Hope and Human Survival

Hoping vs Hopelessness

Again and again, we—that is to say a person, a family, a group, an organisation, a society—find ourselves embedded in a deeply unsatisfactory or even dreadful situation.

The situation seems hopeless. Often there are critics or opponents, including well-meaning friends and family, who would love you to believe that you have no power and that you cannot change anything. But to submit to hopelessness only generates the feared disaster. To resign ourselves achieves nothing, nor does hoping in the sense of blindly assuming that everything will work itself out.

Hope is an intrinsic part of being determined to do something that could improve a terrible situation. Hope implies that there can be a change from a present threatening condition to a future better one. Hope must be part of the mental infrastructure that enabled survival in the past, just as it does now and will in any future.

Hoping means refusing to surrender, having faith and, by definition, preparing to attempt the seemingly impossible. After all, if improvement did not seem impossible, the sense of hopelessness would never have arisen in the first place.

In awful situations, the gulf that lies between victim-hood and positive effort is bridged by willingness, and the beginning of willingness appears to be hoping.

In this Taxonomy, that means hoping is a manifestation of willingness: and to be specific, hoping entails trying, believing, facing, participating, risking, learning and/or trusting—but taxonomically as G1-monads in a structural hierarchy rather than as 7 levels in the primary hierarchy.

Attempting the impossible calls for harnessing all the energies that you possess. By combining levels of willingness into more complex structures, willingness energies can be multiplied, enriched and directed to deal with necessities like reassuring others, enduring hardships, staying balanced and more.

ClosedHope in Philosophy

Hope is a staple of philosophers: see this account for details.

Subsequent to the formulations proposed in this section, I discovered that Aristotle closely aligns with the G1-Monad in his linkage of courage, confidence and hope.

The brave man, on the other hand, has the opposite disposition; for confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition. (Nicomachean Ethics 3.7, 1116a2)

Not every hopeful person is courageous, but every courageous person is hopeful. Hoping well looks to the future while drawing on past experience.

This future orientation was a negative feature of hope for those philosophers emphasizing living in the present and equating hope with ignorant optimism. For others hope is evil because its link to patience and tolerance fosters passivity.

As always, the taxonomy never asks what a word means. It discriminates psychosocial functions and then finds a suitable label for that function.

Hope and the Spiritual

Hope and faith make up two of three theological virtues. This is no coincidence because throughout the taxonomy, Level-7 has regularly been associated with spiritual functioning. Willingness-RL7 naturally shares this quality.
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Ultimate values-L7 in Purpose-RL6 are the doorway to goodness and the conception of God. But L7 in the other domains also touch on the transcendental: L7-Action is Spontaneity, L7-Inquiry is Wonder, L7-Change is Transformation, L7-Experience is Imagination, L7-Communication is Openness.

Within Typologies, L’7 similarly touches on spiritual methods: For decision-PH'1, the method is Imaginist. For research-PH'2, the method is Contemplative. For depiction-PH'3, the paradigm is Unitary (Oneness). For mental stabilization, the method is Transpersonalist. For use of language, the method is Mythic. For ethical choice-PH'6, the method is Transcendentalist.

The highest level of hoping is trust-G17 which implies both assuming all will go well but also appreciating that it is never possible to know the full ramifications of any action. When the impossible is attempted, rational planning is a mirage and the end result of efforts are unpredictable.

Vaclav Havel wrote: Hope is … an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

Maria Popova suggests: Hope is therefore the power to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps from even the darkest and most dispiriting of circumstances. Hope might be our greatest evolutionary adaptation — the mitochondria of our spiritual metabolism, the opposable thumb of our grip on life.

Gabriel Marcel wrote: We might say that hope is essentially the availability of a soul which has entered intimately enough into the experience of communion to accomplish in the teeth of will and knowledge the transcendent act.

Before developing the framework for attempting the impossible, grouping by grouping in a structural hierarchy:

Originally posted: 30-Jun-2026