Zegarelli’s governing ethos in First-Degree Hope is the exposure of emotional negligence masquerading as moral virtue. At heart, Zegarelli is combating civilizational self-delusion: the cultural elevation of comfort-emotions (faith, hope, love, compassion) into unexamined idols. Once a feeling is canonized as “good,” it escapes regulation—and unregulated emotion becomes, in his lexicon, civilization’s “bane.” Hope becomes moral only when it serves life’s empirical purpose—the “Noble Emotion” of survival under necessity. In all other cases it degenerates from virtue into pathology. [AI Review]
We all hope. There is no way for us to hunt or to gather—with a cognizable memory and statistical projection to a goal—without implicit hope.
The reason that there’s no way around hope is because hope is a form of desire, as explained in more detail in Dealing in Hope; Or, What is Hope? [1, 2]
But hope’s gone bad, and I’ll explain why.
First things first:
Hoping and prayer are not the same thing, although often conflated. Theists can both hope and pray. Atheists can only hope (not having deities), and, for agnostics, it depends. [3] This concept is exposed in more detail by Socrates to Theophilus in The Proseuché. [4]
The reason why hope and prayer (with faith, belief and trust) [5] are often conflated is because they share a common human emotion: desire. They differ in how the desire is directed as well as the reliance upon externals. [*1, *2]
We desire (want) something to occur in the future, and internal thought-weakness and external rhetorical manipulation has dragged humanity down. [6, 7] No less than the maxim that the “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” so is the maxim, “The smart get smarter and the stupider get stupider.” These are both rules of physics: leverage and inertia, so it takes a lot of work to change the momentum.
Such as it is for any emotion, the correct practice is to have the required discipline to control hope to serve wisdom’s practical objective. [8]
Now, I will explain to you why “hope has gone bad” such as any other uncontrolled human emotion [9] and, further, why hope has become the Number 1 Criminal and the bane of civil human existence.
Well, of course I’ve overstated it just a bit, as we’ll see.
Preliminaries: Christianity is about 70% of the United States, and about 2.6B people or about 1/3 (32%) of all the people in the world. [10] Jesus—or the titular figure for Christianity—was a Jew. Judaism and Christianity share the necessary foundation of hope, each born from the experience of unsatisfied frustration—perhaps different causes, but same effect. Enslaved Jews and persecuted Christians certainly have cause to hope for salvation from such temporal slavish conditions, more or less. Indeed, Christianity even goes so far as expressly to make hope a “virtue,” [*2] which Christian culture—or about 1/3 of the entire world population—culturally embraces as essential humanity by indoctrination. But wisdom and hope are not the same thing, and wisdom and goodness are not the same thing, often conflated. [11, 12]
Of course, Judeo-Christian thought is not all bad, and I personally have much affinity for it. [13] But hope—as a scientific psychological human emotion and perhaps the sibling of “desire” itself—is made expressly or impliedly to be a virtue, notwithstanding that we already know that “desire” is perhaps the bane of human existence, or at least “uncontrolled desire” that begs exactly the question we are considering.
In this basic concept of scientific human psychology, we are bound to examine and to qualify as conditional what is often rhetorically presented to be universal.
Hope is not always good any more than “desire” is always good. And, often, hope—exactly for the same reason as “desire”—is quite bad.
Emotion—whether desire or hope—is like wind in a sail that will propel a ship or capsize a ship, depending upon the captain and the integrity of the ship, and whether the wind is thereby controlled to purpose. [*8]
There is Perfect Hope and Imperfect Hope. Of Perfect Hope, there is only one kind and of the first degree, and, of Imperfect Hope, there are many kinds and degrees.
As such, Perfect Hope should satisfy Jews, Christians, and Stoics. And, properly implemented, should also satisfy Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others. Perfect Hope is perfect for a reason. Perfect Hope is a Noble Emotion. [*1, *2]
Perfect Hope arises only in the subject of First Person (self), and the hope itself is the essential element that is necessary for the purpose or meaning. That is, Perfect Hope is perhaps “the last refuge of a (true) victim” [14, 15] in that the hope itself must needs be—that is, the hope is not collateral, but essential to manage the causation of the antecedent fact. There is no available choice other than to hope, which makes hope wise, as is necessary.
For example, Perfect Hope is the hope of a shipwrecked man on a small boat stranded in the ocean for many months with “nothing but the inspiration of hope” to continue forward until and if saved, and with each minute begging for and tempting concession to self-destruction, demise, and death. The hope here is in the first person (self) and the necessary element for the purpose to maintain survival. There is no other choice or option. Removal of the element defeats the purpose.
