"Hope has a working class version too. The kind that clocks in early and stays late, not because it's noble, but because the rent doesn't care. It’s the kind of hope that says maybe this time the paycheck won’t bounce between bills. It’s not romantic. It’s not abstract. It’s the quiet calculation in the back of your mind that says, Keep showing up. Keep grinding. Because the alternative is nothing. "
"Those who survive the worst often don’t do so because they are the strongest, but because they refuse to give up control of their mind."
I've started tutoring a high school kid in geometry, and after we finish, I'll probably have to tutor her in algebra. One of the geometry problems she was given drove me right up the wall. She was given two angles of a 30-60-90 triangle and the length of one side, and was told to find the other two sides. That's fine, except the one side she was given had a measure of 2*(SQRT2). I laughed, because that's a very silly measurement, but then I got mad, because the only reason for a problem like this is to make the student feel stupid. If you're mathematician, physicist, or engineer, you'll probably recognize that the only way to come upon a triangle that looks like this is to first move through other, easier triangles that are, in some way, more fundamental to the larger phenomenon that you're investigating. And if you're that advanced, then this 30-60-90 triangle is too easy to be worthwhile as a homework problem. If you know all the fundamentals, this triangle simple.
If you don't know enough fundamentals to get to this triangle, this homework problem won't teach you those fundamentals. This homework problem will just overwhelm you with a panoply of different ideas-- easy ideas individually, but more ideas than a noob can juggle at once. This homework problem is either too easy to be worthwhile or too difficult to be of any help. There is no skill level for which it is suitable as a homework exercise. No wonder the kid needs tutoring. Makes me mad.
Most math education these days is structured the same way. If, without thinking too hard about it, the student applies the procedures given, then a numerical answer results that, for some reason, pleases the teacher. Rinse and repeat. For example, they compel the kids to agree that negative numbers are less than zero. 'Less than zero' is an absurd quantity, but once this assault on human reason is accomplished, students are then required to accept that the multiplicative product of two negative numbers is positive. This is also nonsensical, in light of how we've mis-defined negative numbers, but academic reward goes to those who accept it. (Actually, 'negative' means 'the opposite of,' wherein 'opposite' will depend on context. So, if we multiply two negative numbers, then we seek 'the opposite of the opposite of,' which of course puts us back in whatever direction we started in.) I don't know how to view this kind of math education except as an attack on the mind. It does not ennoble, but it does help produce large numbers of docile employees; do your task in the way you are told, because math is hard and you are dumb.
Contrast this with, for example, the Neoplatonist view of geometry. Proclus, in his commentary on Euclid, described geometry as a middle domain that takes the mind from mutable matter to eternal forms. No perfect circle exists in nature, but the human mind can participate in the eternal because it can engage with the geometric ideal of a circle. The fact that a square's diagonal is incommensurate with its sides is not knowledge that we can abstract from matter; only human reason's ability to reach the divine enables us to know it. Math should not make us feel stupid. On the contrary, our powers of mathematical reasoning should reassure us that there is something transcendent in us. Any beast might stumble its way into a correct answer of 42 degrees and thereby satisfy a test question, but only Man can appreciate the triangle inequality.
Now, if somebody has so given in to the working world that "the alternative is nothing," has not that person "give(n) up control of his mind" to his employer? Wouldn't such a person be just about the easiest candidate for a SERE instructor to crack? Such a person has already consented to going along with pretty much anything. Show him that his boss says it's good for his paycheck, his retirement plan, or his mortgage, and he'll tell the interrogator anything he wants to know.
He'll do that because the problem with hope is what I think you've identified here: "(Hopelessness) often manifests when a person perceives no control over their situation and no foreseeable end to their suffering." That passes for a melodramatic description of life itself. We live for a while, there are varying levels of suffering throughout, we have precious little control over what happens, and in the end we die. Pessimistic, but passably accurate.
If we're going to have hope, and not have hope backfire on us, it matters very much what we choose as the ultimate object of the things hoped for. If that object is no more than our own well-being, then we're in for disappointment. On the other hand, if I can get this high school kid to recognize that math doesn't make her dumb, math makes her holy... well, now that would be something, regardless of whatever happens to me along the way.
