Everything Is F*cked

party was no more. Now men could kill each other. And, more important, now
men  had  something  to  kill  each  other  for:  women,  and  the  resources  that
attracted women. Thus, began the stupid dick-measuring contest also known
as human history.
Wars started. Kingdoms and rivalries arose. Slavery happened. Emperors
started conquering one another, leaving hundreds of thousands slaughtered in
their  wake.  Entire  cities  were  built  and  then  destroyed.  Meanwhile,  women

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were treated as property, traded and bartered among the men like fancy goats
or something.
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Basically, humans started being humans.
Everything  appeared  to  be  fucked.  But  in  the  bottom  of  that  box  there
remained something shiny and beautiful.
There remained hope.
There are many interpretations of the Pandora’s box myth, the most common
being that while the gods punished us with all the evils of the world, they also
equipped us with the one antidote to those evils: hope. Think of it as the yin
and the yang of mankind’s eternal struggle: everything is always fucked, but
the  more  fucked  things  become,  the  more  we  must  mobilize  hope  to  sustain
and  overcome  the  world’s  fuckedness.  This  is  why  heroes  such  as  Witold
Pilecki inspire us: their ability to muster enough hope to resist evil reminds us
that all of us are capable of resisting evil.
The  sickness  may  spread,  but  so  does  the  cure,  because  hope  is
contagious. Hope is what saves the world.
But here’s another, less popular interpretation of the Pandora’s box myth:
What if hope is not the antidote to evil? What if hope is just another form of
evil? What if hope just got left in the box?
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Because hope didn’t just inspire Pilecki’s heroics. Hope also inspired the
Communist  revolutions  and  the  Nazi  genocides.  Hitler  hoped  to  exterminate
the  Jews  to  bring  about  an  evolutionarily  superior  human  race.  The  Soviets
hoped to instigate a global revolution to unite the world in true equality under
communism.  And  let’s  be  honest,  most  of  the  atrocities  committed  by  the
Western, capitalist societies over the past one hundred years were done in the
name of hope: hope for greater global economic freedom and wealth.
Like a surgeon’s scalpel, hope can save a life, and hope can take a life. It
can  uplift  us,  and  it  can  destroy  us.  Just  as  there  are  healthy  and  damaging
forms of confidence, and healthy and damaging forms of love, there are also
healthy and damaging forms of hope. And the difference between the two is
not always clear.
So far, I’ve argued that hope is fundamental to our psychology, that we need
to (a) have something to look forward to, (b) believe ourselves in control of
our  fate  enough  to  achieve  that  something,  and  (c)  find  a  community  to
achieve it with us. When we lack one or all of these for too long, we lose hope
and spiral into the void of the Uncomfortable Truth.
Experiences  generate  emotions.  Emotions  generate  values.  Values

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generate  narratives  of  meaning.  And  people  who  share  similar  narratives  of
meaning  come  together  to  generate  religions.  The  more  effective  (or
affective) a religion, the more industrious and disciplined the adherents. And
the  more  industrious  and  disciplined  the  adherents,  the  more  likely  the
religion is to spread to other people, to give them a sense of self-control and a
feeling  of  hope.  These  religions  grow  and  expand  and  eventually  define  in-
groups versus out-groups, create rituals and taboos, and spur conflict between
groups with opposing values. These conflicts must exist because they maintain