Something Stronger Than Hope

You already have it.

Photo by C D-X on Unsplash

We were born in fire.

Some of us came of age during the war on terror. We entered the workforce during the great recession. We started families right before the worst pandemic in a century. Now we’re fighting fascists before breakfast. They tell us to hope, but we already tried that. I’m sorry, it didn’t work. But there’s good news.

We have something better.

Philosophers cautioned us against hope. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, philosophers saw hope “mostly as an attitude to reality that [was] based on insufficient insight into what is true or good.”

Here’s Seneca:

“Cease to hope and you will cease to fear… the two of them march in unison like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to. Fear keeps pace with hope… both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.”

Cease to hope and you will cease to fear.

Adapt yourself to the present.

I love it.

Plato didn’t get everything right, but he remains one of the most widely studied philosophers in western history for a reason. In Book IV of The Republic, he discusses the four cardinal virtues. Hope didn’t make the list.

Here they are:

• Wisdom (or prudence)

• Self-control (or temperance)

• Fairness (or justice)

• Fortitude (or courage)

These four virtues feed a healthy society. We’re supposed to teach them to our young and practice them every day. Hope stems from an insufficient knowledge about the world, but fortitude grows out of wisdom.

We’re long on hope, but short on fortitude.

Fortitude gives us the ability to confront fear and uncertainty. It keeps us going when we don’t know what to do. It motivates us when we feel like we’re losing everything and we have no idea what’s going to happen next.

Here’s Maya Angelou:

“You can be kind and true and fair and generous and just, and even merciful, occasionally. But to be that thing time after time, you have to really have courage… what you have first is your courage.

You may lean against it, it will hold you up, you have that… It is upon you to increase your virtue, the virtue of courage—it is upon you.”

For Angelou, fortitude (courage) was the foundation for everything else. It’s simply the decision to keep getting up every time you get knocked down. It’s the decision to keep trying even when you think it’s hopeless. It’s the strength to march through the mist, because it’s everywhere you look.

That’s what we need.

You can have all the hope in the world, but you won’t get very far without fortitude. At every low point in my life, hope didn’t keep me going. It was fortitude, the ability to dig through my sadness and despair. Fortitude keeps us going now, in the face of never ending crisis. It’s not the hope that things will get better. It’s knowing what will happen if we don’t keep trying.

You don’t have to believe in fairy tales about the world when you have fortitude. Put them together with the other cardinal virtues, and you have everything you need to face the abyss, no matter how hopeless it feels or how dark it gets. You know the right thing to do, and you do it. You do it no matter who judges you, no matter who laughs at you, no matter who attacks you. You do it even if you know it might never make any difference. You do it even if you’re terrified on the inside.

How do I know you already have fortitude?

You’re still here. You haven’t given up yet. You’re still doing the right thing, even if you often feel like you’re the only one doing it. There’s more good news. You’re not the only one doing it. We’re here. It’s like Seneca said:

Cease to hope and you will cease to fear.

Adapt yourself to the present.

That’s fortitude.