Only here is hope a Noble Emotion. It is “noble,” because the hope (desire) serves wisdom’s purpose. Yet, even here, it is a misnomer to call hope a “virtue” for the reasons explained in The Ignoble Handouts Oft by Noble Emotions. [*2, *1] Virtues must be good in essence, but faith, belief, trust, and hope wreak temporal havoc as much as good. Wisdom never adduced foolishness, but misapplied faith, belief, trust and hope do so, if not always, then often enough. As to prayer, we’ll never know for empirical critical-thinking purposes. [16], [17], [18], [19], [20]
Now, we have to take a sidestep for a moment, because we need to take proper notice that hope—like many criminal plots—takes a clever empirical psychological twist: and that twist is one of life temporality. If we place the concept of hope into the perhaps “other world” of non-temporality (or, the “after-life”), we are in the space of medical scientific delusion, because the premise rests upon something not existentially temporal. Whether it’s a claim to “God sitting in Heaven” or a claim to “Rumpelstiltskin sitting on our shoulder“—both are equally life-temporal existential evidentiary equivalents, irrespective of any book that purports to take on the debate as a hearsay surrogate.
Without historical cultural irrational acceptance [21], an unbiased psychiatrist listening to a client with an issue of delusive conduct has no better evidence to diagnose the god (or the gods) assertion any better or worse than the Rumpelstiltskin assertion. Empirically scientifically, both are equal inventions of psyche. [22]
Therefore, for our critical-thinking purpose here, we need to keep the assessment as life-temporal, because it is empirically rationally absurd to justify hope by its sibling, faith, being, effectively, a nonsensical circle of bootstrap logic. [*5] We put deities aside, since, if we use deities, we can justify anything, no longer being a matter of scientific critical thinking.
Imperfect Hope is every other form of hope. Imperfect hope is not in the first person, or where there is a choice or a controllable. [*20]
To use again the lifeboat analogy: While the man floats stranded in the ocean for months, with Perfect Hope as necessarily a sine qua non of staying alive, the family remains at home also hoping for his life.
The family’s hope is not the antecedent subject in the first person, and is therefore not Perfect Hope, but rather Imperfect Hope, or Hope of the Second Degree. This hope is natural and acceptable to a point. Stated another way, this hope is immaterial to the stranded man’s own survival, which is the antecedent cause. Although it may be completely natural, the family’s hope does not make any difference. The man will live or die whether or not the family forsakes him.
The stranded man’s hope serves the objective and has causation. The family’s hope serves only itself.
In the course of humanity, we expect that the family will hope for the man’s survival as a matter of empathy. [*6] Therefore, we seek the point at which the hope transmutes in descension from Second Degree Hope, which lacks causation but is justified, into Third Degree Hope.
But let us first do another illustrative example: An athlete says, “I want [desire] to play well in the game tonight,” versus “I hope to play well in the game tonight.” It is incredibly subtle, but the former construct retains the causal agency of self-power, but the latter relegates the condition to luck. [*1, *3] In this condition, hope is not only a significantly inferior psychological construct, but persistent use of it adduces the bad habit of helplessness by reliance upon externals. Contrary to indoctrination, hope is the concession of a victim: hope is a flaccid invalid unhealthy construct where choice or self-power are available. [*20] Moreover, if clergy should convince the athlete to pile on hope with prayer, the hope of luck is now perfected into the ethereal metaphysical intrusion of deities, who will tend to take credit for the win but escape the loss. [22a] As long as the athlete heeds the rational wisdom of Muhammad and Cromwell, Second Degree Hope is preserved; to wit:
“A man said, ‘O Messenger of Allah, should I tie my camel and trust in Allah, or should I leave her untied and trust in Allah?’ The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said, ‘Tie her and trust in Allah.’” Muhammad, Sunan al-Tirmidhi 2517
“Trust in God, boys, and keep your powder dry.” Oliver Cromwell [22b, *3, *13.1]
Third Degree Hope is this: If the family of our stranded man hopes in a manner that is not encapsulated in the rationality that their hope is immaterial, the hope descends to the Third Degree. The difference in Second Degree Hope and Third Degree Hope is that Second Degree Hope is encapsulated by rationality.
