Of all the qualities inherent to humankind, I think that the two most essential to our collective nature are fear and hope. Standing above greed, love, anger, courage, or even curiosity, it is hope and fear that drive us, that hold sway over all that we have done and all that we might yet do; all that we are, and all that we have the potential to become.
I think it could be argued, in fact, that all the other qualities are just offshoots or shades of those two primal aspects of who we are. After all, what is greed, if it’s not the manifestation of our terror of losing what we have, or what we think we are owed? What is courage, if not the belief that our troubles can be battled and overcome? Just as curiosity and love arise from the faith that life can turn out to be rich, exciting, and meaningful.
Although these two powerful emotions seem diametrically opposed, they are inevitably linked together, like the near and far side of the moon. In fact, they have no meaning, except in the context of one another. Without fear, hope would be a worthless currency. Without hope, fear would long ago have caused our species to have winked itself out of existence. Like two sides of a tossed and flashing coin, they flicker inside us, shifting from light to shadow, shadow to light.
I think, when all is said and done, and humankind’s race has been fully run—whether that’s in a fortnight or a couple of millennia from now—fear and hope will still be there with us, right to the end.
Because I tend to be a cynic, I have to confess that my money would be on fear to have the last word as the doomsday bells toll. Fear is as hard to kill as a vampire, as resilient as a virus. Overwhelmed by it, we will more than likely be too paralyzed to act or panicked into actions that are terrible and wrong. Certainly, current events around the globe seem to show a surge of bigotry, resentment, isolationism, and a host of reactionary political ideologies, including environmental denial. All of which suggests that fear is thriving and on the rise.
Hope, on the other hand, despite its weird ability to appear out of nowhere, even in the darkest of places and at the most unlikely times, seems a comparatively numinous and fragile thing. Like a butterfly in a thunderstorm, a sunbeam sliding through the rafters of a slaughterhouse. But perhaps it’s this seeming fragility, the near impossibility of hope’s survival against all odds, that is its greatest strength. I can’t even begin to explain how that may be, except that it has something to do with the conviction that things are rarely what they seem to be.
But, who knows? Like I said, I bet, in the end, it’s fear that will win. But still, I hope against hope that I’m wrong.
