is no more likely to be elected president than an atheist. George W. Bush provides a sterling role model. Asked on his most recent birthday about the potential nuclear threats of Iran and North Korea, as well as the U.S.-instigated civil war in Iraq, he replied, "I'm optimistic that all problems will be resolved."

<snip>

In 2000, the self-improvement indus­try – including books, CDs, seminars, and coaches – took in $3.35 billion. In 2005, it grossed $5.62 billion, with the coaching market alone growing by almost 500 percent.

<snip>

http://web.ionsys.com/~remedy/Pathologies%20of%20Hope%20-%20Ehrenreich.htm

[sweetheart]

1. externalization of completion

People seek to feel complete, and part of any healthy human life is hope and postive
plans for the future, but to coopt hope and corporatize it, by taking the power to make
your own hope soley in to money-making, as if all hope can be solved by a thing,
and the sense of completion, however much you may want that 'thing', is held hostage.

When you finally get the desired hope, the desire satiated allows your mind, your
heart and your consciousness to recognize that the 'feeling' that
was essential to the experience is unity, coming together with
your desire and realizing that.

But really that realization has nothing to do with desire,
yet corporate america, including the life coaches and the hope industry,
feed off of this externalization of an internal awareness,
selling powers and magic potions, based on identifying with your hopeful desire.

But there's the rub, for it to be 'real', or essential, it comes from
love, and not from fulfillment of a corporate hope. And so many are
successfully brainwashed to never be able to distinguish the difference
between their own desires and the implants that are sold to them by
MSM drones. They try to live a faustian tragedy, where a petroculture
will never ever offer them completion, as it is not percieved to be
economically expedient to have a citizenry in touch with its totality.