Hope

Hope is an activity rather than an expectation. It is conscious striving, which places it under the conscious will rather than the emotional one, and it is aimed at two things that turn out to be the same thing, exosocial connection and relief from sublation or violation. Reaching outward and getting free are one movement, since what sublation and violation do is block the reaching. Nothing in the definition concerns optimism or belief that circumstances will improve, which is what separates it from ordinary usage. A person can expect nothing to change and still be striving, and a person can expect improvement while striving for nothing. The second sentence supplies the diagnostic, and it is stated as a definition rather than a symptom. To lose hope is to stop seeking connection or liberation, so hopelessness is not a mood accompanying inaction but the inaction itself. That places it very close to what Marsh describes as deanimation and to the immobilizing depression she reports under totalitarian arrangements, where the exhaustion of maintaining an endogroup shows up in a population as a general cessation of reaching. It also accounts for the strategic weight she puts on making resistance interesting rather than grim, since a movement offering so many discussions, decisions and things to build that it is more interesting than any stale old dictator is supplying exactly what the definition asks for.

Charles Snyder's hope theory in psychology defines hope through agency and pathways thinking, the belief that goals are reachable and that routes to them exist, which makes it cognitive and expectation-based. Learned helplessness research after Seligman studies the opposite condition experimentally. Philosophy and theology have their own long treatments, with hope as a theological virtue and Ernst Bloch building a whole philosophy on the not-yet. Marsh's definition is closest to the activist strands and differs from Snyder's on the central point, since her hope requires no belief that the goal is reachable, only that the reaching continues, which makes it available to people whose situation offers no grounds for expectation.