Don't Get Your Hopes Up...

There's a video series currently trending on the Internet right now that discusses how people can be manipulated. Essentially, regardless of how bad the situation looks for a person, they are able to spin it around only by playing the "pity card," making others feel bad for them. Their guilt surrounding how bad the manipulator may be hurting eventually outweighs the anger that stemmed from the situation itself. While I was laying in bed, I was stuck wondering how many of us are able to forgive and forget the sketchy details of a situation due to mere pity. I've come to the conclusion, however, that it is because as humans, we simply hold too much hope in innate goodness.

I know, I know... here I go again, writing something pessimistic and slightly cynical. Can you really deny this, though? Imagine: if we were able to anticipate every ulterior motive a person may have, if we were able to realize that a person may only be offering forgiveness not because they are actually sorry, but because they can't stand the feeling of being disliked; we'd never be fooled. Never. But, we hope that these people will change, we hope that their actions were just an accident, and we hope that our forgiveness can give them the opportunity to start over, to make them happy again. It's much easier to live our lives oblivious to these potentialities of manipulation.

Incessant hope can ruin us more than this, however. Sometimes, we do anticipate manipulation. And still, we tend to insert ourselves into such situations.

There was a story that stood out to me in Song of Solomon, that really went along with what I've been thinking all week. I'll insert the passage below:

"The man saw this baby snake bleeding and hurt. Lying there in the dirt. And the man felt sorry for it and picked it up and put it in his basket and took it home. And he fed it and took care of it till it was big and strong. Fed it the same thing he ate. Then one day, the snake turned on him and bit him. Stuck his poison tongue right in the man's heart. And while he was laying there dying, he turned to the snake and asked him, 'What'd you do that for?' He said, 'Didn't I take good care of you? Didn't I save your life?' The snake said, 'Yes.' 'Then what'd you do it for? What'd you kill me for?' Know what the snake said? Said, 'But you knew I was a snake, didn't you?'"

 I've watched situations like this continuously happen to my friends, my family, and even myself. We are all able to recognize that the person is a "snake," but the one directly involved carries hope that they'll be the exception. The snake won't attack them, they will be the outlier. It all plays along with the message of David Wallace's speech, This Is Water, in which he discusses the selfish tendencies on humanity. We'll run on autopilot, as he describes it, concentrating solely on our own thoughts while drowning out the pleas and cries of others. We itch to prove that we are "special," that we can evade manipulation and be the 'fixers'. The snake is never a snake until it bites us. But when we get hurt, more often than not we cannot say we "couldn't have seen it coming." Rather, we just had too much hope that it would not happen to ourselves.

Hope is generalized as a good thing. However, I see it as very similar to apple seeds. Beautiful trees can grow from apple seeds in the right environment. However, if there are too many seeds in one apple, the apple is soiled. Apple seeds contain cyanide: harmless in tiny amounts, but deadly in large doses.