Fourth wave, new virus variant, a divided society: the situation is bleak. Yet despite all the gloom of November, hope is needed – as an enlightened principle.
It is unclear, from a philosophical and mythological perspective, whether hope is more useful and a promise or harmful and an illusion. In Pandora's box, so the story goes, hope was the only thing that remained – either it was to be kept from people or deemed too much for them to bear.
Today, hopelessness is intensifying in an unprecedented way: there is a mixture of deep frustration, genuine pain, ever-present fear and a resignation that means more than an individual outlook with which one simply trudges through the drizzle of one's own biography – it is a societal crisis. For from this resignation grows a grumbling passivity that becomes politically effective and, in the long run, democratically destructive...
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Georg Diez
