Hope is a Feminine Evil

Or a power to use wisely

Pandora -Walter Crane - watercolor on paper - 1885 [doing this level of detail in watercolor is very difficult. This is a stunning piece of artwork.]

I’ve been re-reading a lot of mythology lately. Ever read the story of Pandora? It’s a caution about the evils of disobedience and curiosity. The story - as do all stories - tell us a great deal about how people thought about things at the time the story was written [or told, since writing is only a few thousand years old and homo sapiens sapiens are around 300,000 years old.]

Pandora was the first woman. She was created by Hephaestus the smith at the command of Zeus. Zeus sent her down to earth with a box [‘box’ is a mistranslation of pithos, which is a jar, but I’ll go with it right now] full of dreadful things and told her not to open it. Curiosity drove her and she did, and let a list of bad things out to plague men. Only hope did not escape into the world.

Makes women sound pretty dumb, huh? Well, it’s worse than that. The ‘plaguing men’ part really did mean men, and only men. When Zeus and Prometheus made humans, they didn’t make women. Yes, there were goddesses but no mortal women. Zeus made Pandora as an act of revenge. He was angry that Prometheus had stolen fire to give to humans [men] and Pandora’s purpose was to plague them [literally]. Hesiod [who wrote down these oral stories around the 8th century BCE] described women as a separate species. A species that only cared and offered their blessings if their husbands were wealthy.

Unlike what feminists would have us believe, men were not deliberately oppressing women as a group. What the ideologists don’t talk about is, life was once much harder than it is now. Every origin myth I’ve read includes some version of order versus chaos. Order is pulled from nothingness, and this isn’t an easy process. It can take mythic generations to reach civilization. Order is difficult. The rules had to be negotiated and implemented. There was labor involved. However, the rules that men could negotiate with each other wouldn’t necessarily work on women.

Our brains are different. For perfectly sound evolutionary reasons, we’re more emotional and we don’t do conflict in a way men understand. From their point of view, we look like chaos [plus that whole grow-a-human thing.] Chaos doesn’t have a great ring to it. Personally, I do my best not to create chaos. But this polarity matters.

Without order, there is no predictability. Things cannot get better.

Without chaos, there is no creativity. Things cannot get better.

The story of Pandora ties women firmly to chaos in a way that’s negative. The ancient civilizations were much closer to chaos than we are. [Yes, I’m well aware of the current fear that our civilization is collapsing. Seriously, not that same.] I prefer ‘structure versus change,’ to ‘order versus chaos.’ Both are necessary if a civilization is going to continue. Without change, there is no growth and no solutions to problems. Too much order and rigidity have consequences too. Consequences that the ancient Greeks didn’t see.

You don’t know what you don’t know.

I never understood why ‘hope’ being trapped in the jar [Box. Whatever.] was a good thing. Don’t we want hope in the world? Isn’t it what keeps us from falling into despair when things are terrible?

We moderns in the WEIRD world don’t grasp that you have to believe things can change for the better for hope to be a useful emotion. The ancient peoples of Greece weren’t optimistic. How many Greek myths have happy endings? If you’re lucky, and the child of a god, you might get taken to Mount Olympus as Heracles does after his horrific death. Or you might become a constellation like the centaur Chiron. The Greeks believed that this embodied life was as good as it got. Everyone went to Hades* and while it wasn’t fiery, it wasn’t nice either.

Hope is chaos for a people trying to keep civilization from sliding backward. Hope for a better partner causes strife. Hope for more money can lead to theft, either aggressive or stealthy. Hope for more of anything could lose people what they already had. Hope meant something quite different to the Greeks than it does to us.

Ancient people didn’t have the perspective to see how humans change over time. Without written language, and enough wealth to do archeology and historical study on what came before, the past becomes invisible except for any stories that get passed down. But humans have changed, even in the relatively short period of a few thousand years. As modern humans, we can see [if we look] how things have changed. For us, hope is a good, even a magical, thing

And that’s justified. Hope is a vision of the future that is better than the now. I think women are better than men at hope. Men are excellent stoics. Men can endure all manner of hard labor and emotional abuse to make sure their children have a Goodlife.

Women always want more. Even the Greeks lamented that women preferred men who were wealthy and that we were dreadful nags.

Sorry fellas, but that’s a good thing [yes, we could be better about it but so could you] Men are better when they are partnered. They are less aggressive and more productive.

My husband has a work ethic. He’s an electrician and his hours can be long, even at 66. He’s also a musician who plays music and earns money most weekends. But when my stepdaughter developed schizophrenia, he had no hope. I carried the hope, and thus the will to find better solutions. Then I did what it took to make sure we didn’t stoically slide into poverty paying the student loans she could not. It was me who held the vision of a better future for her and for us.

I didn’t get the best that I hoped for, but being stoic would have destroyed our marriage and made things worse for her than they are, [like many schizophrenics, she won’t stay on medication and is addicted to marijuana which feeds her paranoia.] But holding on to hope, and praying for guidance [which I got!] moved the two of us to a better place.

My sex has driven a lot of change in the last few decades. No small amount of that change is tilting rapidly back toward chaos. We need to think about where we’re going. And we need to do better.

I’ve looked for and found guidance in making my life better. Here are some newsletters that might make yours better.

Andrew Lokenauth puts advice in easy-to-understand terms in his Money Mastery and Wealth Building newsletter.

Matt Leo talks about communication and people skills that apply to the home the board room.

Tim Ebl fights back against the steamroller of health issues with how to restore what we’ve lost to 21th-century food and habits.

Unskool offers insights and alternatives to the sucking pit of our education system

Bobby Dimitrov and Healthy Farming, Healthy Food share their journey on how to build a food production system that is better for humans and better for the planet.

Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. She lives with her husband, and is Mother of Cats; four boyz and one cranky gurl. Selina has written The Young Woman’s Goodlife Guide: Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 20. Or… Learn From My Pain, and How to Train Your Cat: Using a Clicker and Leash to Keep Your Indoor Cat Happy and Healthy, and the Goodlife Guide to Nutrition.