Genuine hope rests on disrespect for entrenched, durable suffering, not on guarantees.

Evidence

Nor yet can dialogue exist without hope. Hope is rooted in men’s incompletion, from which they move out in constant search—a search which can be carried out only in communion with others. Hopelessness is a form of silence, of denying the world and fleeing from it. The dehumanization resulting from an unjust order is not a cause for despair but for hope, leading to the incessant pursuit of the humanity denied by injustice. Hope, however, does not consist in crossing one’s arms and waiting. As long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait. — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 267 (#expands, via linked claim)

People are evidently inclined to grant legitimacy to anything that is or seems inevitable no matter how painful it may be. Otherwise the pain might be intolerable. The conquest of this sense of inevitability is essential to the development of politically effective moral outrage. For this to happen, people must perceive and define their situation as the consequence of human injustice: a situation they need not, cannot, and ought not to endure. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 186 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

In so far as man is immersed in the historical situation, he does not even succeed in conceiving of the failures and lacks in a political organization or determined economy; this is not, as is stupidly said, because he “is accustomed to it,” but because he apprehends it in its plenitude of being and because he can not even imagine that he can exist in it otherwise. For it is necessary here to reverse common opinion and on the basis of what it is not, to acknowledge the harshness of a situation or the sufferings which it imposes, both of which are motives for conceiving of another state of affairs in which things would be better for everybody. It is on the day that we can conceive of a different state of affairs that a new light falls on our troubles and our suffering and that we decide that these are unbearable. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1068 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Hope is active struggle rooted in human incompletion, not waiting — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 267; Powerless hope is the sole precondition for continuing to live — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 149; Unenforceable reliance is a gamble and hope, not trust (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Hope is active struggle rooted in human incompletion, not waiting #expands (0.85) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 267
• People accept any suffering they believe is inevitable, blocking political outrage #contradicts (0.80) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 186
• Suffering becomes unbearable only once a better alternative is conceivable #expands (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1068
• Powerless hope is the sole precondition for continuing to live #qualifies (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 149
• Unenforceable reliance is a gamble and hope, not trust #expands (0.72)
• Trust involves a calculable asymmetry of possible harm, while hope does not #expands (0.72)