In the 14th century we find the first instance of a human crafting a word for the feeling of a certainty there shall be no prosperity, and/or of existing in an environment in which everyone around you expresses this sense OF you, TO you.
It is interesting to me that there is no word that opposes despair, no word that can flip or turn it. It has ‘an opposite’ (hope), but theirs is a dichotomous relation. The nature of despair is, at least linguistically, binary. We speak of ‘giving hope’ but it is a sleight of mind; we give not hope, merely argue that despair is misplaced. Hope is not given, it is fabricated from and of the being. Perhaps this is why humans so often equate hope with life. To understand why we have no concept opposing despair, we first must understand the context, definition, and origin of ‘despair’.
Despair, generally, is an emotional state defined by its certitude that redemption, relief, or remedy is non-existent.
The more detailed definition, courtesy of Etymology Online:
As may be seen, the context of meaning is economic and religious; hope being linked directly to prosperity, the ability to maintain the requirements to engage a prosperous life. The socio-religious value judgment contained in ‘prosperity’ thickens this meaning, as only the good can prosper; thus, despair contains deeper, contextual braids… the cultural, religious, societal judge, ever present, ever adjudicating.
Long has humanity labored under the myth of ‘ability conferred by the gods’, ‘ability equating to good’ and ‘disability equating to evil or punishment’, and our cornerstone word, ‘prosper’ is cognitively loaded with this context, as ‘pro spere‘ (according to expectation) makes clear.
So, to despair is to no longer hold hope of prosperity — ‘prosperity’, in context, refers to both internal and external circumstances — you may despair, you may despair of the world, the world may despair of you. Despair as a judgment is a statement of unworthiness, “Oh, he despairs.” (#doomer, anyone?) The general backlash against despair is one of the more insidiously cruel, but convenient cudgels of the world — despair is treated as a sin against culture or societal — neutering dissent before it can cause discourse or change, because despair so often does lead to precisely that.
But the reality that we created a world in which it was possible to feel as if there is no hope for prosperity? That this feeling is still with us, all these centuries later? That we continue to wage the same wars over the same causes? That we cycle through this wheel of forms and find no irony in our inability to innovate? That no matter how innovative, our systems inevitably dissolve into the same acrimonious wars? The feeling that we are impotent before our own being? Doomed to endlessly repeat this pattern, insanely?
Despair.
We created it. It did not exist before we did. We do this to ourselves. (A common theme.) But that’s the good news. We do this to ourselves. We can un-do it. This is not some haughty platitude; it is how the planetary system operates, our bodies, too. The health of the whole. Holistic. We live in a paradoxically ‘open-closed’ system. It’s rules are our rules, too. Plus, we made it. Of course we can change the things we made. It’s not even hard, it’s just selfless, so we hate it.
The remedy for despair is to care more for humanity’s prosperity than its profits.
As always, the solutions are deceptively simple.