WHY WE'RE ALL LOSING HOPE AND WHY IT MATTERS

Rodin, Le Baiser

You can feel it in the air. The loss. The grief. The absence. Of hope.

Where are we in the world today? We’ve lost hope. I won’t recite the statistics for you. They’re universal, stretching across the globe. Levels of despair, anxiety, distrust, distress. Soaring off the charts. Let us sum it up in the loss of hope.

How did we get here? Why should we talk about it? I sit at the cafe. I watch and observe. I feel. And in all this the sense of the loss of hope is in everything and everyone. Downcast eyes, staring blankly at screens. Searching for a glimmer. The doom scroll and the hate watch. The dopamine addiction. “Survival mode.” Sometimes a thing, an attitude, is conveyed best in what’s missing. I almost never see a hopeful face anymore. It doesn’t matter where in the world I am.

Americans call this a “vibe.” It’s a poor mode of expression. Americans are uncomfortable admitting, expressing, the fact that societies too have moods. That there are such things as collective sentiments. America is the land of the rational individualist, so the myth goes. All else must be repressed and denied. Hence, this beautiful idea of social psychology and social currents is reduced to a “vibe.”

I digress. How did we lose hope?

At this precise moment, an interjection will arrive. But I haven’t lost hope! My life is fine, wonderful, all is well. And the world is doing just fine, too! You know by now the kind of person who’ll express this, at first in surprise, and then, if you press them, angrily, then finally, at last, scornfully. These objections, universally, flow from the Mediocre White Guy. He’s had it good all his life, failing upwards. Of course, not every “white guy” is like this, far from it. But the objection will almost always come from having enjoyed a certain position in life.

And this objection can be dispensed with. Because it isn’t about hope at all. It is just expressing satisfaction with the present. Hope is of course about the future, what is to come, what has yet to unfold. To say that one is doesn’t worry about it is only another way of saying one doesn’t have hope. And so again, this sense is seen to be universal.

The loss of hope is a profoundly dangerous thing. The church says: despair is a sin. The existentialists say: despair is a virtue. Which is correct, preacher or philosopher? Both, perhaps. Despair in the existential sense is what leads to the creation of hope that one can have mastery over one’s own life.

And this is precisely what we are losing.

Who feels a master of their own life now? Do you? If you do, you are exceedingly rare, or more likely, simply lying to yourself, and to me. The sense that we are masters of our lives is slipping away from us now, day by day. The world descends into chaos, that’s true, but it descends into chaos at the hands of lunatics, men possessed by history’s demons, who dream of omnipotence and omniscience. They search for immortality and hunt for the golden touch. And in this, history reminds us of the only exorcisms for such demons. War, collapse, implosion.

In the hands of the malign figures we have turned our destinies over to, our destinies, equally, have turned to dust. The idea that one can exercise control over one’s fortunes is now widely regarded to be a lie that induces bitter laughter. If I say to you, work hard and you will get ahead, do you believe it? And so we see movements arising that are every bit as delusional as they are pathetic, depressing, lurid, strange. Young men beat their own faces in to try and gain the looks they imagine women desire.

We’re made of desire. We’re beings of Eros. And our unmet hunger for Eros is everywhere now. Only we will not give each other the very sustenance we ache for. We long to be loved, but nobody is very loving. We yearn to be seen and held, so today’s cliche goes, but we are too busy holding and seeing screens to bother with one another. We are too busy turning over our vital forces of Eros to…

To whom are we giving our wellsprings of life? Our desires, our longings, our attentions? All this we call, sometimes, “energy,” and it is, but understand, that the human soul is a thing made of need. It needs to be needed. This is the thread the Fates wove around us. We are covered over with glittering threads of desire. And in my desire for you, I become my fullest self. This is the source and the origin. Together we become one. This is love. This is the answer and the message.

On this, the preacher and the philosopher, the saint and the warrior, the judge and criminal all agree. The message and the answer remain the same. Love is the scale by which we frail human things are weighed. All else turns to dust, in the end.

Who are we giving our wellsprings of life to? If you’ve followed me so far, you may think I’m saying: to billionaires and tycoons, to demagogues. True, but I want you to take my hand and come deeper with me, deeper into the source and origins of all things, the place we began.

Eros is the life-force in us.

Who are we giving it to?

