Hope vs Fear

 A battle between phantoms... but must it be fought?

 

When we hope for something, we wish for things to turn out the way we want them to. Yet in hoping, we imply that there is another way we very much wish for things not to turn out. The strong aversion we feel for the possible scenario we wish to avoid can be characterized as fear. It is for this reason, I think, that hope and fear are so often posed in opposition to one another. But while it is clear that there is a relationship between the two, I think it is mistaken to infer from this that hope and fear are opposites. If we look at them more closely, we will find a relationship of a significantly different kind.

 

Hope is quite strongly urged and cherished by many folks these days. It is all too often that we hear the admonition, "don't lose hope." When it comes to fear, the general tone I hear is "do not give in to fear," or at times I hear the even blunter phrase, "have no fear." These attitudes are at times so strongly held that they seem to have become stigma, both against a hopeless disposition and in favor of a fearless disposition. This quickly develops into a dogma that esteems hope as a high virtue and derides fear as a blemish to be scorned. With these opening remarks in mind, I'll state outright that in this article, I aim to clear the air up around three main points:

 

1) The supposed opposition of hope vs fear. I argue that they are not, in fact, opposites, and that conceiving them as such is based on a misapprehension of what they really are.

2) The excessive and earnest praise of hoping and hopefulness. (Taken to the extreme, this risks detaching people from reality and leaving them deeply dissatisfied or worse.)

3) The disdain and dismissing of fear. (Taken to the extreme, this reeks of toxic positivity--the attitude that says to wash away all "negative" emotions and "just focus on the positive.")

To attend to these three points will require us to engage in a deep semiotic exploration. And in this exploration we will surely discover much more than what we set out to find.

~

Our noun for hope comes from the Old English verb "hopian," meaning "to have trust or confidence that something will be so." The modern use of the word is more commonly used in a sense of: "to wish for a possible event," as in "I hope the weather will be nice tomorrow," though it can also indicate a kind of trust or confidence when used in a certain sense, such as in "I have high hopes for his project."  While it may not be obvious, hope always directs us at the future. We have to look deeper at the usage of the word to see this. It is obvious when we say "I hope I get the job." But when we say "I hope you had a good time at the party," it sounds like a hope for the past. But what the statement implies is "I hope you will tell me you had a good time" or "I hope I don't find out you had an awful time." In a similar way, it may sound like a hope for the present when someone says "I hope it is safe to camp here," but what is implied in that is "I hope we pass the night undisturbed and wake up well-rested tomorrow" or "I hope we don't wake up to an ambush." When we see past the misleading uses of the word, it is clear hope always creates an anticipation or expectation of what is yet to come. Hope lives in the future, and it actually requires uncertainty. Just consider this: if we had an exact knowledge of everything that would happen in the future, hope would be meaningless.

 

Fear, on the other hand, came from a word denoting calamity and sudden danger. It is intense and present in this moment. Fear comes from proto-Germanic "*feraz," meaning "danger," and even older is the Proto-Indo-European "*per-," meaning "to try, risk." Much of our very old language has evolved from being literal to being more abstract and figurative, and so has fear evolved from its root words denoting danger (the tiger or crocodile waiting in ambush) and risk itself (drawing closer to the edge of a steep and high cliff), to become a word that describes the emotion associated with these experiences. 

 

Right away, we can see that hope is a cognitive process of forming an expectation of the as-of-yet-unknown, whereas fear is a strong emotion that may be focused on either a present or future danger. We can also see, as I described in the intro, that rather than behaving as opposites, hope and fear seem quite inseparable. For example, one can imagine encountering a dangerous predatory animal and feeling immediate fear in this interaction, while also thinking, "I hope I will find a way out of this." Similarly, one can imagine, upon turning into a darkened side street, having the thought go through their head, "I hope I don't encounter anyone who wishes me harm as I go this way" while being afraid that such an assailant lurks in the shadows. (If they were opposites, it would be impossible for them to both occur simultaneously, as they do in these examples.) It looks like hope is one of the possible reactions we can have to fear. There seems to be a strong link here--more on that later.

 

Let's take a moment and consider things in light of the future. One thing (and perhaps the only thing) that is clear about the future is that it is uncertain. In the face of uncertainty, we often feel fear. We can also choose to have hope in the face of an uncertain future, and this can distract us from our fear about it, but hope is not an antidote to fear. Still, hope seems at first glance to be the opposite of  fear because of the way that it can distract us from it. The thing is, hope fixates on the future--and fixation on the future can breed something very closely related to fear... There are many things in our world that we may be afraid of that we do not have complete control over, from sudden illness to political leaders making dangerous decisions to just the thought of getting in a car accident...

 

But fearing uncertainty in a world of constant uncertainty leads to constant fear. 

 

This backdrop of fear about things that could go wrong but haven't happened yet, we call anxiety. Whereas pure fear comes from the presence of a perceived danger, anxiety seems to be a fear about the possibility of danger. (And since we can never truly know all the possibilities, it is not uncommon for people to be chronically anxious.) Our word "anxious" descends from the Latin "anxius," meaning "solicitous, uneasy, troubled in mind." This word evolved from the older "angere" which literally meant "to choke, squeeze," and this descended from a Proto-Indo-European root word "*angh-" which meant "tightness, narrowness." This much older origin of our current use of anxiety seems to still have some bearing today, as when someone feels anxious, they feel constricted and tight. I can say from personal experience that an anxiety attack involves shortness of breath, and relief from anxiety feels like being able to expand and breathe again after being suffocated. But I think we can broaden the sense of "tightness" and "narrowness" to convey the way anxiety affects our disposition towards the world. When we are anxious, we focus on how things could go wrong, narrowing our view of the situation, and attempting to tighten our grip on it. Yet when a fist tries and tries to tighten itself around nothing, the only thing that might come out of it is a muscle-strain. Anxiety feels like trying to get control of something uncontrollable--the ever uncertain future. Anxiety is a cousin of fear, but it does not arise from fear itself, but rather is a type of fear that happens when we fixate on possible outcomes. Again, we must be aware of how the mind works. Anxiety sometimes evaluates the past that already slipped by, trying to figure out "how did I screw up this time?", "what did I do wrong?" But what the anxious mind is really doing in this situation is trying to protect us. The overly 'helpful' mind thinks, "if I can figure out what we did wrong back there, we can avoid messing up again." "If I had only done Y instead of X, we would be so much happier right now." Playing through a specific memory over and over again is never going to change what happened--"but perhaps," thinks anxiety, "we can do better next time if we figure out how we failed before." Again, as with hope, we need only consider: would anxiety have any bearing if we were absolutely certain of everything that was coming up in the future? Anxiety, like hope, is rooted in uncertainty.

 

Isn't it curious how hope narrows our view to fixate on a favorable particular outcome. Isn't it interesting that when we are in hope, we tighten around the uncertain situation, to try and make the hope come true? Yet despite these similarities, the feeling of being full of hope is far different from having an anxiety attack! ...But what happens when that hope falls in jeopardy? What happens when our very highest hopes seem like they are about to be undermined? What happens when we feel like we are starting to lose control? And what happens when we can't get that control back?

I've made it quite clear by now that hope is inevitably tied to fear and anxiety, even though it is not the opposite of either one. So what, then, is its opposite? Ok, as promised...

 

Despair is actually the opposite of hope. If we look at the Latin roots of "despair," we find "de-" (a root meaning "lack" or "lacking") + "sperare," ( literally "hope"), so we get a word that literally means "a lack of hope." But despair is more than just a lacking of hope, because this presupposes that hope is normally present. But just as despairing is not a base state of consciousness, neither is hoping. If we look more closely at the root of "despair," we actually find that "sperare" is closely related to "speed," and both "speed" and "sperare" can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European "*spes," meaning "prosperity," also "fat" and "success."

A lack of success... A lack of prosperity. A peculiar worry regarding the future, (but then, are not all worries cast in that way?). Just as hope looks to the future fixating on success (sperare), so does despair look to the future fixating on failure. Both are thought-patterns fixating on future outcomes. It is curious how the workings of the mind can themselves stimulate powerful emotions in us. Despair can cause a fear reaction in the body, while hope can cause a confidence or sureness. But the cognitive exercises of hope and despair turn us toward the future and away from the present. The "fear" stimulated by despair is more like an anxiety, while the "confidence" stimulated by hope is more like wishful thinking. Despair seldom fails to produce a feeling of fear--and this curious power of our minds is another reason why people so often confuse fear as being the opposite of hope--when really it is despair that is truly hope's opposite! And it looks like the opposite of fear is really confidence, sureness, the feeling we are safe. But when turned towards the unknowable future, this kind of confidence is only a hope--it can never go any further than hope. And whether we hope or despair, we encourage fear. In hope, we fear that what was hoped for will not come to be, while in despair we fear that what we despair of is coming to be. (I keep coming back to the relationship between hope and fear, and I will unfold this fully when we get to the deeper analysis of fear later on.)

 

And none of this is to say that I think we should never hope. Indeed, hope can be a very good teacher--because when we indulge in hopeful thoughts, there is always some thing or situation we are hoping for. To hope with sincerity is to envision what it is you truly long for. But as hope is a fantasy, it is not a stable place to stay. In this present moment, we may work to move towards a future we seek. And hope helps us to idealize and visualize such a future. The same could be said of despair. When you come crashing down from the high platform of hope, there you have fallen into the abyss of despair. The despair also teaches us. It teaches us about what we dread. In despair we get to see the things that most terrify us. Indeed, fear is not the opposite of hope, but despair can show us what we fear... because in despair we feel we are falling headlong towards it.

In the realm of imagination we can come to hope or despair. But it is always from here in the present that I can evaluate, decide, and (if I have the wherewithal and resources) act to bring myself closer to that ideal I hoped for and steer away from the horror that despair warned me about. To hope implies that what we hope for is yet to be obtained; to despair implies that what we despair of is yet to be suffered... To put certainty into either one is to give much more credence to this sense of not-yet-being... It is just not very sturdy ground to stand on. I want to base my foundation in the present that does not know the future but remains open to all of its possibilities. Hope and despair are guests who come into my home but do not stay. In the face of uncertainty, rather than hope or despair, I am more wont to encourage faith. But you can read my piece on faith if you want to hear more on that--now we are going to look at what has been looming in the background: we must now face our fear.

 

One thing stays true about fear through the ages... Fear tells us we are facing a risk or danger, and gives us the impetus to respond (often by either fleeing or destroying the source of the fear.) Even the smallest creature could cause a fear reaction, such as when we see a colorfully-marked spider that is likely venomous, or a tick that could spread disease. Only the most disciplined person could repress the very real urge to get away from the potential danger, (and I suspect that, faced with real danger, even someone who appears totally stoic on the surface could still be dealing with an internal chaos stimulated by fear). As one of the most basic emotions, fear has an immediacy to us, and for good reason as well. Imagine if you did not have a response of fear to looking over a cliff or finding a wildly colored arthropod inhabiting your sleeping quarters. The extreme of this would be you neglect to have caution and go tumbling over the edge or get woken up with a deadly venom coursing through your veins. Fear is what impels us to step back from the edge or set up a permethrin-infused mosquito net. Fear motivates us to respond to danger by either avoiding it or modifying the environment to eliminate the danger. Fear drives us to take measures to protect ourselves and those we care about.

So far so good. At the surface, there is nothing strange about fear, and it in fact appears quite natural, as it is observable as a self-preserving feature of the emotional landscape of at the very least, all of the other mammals. Yet to only discuss it in this way would be to sidestep the deep cultural aversion to fear, as famously expressed by Dwight D. Eisenhower when he said in his inaugural address that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." Indeed, it is by the very way that fear impels us to alter our behavior that it can have a more sinister side to it. Fear has an effect of dulling our reason and pushing us into action. Taken too far, the practical fear of particularly dangerous spiders becomes an extreme panic at the sight of any spider, even harmless ones. Some people cannot even handle the sight of any arthropod at all. 

 

At a basic level, fear is jumping back from a snake, but at the complex level of our society, it is avoiding a risky social interaction, or joining a crowd in chasing away a threat. Again, fear taken too far in these situations could mean avoiding even slightly risky social situations even if they might offer great rewards, or joining a witch hunt that targets innocent people. These examples of extreme fear are often characterized as phobias, and are generally regarded as mental illness. Phobias are what happen when fear is taken to the extreme, but it can cause problems even when it is not so extreme as to cause immediate panic: one particularly insidious feature of fear lies not in the emotion itself, but in the way it is manipulated. Many manipulators have used this method of invoking a strong fear in people in order to coerce them to act one way or another, because when people are truly afraid, their next actions become more predictable.

 

Some examples:

 

-Notice how people are kept in line in society, adhering to their conventional (and often severely limiting) roles, by the subtle overhanging fear that everything would go to Hell if they didn't. Frightened people won't deviate and try new things. 

 

-Notice how people can be coaxed into war (or at least being supportive of a war) when they are made to be afraid of another country, the "outsiders," the "barbarians," even if going to war may not actually be in anyone's best interests (except for the leaders urging it).

 

-Notice how the news channels broadcast messages of fear. Yet people who are afraid feel they must "watch the news to keep track of what is going on." When they watch the news, they only become more afraid, which leads them to feel the need to be more prepared, so they go back and watch more news... ad infinitum. (An effective marketing scheme, predatory as it may be.)

 

Thus, as clever as Eisenhower's phrase is, its irony does not escape me--and I suspect it did not escape him either. For in fearing fear, people still have something to fear. The people taken in by that speech may have thought, "well we had best get busy at eliminating the potential sources of fear, so that we are never afraid." A black widow nesting in your home can actually be dangerous, so we eliminate the danger by moving it outside (or for those of us more violently inclined, throwing a shoe at it). By making fear out as a danger in itself, (effectively making fear fearsome), we make it something to be avoided or eliminated. But is fear even the kind of phenomenon that can be eliminated or avoided? I haven't seen this work with any other primal emotions.

It is clear that those who are ruled by fear give up a great deal of their agency--in other words, they become less capable of making effective judgments and sound choices. Bearing this in mind, I certainly sympathize with those who want nothing to do with fear. There is no shortage in our culture today of people who implore us to "choose love instead of fear" or "have no fear, trust the universe." They have at least chosen to turn away from fear, but I wonder if these militant anti-fear folks are not only focused on the extreme examples and ignoring the ways fear helps and teaches us. And I also can't help but wonder: are these well-intentioned folks not falling into Eisenhower's trap? Are they not guilty of fearing fear itself? Are they not, perhaps, as little as they may like to admit it, afraid of what would happen if they let fear rule their lives? Ironic indeed. It would seem that as we humans presently find ourselves, we have not (yet) been able to escape our mammal brains. 

 

Maybe we can't get around the fact that fear is built into our very biology, and for reasons I have discussed above, it may not be wise to dispose of it, (if such a possibility even exists). The trick, then, seems to be in how we respond to fear.

 

One way of responding is to fall back on hope. If we are surrounded by danger, why not hope that we can get out of it? This is actually quite a common response, and I think the apparent palliative effect of hope in situations of great fear may be another culprit behind the ubiquitous (and false) dichotomy between hope and fear. It is not unreasonable, when facing a difficult and fearsome situation, to choose to focus on hoping things will turn out alright instead of being afraid that they won't. But there are problems with this approach. For one, hope, being a wish or expectation for a possible outcome, takes us out of our present awareness where we may actually be able to do something about the thing we are afraid of. But another, less obvious criticism, lies beneath. Hoping for a scenario implies, as I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, the fear that its opposite will come to pass. Let's take a deeper look at this connection: While it may be possible to achieve our hope, it is also possible that we will never reach what we hope for. Thus, the greater the hope, the greater the fear that accompanies it--and they can never be detached from one another. Rather than being the opposite of hope--fear is the shadow that follows it. If someone has a hope that reaches to the stars, it casts a shadow of fear that could consume their whole world. 

 

This is not to mention that when hoping in the face of fear, there still remains the danger that one hoped to avoid in the first place. Add to this real danger the potential danger of a failed hope, and we now face a twofold danger. Hope mutates fear/danger by amplifying it beyond a mere present danger into a whole array of possible future dangers. It is like adding wood to a fire in an effort to smother it. Thus, in verse 13 of the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching, it reads: "Hope is as hollow as fear."..."Hope and fear are both phantoms / that arise from thinking of the self." Fear is a self-preserving reaction to a dangerous situation, and hope yearns for this same self to find itself in a more desirable situation. The more energy and attention we put into our hopes or fears, the more we reinforce our separate ego-identities, and the more we care for this ego-self, the more weight our hopes and fears carry. It becomes a vicious cycle. We need to look deeper than the ego-self if we want to get beneath our fear.

 

What happens when we accept that fear is a part of what we are, and may be part of what has gotten us this far? Perhaps you have heard a proposed choice between love or fear, and been urged to choose love. While love is not the opposite of fear, it looks like it may be a better antidote for fear's debilitating hold than hope. But I am not sure if it is possible to always choose love as a replacement for fear, and if it were possible, that would be denying fear, which still has a valuable place in our lives. I also find it hard to advise someone, when facing a real danger, to show that danger love instead of fear. The terror that compels us to save ourselves when the tiger gives chase is all-consuming, and its usefulness needs no explaining. But remember, the fear we are talking about today is the emotion that arises in response to a perceived danger (which may or may not be truly dangerous). When faced with the emotion of fear, we can be loving, and this love does not need to replace or push out the fear. Might I be so bold as to suggest, that instead of saying "choose love instead of fear," we go even further and start saying, "choose to love fear."? This would certainly be a most radical kind of love... though I must say I prefer love with roots that run deep.

What I suggest is that the troublesome aspect of fear is not so much what it does to us, but rather what we do with it. What I believe is possible is that someone can become more aware of the relationship they have with fear, and through this awareness not be controlled by it. By recognizing when fear arises from a place of stillness, by accepting that it has appeared (hence the love), by listening to what it tells us (while not necessarily allowing it to persuade us), we put ourselves in a position where we actually become freer from fear than if we tried to avoid it altogether. If fear is like the shadow that never leaves us, why are we running from it?

 

And beyond its usefulness as an aid to survival, doesn't fear have something valuable to tell us at a much deeper level? 

 

If you look over a cliff and feel the fear of death as you dwell dangerously close to the edge, does that not tell you that you are afraid of losing your life? So that in this fear, you know you value being alive? Can you imagine what kind of life it would be that you don't feel that fear?

 

Have you ever realized that you very much want to ask someone on a date that you really care about, but you are so, so afraid that you'll lose the connection you already have with them in an awful rejection? But doesn't that fear tell you that your feelings for them are so, so important to you? Can you imagine never meeting someone who makes you feel that kind of fear?

 

And what do we do in the face of this fear, if it is such an important and meaningful aspect of our experience? Rather than urge people to be fearless (which would be as sensible as urging them to run from their shadow), I would prefer to remind us of our capacity for courage. And all the more significant is one's courage when it faces the direst of fear.

 

Samwise Gamgee from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series had to look deep within himself to find the courage that empowered him to face unimaginable dangers. (Image is from an anonymous artist and is available on Pinterest).

 

Courage, the quality of mind that enables one to meet fear and danger head on, evolved from the Old French word "corage," which denoted the innermost feelings associated most often with one's heart. If we trace the lineage of the word further back to its Proto-Indo-European roots, we get the root word "*kerd-", literally meaning "heart." You see, the true opposite of fear is confidence, safety, sureness. But when faced with a real danger, one is anything but safe--and when faced with real fear, one is anything but confident. But when sitting in this fear, one can, after listening, respond to the fear with the resolve to be courageous. Dipping deeply into the strength of one's heart, one may find the courage that does not replace the fear, but is willing to face it. Courageously facing fear does not necessarily mean brashly charging through. When a real danger is present, courage may mean holding the presence of mind to calmly look for an escape. Love becomes the gateway to listen to fear, and listening becomes the gateway to courage. The suggestion here for the fearful ones, then, is not the cliche "have courage," but the radical: show love even to your fear, and then after hearing it out, see what courage you may find--deep within--corage--the heart. Is it a coincidence that love is also universally associated with--the heart?

When I think about everything that comes together to make me who I am, my deepest, most haunting fears end up being indispensable. I don't enjoy feeling these fears. But to reject them or aim for a state where they don't exist would be to reject an important part of myself. As an advocate of radical self-love, it is only sensible that I come to this position, that I may as well love this fear. Fear gives us the opportunity to be courageous, and indeed it is only in the light of our fears that courage gains its significance. As we grow and move forth in life with courage, we may someday find that we have overcome old fears; but, then unforeseen and new fears may lie in wait around the corner, only to give us opportunities for new courage--a never ending adventure. And if with courage welling from deep within the heart we can continue to face our fears--it may indeed sometimes lead us to what we--hoped for. 

Earlier we considered: the greater the hope, the greater the fear. So perhaps the most honest hope requires a most fervent courage--the courage to hope, even though it will imply the fear that this hope may not come to be. I think I have made clear the problems that arise when we let hope or fear be our commanders or solace... But we can accept them as part of ourselves without letting them take us over. And this love that can love both our hopes and our fears comes from the same place as our courage that empowers us to face them.

The greatest mark of courage is someone who, despite a clear danger to themself, will stay and face the situation, even if they do not know what to do or how it will turn out. If we find ourselves sometimes lacking in courage, maybe the place we can start first is to look for love. Maybe instead of looking to our hopes, we can look to our hearts. And maybe, if we do that, we'll find that the courage we never knew we were capable of dwells deeper within us than any hope or fear could ever reach.