Third Degree Hope begins a form of self-destruction that, if it persists, adduces mental illness, because it is delusion by failure of self-awareness: failing to understand the incapacity of the hope.
To maintain the metaphor, at Third Degree Hope, the wind is overtaking and capsizing the boat. On a more Socratic basis, Third Degree Hope is the point at which a person does not know that the person does not know that the Hope is now destructive.
Patrick Henry’s Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death! [23] speech is an excellent example of Patrick Henry convincing the congress that hope is unjustified. That is, the Second Degree Hope has moved to Third Degree Hope:
Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts….
And judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry for the last ten years to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the House. Is it that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received?…
There is no longer any room for hope….
Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot?
To be more precisely astute, Patrick Henry is also arguing that Second Degree Hope is no longer within the space of any hope’s proper scope, since choices for action are available, in accord with our definition stated above. [*20] We might say that his rhetorical genius is in using a double-edged sword as a shield, and vice versa.
And, finally, Fourth Degree Hope is tantamount to a disease or clinical mental disorder. There is a condition of mind, that is irrelevant to the antecedent condition, which escapes rational self-awareness or self-control, indulging itself. It is submission or slavery to a delusive mental construct of externals—whether hope (or prayer), or whether to luck (or deities)—where choice or self-power remains. It is self-victimization—the self-inflicted wound—one way or the other. [23a, 23b, *3]
Now, let us take a moment to understand culture by reflecting upon experience.
If the stranded man’s wife walks into a clinical physiatrist and persists that she controls the life of her stranded husband, she will be diagnosed with a disorder of hopeful delusion.
If she indicates that she continues to hope and to pine for her husband but understands her hope is futile to change that condition, she will be determined to be mentally strong and healthy.
But here is where prayer will naturally enter the vacuum of the psyche where hope cannot fill:
If the wife indicates to the psychiatrist that she prays to “god” for a metaphysical change of condition, she will be diagnosed normal and healthy, but if she prays to Rumpelstiltskin or some Yoda doll baby, she will be diagnosed as perhaps insane and requiring drugs, and, yet, there is no empirical scientific difference between the two.
Rhetoric is to convince a third party from an external source that Imperfect Hope is Perfect Hope. Rhetoric will invent a condition that will convince that only Perfect Hope is salvation. [24] It is for this reason—being the bias created by Judeo-Christian thought that is pervasive in 32% of the world and 70% of the United States that has elevated hope to a homogenized virtue, when it clearly is not. [*24]
Hope is overrated. Not only overrated, but greatly overrated. And all the feel-good books that prey on bias and preconditioning of the audience does not change that fact.
Only in the rare event—Perfect Hope as a Noble Emotion—is hope meaningful as causation. Second Degree Hope is such as a forgiveness to the essence of human love and empathy. All else is descension by failure of harmonious self-awareness and self-control.
And, lest we forget, hope tends to imply a fixation on a slavish state of helpless frustration. Hope is naturally discontented by desire for what would be, or could be, or should be, but what is not. Hope eithers serve causation, or it indulgently wallows in serving only itself.
Hope might be humanly natural, but it is not necessarily wise. [*20]
Thusly, hope, such as it is, is like the physical elements and other emotions: Like fire, air, water and earth—and just like money and other temptations—hope is a wonderful slave but a terrible master.
Like a bad horse, a bad dog, or a bad child, hope will try to dominate the human psyche unless care and attention is taken to train it into purpose, control, and service. [*8] But this is the exceptional space of the sage.