"Hope has a working class version too. The kind that clocks in early and stays late, not because it's noble, but because the rent doesn't care. It’s the kind of hope that says maybe this time the paycheck won’t bounce between bills. It’s not romantic. It’s not abstract. It’s the quiet calculation in the back of your mind that says, Keep showing up. Keep grinding. Because the alternative is nothing. "
"Those who survive the worst often don’t do so because they are the strongest, but because they refuse to give up control of their mind."
I've started tutoring a high school kid in geometry, and after we finish, I'll probably have to tutor her in algebra. One of the geometry problems she was given drove me right up the wall. She was given two angles of a 30-60-90 triangle and the length of one side, and was told to find the other two sides. That's fine, except the one side she was given had a measure of 2*(SQRT2). I laughed, because that's a very silly measurement, but then I got mad, because the only reason for a problem like this is to make the student feel stupid. If you're mathematician, physicist, or engineer, you'll probably recognize that the only way to come upon a triangle that looks like this is to first move through other, easier triangles that are, in some way, more fundamental to the larger phenomenon that you're investigating. And if you're that advanced, then this 30-60-90 triangle is too easy to be worthwhile as a homework problem. If you know all the fundamentals, this triangle simple.
If you don't know enough fundamentals to get to this triangle, this homework problem won't teach you those fundamentals. This homework problem will just overwhelm you with a panoply of different ideas-- easy ideas individually, but more ideas than a noob can juggle at once. This homework problem is either too easy to be worthwhile or too difficult to be of any help. There is no skill level for which it is suitable as a homework exercise. No wonder the kid needs tutoring. Makes me mad.
Most math education these days is structured the same way. If, without thinking too hard about it, the student applies the procedures given, then a numerical answer results that, for some reason, pleases the teacher. Rinse and repeat. For example, they compel the kids to agree that negative numbers are less than zero. 'Less than zero' is an absurd quantity, but once this assault on human reason is accomplished, students are then required to accept that the multiplicative product of two negative numbers is positive. This is also nonsensical, in light of how we've mis-defined negative numbers, but academic reward goes to those who accept it. (Actually, 'negative' means 'the opposite of,' wherein 'opposite' will depend on context. So, if we multiply two negative numbers, then we seek 'the opposite of the opposite of,' which of course puts us back in whatever direction we started in.) I don't know how to view this kind of math education except as an attack on the mind. It does not ennoble, but it does help produce large numbers of docile employees; do your task in the way you are told, because math is hard and you are dumb.
Contrast this with, for example, the Neoplatonist view of geometry. Proclus, in his commentary on Euclid, described geometry as a middle domain that takes the mind from mutable matter to eternal forms. No perfect circle exists in nature, but the human mind can participate in the eternal because it can engage with the geometric ideal of a circle. The fact that a square's diagonal is incommensurate with its sides is not knowledge that we can abstract from matter; only human reason's ability to reach the divine enables us to know it. Math should not make us feel stupid. On the contrary, our powers of mathematical reasoning should reassure us that there is something transcendent in us. Any beast might stumble its way into a correct answer of 42 degrees and thereby satisfy a test question, but only Man can appreciate the triangle inequality.
Now, if somebody has so given in to the working world that "the alternative is nothing," has not that person "give(n) up control of his mind" to his employer? Wouldn't such a person be just about the easiest candidate for a SERE instructor to crack? Such a person has already consented to going along with pretty much anything. Show him that his boss says it's good for his paycheck, his retirement plan, or his mortgage, and he'll tell the interrogator anything he wants to know.
He'll do that because the problem with hope is what I think you've identified here: "(Hopelessness) often manifests when a person perceives no control over their situation and no foreseeable end to their suffering." That passes for a melodramatic description of life itself. We live for a while, there are varying levels of suffering throughout, we have precious little control over what happens, and in the end we die. Pessimistic, but passably accurate.
If we're going to have hope, and not have hope backfire on us, it matters very much what we choose as the ultimate object of the things hoped for. If that object is no more than our own well-being, then we're in for disappointment. On the other hand, if I can get this high school kid to recognize that math doesn't make her dumb, math makes her holy... well, now that would be something, regardless of whatever happens to me along the way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YVpI_s3Kq4