The Natural Selection of Hope, The Mechanics of Virtue, Matt Berry, aphorism 92

92
The Natural Selection of Hope: In a desperate but apparently futile predicament, it is the one who insists upon mechanical efficiency that is the pessimist and the one who cares nothing for it that is the optimist.  And so out of one hundred optimists and an equal number of pessimists, each of the optimists blindly and therefore confidently “knows what to do.”  In the random scattering of their efforts, each in his stubborn endurance provides a yield for the law of natural selection: one optimist makes it ... while all one hundred pessimists have not so much as lifted a finger, for they have not yet made a distinction between their complacent belief in certainty and their certain ignorance of total conditions ... and dead men telling no tales, the lesson of blind optimism now appears invincible. 
Likewise, Hope is often a product of self-deceit: it is a mental escape from an apparently hopeless situation.  It nonetheless has the beneficial function of leaving the hopeful readied, alert, and thus capable of dropping their hope at a moment’s notice in order to grab a new resource ... or even a new goal.   Those who were without hope, that is, whose honesty refused to coddle itself with wishful thinking, were caught off guard ... less capable of dropping their conviction of hopelessness for an unexpected opportunity when it arrived.  

A few out of the many who convert an apparently hopeless situation into Hope tend to survive the pressure of natural selection when under extreme circumstances.  And those who hold to Honesty and Integrity when confronting an apparently hopeless situation see no reason to keep watch and are also less capable of the hypocrisy which new conditions and new goals always force upon an existing conviction.



A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism



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