Kill That Hope

Abandon hope, Dante’s Inferno tells the reader, when you enter hell. That this line should be one of the most (if not the most, altogether) recognizable line from medieval literature should tell us something, I believe.

Why are we supposed to abandon hope? Because hope sets us up. Hope pertains to something that hasn’t yet transpired. Hope is deceptive. Hope is inherently biased. Hope can lead us to boundless delusions and we may forever end up entertaining illusions.

It is dangerous to give people hope if you’re only going to take it away. Desperate people are dangerous. And you should not frustrate people in this day and age when we are all just a hair trigger away from turning into werewolves, even without the full moon. People are by and large disappointed with Life. If you’re not going to be able to deliver, don’t promise them things. We’ve all sort of accepted that we are rolling in the mud and we just shuffle along. But when someone gives us hope, we start to dream. Like pigs staring out at the stars from a pigpen, as it often happens. That’s when people abandon hope and become exactly who naysayers have always said they would be, the worst versions of themselves. It is an incredibly rigged system. And sometimes we are the ones who contribute to it. Maddening, no?

Of course, we don’t like to introspect, so we don’t realise it or accept these vexing thoughts of ourselves to ourselves. Even when our actions have fanned out to undeniable negative repercussions, we rationalize it and say we have done what we have for the greater good. The greater good. What a concept! So grandiose. And so deceptive. Anyone who’s ever read Harry Potter would understand how flawed this phrase is. In real life, any student of Political Science would instantly recognize this as a flaw in democracy. Who is the greater? A demographic majority? An elite majority? Who?

I don’t know, man. Maybe the call to abandon hope is apt today because maybe the world has already ended and we are in Inferno, without our realizing it. There are glitches in the Matrix, as us sci-fi nerds like to say. Every few days, there are new evidences of Mandela’s Effects. I was always so sure it was ‘Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear’, for example; apparently it has always been ‘Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear’; I refuse to believe this.

But I am stupid. And I remain thus. Like my sci-fi hero, The Doctor of Gallifrey, I am, and always will be, the optimist; the hoper of far-flung hopes, and the dreamer of improbable dreams. And when in the course of time, I have to choose between sacrificing/killing people for the greater good or being a coward, I hope I choose to be a coward.