Hope and Despair Come Down to the Same Thing: Magical Thinking

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Our emotional lives are, as I explain to my clients, a combination of bodily sensations or feelings and the stories we experience consciously to make sense of those feelings within particular contexts. This is why we can have a limited number of physiological reactions and a nearly infinite number of culturally-created emotional verbiage to label experiences. We all have likely experienced something we’d call homesickness, but what about kaukokaipuu? It’s the Finnish word for a related emotion of yearning to be at a place to call home even if you’ve never been there but at least it’s somewhere else than you’re currently at? There are so many of these experiences where whole sentences in one language are required to grasp a single word in another.

What all the verbiage has in common is a biological drive to organize one’s resources in such a way as to address the perceived future. In a sense we all live in a projected ‘as if’ construct of reality, embedded as we are in the multiple layers of individually perceived collectivized meaning that we call society and culture.

“Your brain’s most important job is to control your body​—​to manage allostasis​—by predicting energy needs before they arise so you can efficiently make worthwhile movements and survive. Your brain continually invests your energy in the hopes of earning a good return, such as food, shelter, affection, or physical protection, so you can perform nature’s most vital task: passing your genes to the next generation.”

from “Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain” by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Silly Season of Politics

There’s certainly a case to be made that there are no silly “seasons” of politics, as the whole enterprise can be called such, but there’s a special uptick in the ridiculous during a presidential election year. We’re inundated, not by declarations of what is, so much as promises of what will be if only the king-ship of our democracy is properly bestowed on the right person. Politics, particularly the personality cults that so often characterize modern political parties, from Reagan to Clinton and Obama to Trump, is easily seen through the lens of a secularized religious drive. We want salvation. An authority figure to show us the way to a promised land.

The visions on hand, and having been there for a while now, center on the two emotional expressions of hope and despair. They are powerful stories, not because they capture what is currently going on nationally (the complexity of the present means we rarely try to look at it), but because they seek to hold up the future as if in a magic globe and they the magicians to make it happen. Look upon the scene inside and see the shining city on a hill or the destruction that awaits.

Thing is, it’s all just so silly. Not in a laughable kind of way, but in the absurd. Albert Camus explored the notion of the absurd as a tangent to existential dread, but rather than a beginning point to inspire a search for transcendence, the absurd was a recognition that meaning itself was fleeting and all would be as dust in the end. What we have in the modern political theatre is a collective recognition of the absurd coupled with a steadfast refusal to admit it. Instead we are wholeheartedly embracing the fictions proffered by secular prophets in service of increasing authoritarian systems. We are racing away from the dread of finding a world that feels just a shade off, as if seen through a glass darkly, by projecting stories of hope and despair into a future that we still, in our hubris, seek to control.

Magical Thinking

The notion of hope seems unassailable for criticism. Who but a crazy person would mock or chastise the existence of hope in anyone? Is it not the most wonderful emotional response to finding joy in life and something to strive for?

The sacrosanct behavior so often associated with hope is the beginning of what will lead to its shadow: to hope is to place one’s awareness on a projected future within which is manifested the dreams or aspirations of an individual or group. This is most notably the case in the injunction to “keep your eye on the prize,” placing the sense of sight not on the immediate surroundings but on a future as yet un-manifested reality. The strength of this mental trick cannot be understated. Sight is equated with knowledge as in the response of “I see” when noting the comprehension of something, a metaphorical conceptualization of a cognitive fact tied as it is to the power of human sight and how important the influence of it is on our lives and early development. Knowledge Is Seeing is not a mere happenstance connection being made; it is the foundation of much of human interaction and the locus of how we often make ethical judgments, notably in the power of an eye witness in the public’s understanding of legal proceedings.

The key here is the focus on specifics, often regardless of the words from the person peddling it. For instance, the political message of Obama was of hope, a powerful and ultimately nebulous claim into which ridiculous numbers of people poured their dreams and aspirations (only later to find that the shiver up their leg that Chris Wallace spoke of wasn’t nearly as positive as they wanted, but then what could be?). Unfortunately, as any person held up in messages of salvation, the reality is anything but and as such the post-racial America spoken of by Obama gave way to a nation hyper-focused on everything that could separate us.

When hope is ruined, lost, or broken, the result is often despair, the shadow. I use the term shadow here because of its constant presence with the object in question indicated by illumination from any angle (notice here again an allusion to sight as knowledge). Hope holds the potential for despair by its very nature. This is because hope, like despair, derives from our forward-seeking minds and the associations built in concerning seeing with knowing. To hope is often, as already noted, to project a particular vision of reality into the future and identify in its specifics the source of one’s future happiness or joy. To despair is to do the opposite, but only in the sense of the opposite as it relates to what is being projected. The act itself is the same in either case. Hope places joy and happiness upon particular future events, and despair places sadness and destruction upon them as well. In both projections, it is a future-oriented placement of value at work.

In both projections there is an attempt at creating a sense of control, using the meaning-making power of our imagination, with an ego enlarged by a preoccupation with identity, funnelled through the populism of an authoritative figure-head. It’s all political hocus-pocus, a form of magical thinking where if we just put our thoughts upon the future, the travails of today will get solved.

A Present Outlook

In Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor states many things having to do with the ego, projections, and control. One in particular:

“The more we become conscious of the mysterious unfolding of life, the clearer it becomes that its purpose is not to fulfill the expectations of our ego. We can put into words only the question it poses. And then let go, listen, and wait.”

There is nothing wrong with looking to the future, but we are at the mercy of events over which even the most arrogant of us cannot hope to control. This is not to say planning is pointless, only that for every plan we make we should take a moment to consider how we live our lives in the present through the actions we take now. Instead of placing the future in the future, take a moment to consider how the actions of today are already shaping it. The future is not a thing out there, it is collapsing into being with every act we take for ourselves and in connection with others.

Learn to live with uncertainty. Again, by Batchelor:

“Perplexity keeps awareness on its toes. It reveals experience as transparent, radiant, and unimpeded. Questioning is the track on which the centered person moves.”

Life does not stop and halt on the whims of our egoistic projections, it continues regardless of the eloquence of our pontifications or the wails of our fear-mongering. We cannot banish uncertainty except by giving up our freedom, and the only person who will appreciate that choice is the one given the power over our future hopes.