We are giving it to Thanatos. Thanatos is the death-force, the death-drive. When Eros can’t be attained—or perhaps its better to say this: when we don’t feel ourselves possessed by Eros, and here, think of all its personifications, from Cupid to Psyche, from Venus to Aphrodite, from Apollo to Prometheus—when we don’t feel one with Eros, what happens to us?

Then we feel a thing called pain. It’s the truest pain of all. So true, so fierce, cutting so deep, that we have so, so many names for it. Loneliness, isolation, depression, anxiety, distress, angst, despondency, dysthymia, and so on. The names change through the ages. But the idea behind them all remains the same.

It is hidden behind history’s veil. And now I am going to ask her to remove her veil, so that you can see this pain for the first time, perhaps. See it for what it really is, through all the ages of humankind.

It is the pain of the loss of Eros. And after too much of this pain, at the point it becomes unendurable. The ancients speak of shame and dishonor, of being abandoned in a maze, of a sense of disorientation, of reaching a place, finally, of no passage.

This pain reaches the point of becoming intolerable. What that means is: we lose hope in Eros herself. Of becoming one with her. Of finding or knowing her. Of seeing her and discovering her. We become estranged from Eros, our own life-force itself, which is stopped, contained, cannot go anywhere, is left trapped in this maze with no solution or exit, from which nothing can pass. It cannot go anywhere.

This is the point at which we throw our hands up in despair, and abandon hope. And then there is only one thing left to do: give our life-force to Thanatos. Thanatos, the death-force. If Eros is stopped up, contained, cannot go anywhere, then all that is left to destroy. To destroy, demolish, obliterate, everything we can around us, until, at last, or perhaps in the hope of, finally ending ourselves, our futile, pointless, empty lives, which have become just withered things.

All this, too, has many names. This passage from the narrow strait, to the maze with no exit. Anger, shock, rage, helplessness, anomie, depression—again, the names change, but the journey, the process, the way, remains the same. Our boat is lost in the underworld. We have come to a bitter end. There is no way out. All that is left to do, at last, is one last terrible gambit: to destroy the maze, set fire to the vessel, to lash out, and perhaps, in the rubble, either we will find the ghost of Eros, or if not, at least we will have the revenge on the thing which has disappointed us so cruelly, which is life itself, being, existence, and if there is justice left in the cosmos, our existence will end alongside everything else we destroy.

This is what’s happening to our world.

I don’t know if you can see it. I can only guide you. Much depends on your attunement.

We are enmeshed now in Eros becoming Thanatos. Our systems and institutions now are mechanisms which invert life-force itself. They take Eros, our will, desire, power, attention, energy, need, and turn it not into sustenance, nourishment, energy, the light of knowledge, the heat of passion, the unfurling of the self, and its embrace by and for love, but into Thanatos. Into darkness and coldness and entropy. Into nothingness. Into the void and the black.

This is what is happening to our world. Our systems and institutions turn Eros into Thanatos. We are becoming mere engines that convert Eros into Thanatos. We are becoming not Eros but Thanatos.

This is what the loss of hope is and does. It is now a necessary function of our world-system. How are the men who rule these systems and institution to prevail, if not through our own acceptance of the evisceration of our life-force? So the systems and mechanisms surround us, and we use them willingly. Instead of talking to a person today, I will talk to the machine. Instead of learning, doing, accomplishing, trying something today, I will recite the incantations of the doctrines of allegiance to my masters, and remain a slave. Instead of being and becoming who I am and am meant to be, I will obey the instructions of the algorithm, the system. I will enter the maze with no solution. I will trap myself in the cave of darkness.

This is what is happening to our world. We are losing hope. It isn’t a small thing. It is the essence of us. It is a loss of the soul, an absence of the miracle, an emptiness of the most profound thing we are and have and were.

We don’t know how we long for Eros. No one has ever taught us that. We’re reduced now to her caricatures. Violent men preening their muscles, women with faces made of self-mutilation. Eros has been forgotten in this time. And as we forget who and what we are made of, and need and desire most, must return to, must become one with, in order to feel at home in the universe, so, too we find ourselves puzzled and bewildered, by what arises in the void left by the loss of Eros. Thanatos, whose kingdom now stretches as far as the eye can see, the missile can land, the bomb can fall.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy)