THE PROBLEM WITH HOPE -- ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW!

THE PROBLEM WITH HOPE – ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 10, 2009

“There is no such thing as a little corruption. It has the same toxic impact on the walking poor for stealing silverware – remember Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” – as it does on the sitting rich for stealing the company store, yet both are equally guilty of corruption.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., “The Problem with Hope”

A RESPONSE FROM A READER TO "THE PROBLEM WITH HOPE"

Hello Jim,

I hope you’re happy. Sorry for the passive wish that puts the burden on you to achieve happiness. Although, I believe your spirits are lifted when you receive a response from one of your readers.

You offer challenging and insightful thoughts on hope.

Actually, the Hooters patrons had no hope or faith. Think about it. If you were forced to leave a restaurant in the middle (or at the beginning or end for that matter) of your meal for any length of time, would you really want to return and resume eating what you left unattended? Would you pay for a service or meal you could not eat? It is unfair to include this among your examples of theft.

Even more revealing is the owner’s lament over the loss of several thousands of dollars. That’s not likely. At best, he had twenty tables filled at about $75.00 per table. That’s a gross of $1500 of which maybe $750 would be net income. Double it and it still is not a lot. He could recover the cost of lost food through his insurance.

More revealing still would be his concern for the waiter staff, busboys and cooks who lost a portion of their tip income. They are the victims of this “crime.”

I know the Hooters story is minor to the whole and meant as an example of a crime of convenience. I can’t say what I would have done as I don’t know all the details.

The other criminality you describe is not done out of boredom. It is born in desperation. When people are hungry, need shelter and are concerned for the well-being of their families, the stress of those worries pushes them over the brink. In a big city, confronted daily by examples of affluence, the stress of being unable to provide is compounded.

This empathy is not meant to excuse the crime. Crime is the “short-cut society’s” path of choice. You’re right. In many cases, it’s the poorer robbing from the poor. The real concern is that those people are hopeless.

That is why I have difficulty believing most people would steal if they knew they wouldn’t be caught. Thieves are created every day and not caught. It’s hopelessness that leads to compromised morals or situational ethics (which are not at all ethical). A majority of us harbor realistic hope.

A huge component of hope is belief. Hope is not blind. It is a view of the future in which you see attainment. Hope is the source of courage, not a weak surrogate. How does one gain the courage to forge ahead in dark times if not for the view that a good end is possible?

Incarcerated criminals rehearse their empty speeches of change and hope in preparation for the parole board. As you learned, many are verbalizing intentions they do not have nor believe. What is their better future? What has the system taught them? What trade have they learned to provide the vehicle to that better future? They are not given any reason for real hope and, therefore, never develop the courage to face the real world.

Your best writing makes me think as this piece has. Thank you for doing that.

Michael

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Michael,

The rationale you provide would be fitting if the United States of America were it a Third World Country, like Nigeria. I reference that country in this piece where the best paid working class workers – oil rig workers – are paid $50 per month or $600 per year, whereas most workers make less than $1 a day.

Need and survival may be the predicate in such circumstances to steal, but not Americans, not anywhere for any reason. That is the psychopathological rationalizing their plight.

With regard to the Hooter’s Restaurant, and the interruption of the meal by a fire emergency that didn’t materialize, I have trouble with your logic. I, for one, in good conscience could not justify leaving without satisfying my bill. I just could’t. The fact that many did – and this is a very large Hooter’s Restaurant on the water – cannot to my mind be justified.

Criminal behavior is criminal behavior and law-abiding citizens are no less obliged to pay the consequences of their actions than are professional criminals.

You contend that crimes are not done out of boredom but out of need or desperation. Even in these difficult times, there are tons of jobs daily advertised in the newspaper that might neutralize such desperation. But so many people, thanks to being hooked by advertisers, cannot give up their cigarettes and booze, or keep themselves in a state of health pursuant to a job, but instead live a self-pitying existence moaning their lives away hoping for things to change.

The lady next door lost her husband not yet fifty years old to brain cancer, then the economy tanked, and now she is cleaning houses for a living. Yes, a lady used to an easy life has bit the bullet and righted herself by doing honest work without humility or complaint. She still smiles every day, and keeps a stiff upper lift.

As for stress, Americans have forgotten that stress is “the spice of life,” as Dr. Hans Selye puts it, for without stress we all would be vegetables, or dead.

It is distress that is the culprit and distress lives in the false hope that things will change miraculously, when they never do.

Some take a detour from hope by anesthetizing their bodies and closing down their minds with drugs or work or profligate activity to escape the reality of their situation. Nietzsche was right. We are all too human!

Americans have had a fifty or sixty-year cushion from reality and now it is breaking through and they don’t know how to deal with it. The short-cut-itis to which I refer is the incipient toxic character to the American disposition at all levels and in all institutions.

As for hopelessness leading to moral compromise, I prefer to see these in reverse. Moral compromise generates hopelessness. The Hooter patrons that rationalize they don’t have to pay their bill because of its inconvenience, an inconvenience that they did not cause, etc., are making a moral compromise.

Michael, you and I live in a society that has never grown up because it has never had to grow up, that is, until now!

We cannot hope that it will grow up nor can we play the semantic game that hope is the other side of courage because courage is that woman cleaning houses for a living when she never had to work before; courage is embracing our fears not justifying our anxieties; courage is getting off our asses and doing something, anything, and not complaining how much stress we have, or how wrong life has gone for us; courage is digging deep into our psyche beyond our fragile ego to realize time is passing and this is the only life we have to live.

It pleases me that this has made you think.  My aim is that only that.

Be always well,

Jim