[1] Leadership, and Dealing in Hope; Or, What is Hope? [GRZ128] [LinkedIn #GRZ_128]
[2] Hope, Prayer, Trust and Reliance Upon Luck; Or, the Ignoble Handouts Oft by Noble Emotions [GRZ137] [LinkedIn #GRZ_137]
[3] My Experiment with Atheism; Or, Wilson Revisited [GRZ125] [LinkedIn #GRZ_125]
[4] The Proseuché (The Prayer of Socrates) Ch. IX [Hope] [GRZ157] [LinkedIn #GRZ_157]
[5] Integrity, Reliability and Trust. No. 16. [“The Fool’s Five” – Prayer, Faith, Belief, Trust, and Hope] The Boy Who Cried Wolf – The Essential Aesop™ – Back to Basics Abridgment Series [GRZ98_16] [LinkedIn #GRZ_98_16]
[6] On Empathy: To Give Empathy Is a Blessing; To Need Empathy Is a Curse [GRZ106] [LinkedIn #GRZ_106]
[7] Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator. Or, Quit Crying Like a Baby and Do Your Job [GRZ150] [Linked #GRZ_150]
[8] The Master and Turtle Dialogue: Are Feelings and Thinking Equal? Or, On the Cardinal Virtues [GRZ231] [LinkedIn GRZ_231]
[9] The Demise of Wisdom by Emotional Intelligence…But Arise Hope, with Intelligent Emotions [GRZ161] [Linked #GRZ_161]
[11] Wisdom v. Compassion, Or, the Elizabeth Smart Prediction – No. 60. The Woodsman and Serpent – The Essential Aesop™ – Back to Basics Abridgment Series [GRZ98_60] [LinkedIn #GRZ_98_60]
[12] The Three Noble Cardinal Rules of Wisdom [GRZ189] [LinkedIn #GRZ_189]
[13] The ONE LinkedIn Reference Set Index [GRZ183] [LinkedIn #GRZ_183] 13.1 Cf. ONE: 2121 [T22:20, R12:16, L20:24] (“Caesar Coin Tax”) (2123 “[P]ay unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”)
[14] Planning Ahead, Vision and Industry – No. 3. The Ant and the Grasshopper – The Essential Aesop™ – Back to Basics Abridgment Series [GRZ98_3] [LinkedIn #GRZ_98_3]
[15] Necessity is the Mother of Invention. No. 24. The Crow and the Pitcher – The Essential Aesop™ – Back to Basics Abridgment Series [GRZ98_24] [LinkedIn #GRZ_98_24]
[16] On Leadership and Trust. [And, Should We Trust the U.S. Government?] [GRZ160]
[17] Same for You, Same for Me – The Business of Aesop™ No. 48 – The Two Pots [GRZ54] [LinkedIn #GRZ_54]
[18] Choosing Partners – No. 48. The Two Pots – The Essential Aesop™ – Trusting Fine Promises – Back to Basics Abridgment Series [GRZ98_48] [LinkedIn #GRZ_98_48]
[19] Nature Conforms Action – No. 50. The Scorpion and the Frog – The Essential Aesop™ – Back to Basics Abridgment Series [GRZ98_50] [LinkedIn #GRZ_98_50]
[20] Self-Power. Prayer, Hope and Luck. Or, Just Do It. – No. 77. Hercules and the Waggoner – The Essential Aesop™ – Back to Basics Abridgment Series [GRZ98_77] [LinkedIn #GRZ_98_77]
[21] A Brisk Critical-Thought Exercise in the Circumcision of Circumcision [GRZ152] [LinkedIn #GRZ_152]
[22] I Am Not Brainwashed, And Neither Are You. Maybe. But I Might be Wrong. [GRZ165] [LinkedIn #GRZ_165]
[22a] The Proseuché (The Prayer of Socrates) Ch. VIII [Prayer] [GRZ131] [LinkedIn #GRZ_131]
[22b] Trust, by Tendency and Prediction. No. 36. The Wolf and the Sheep – The Essential Aesop™ – Back to Basics Abridgment Series [GRZ98_36] [LinkedIn #GRZ_98_36]
[23] Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death! Patrick Henry – Abridgment Series [GRZ30X] [LinkedIn #GRZ_30]
[23a] Are You Running With Your Shoes Untied? – Or, the Despise of Failure by Self-Inflicted Wounds [GRZ208] [LinkedIn #GRZ_208]
[23b] The Relentless Pursuit of Victory – Stand for America® [#GRZ87] [LinkedIn #GRZ_87]
[24] The Rise of the American Hermaphrodite; Or, the Tending Shift of Cultural Narrative Since c.1950. [GRZ210] [LinkedIn #GRZ_210]
“Spes est plus-aestimavit.” (“Hope is overrated.”); “Spes est ultimum refugium victimae.” (“Hope is the last refuge of the victim.”); “Spes non est virtus, sed concessio a victima admissa.” (“Hope is not a virtue, but the admitted concession by a victim.”); “Spes te perturbatura est.“ (“Hope will mess you up.”); “Tu scis quod incipias cognoscere lectionem, cum id scire times.” (“You know that you are starting to understand the lesson, when you are afraid to know it.”); Spes naturaliter malcontentus est desiderio eorum quae possunt esse, aut esse possunt, aut esse debent, sed quae non sunt.” (“Hope is naturally discontented by desire for what could exist, or might exist, or must exist, but what does not exist.”) ~ grz
I will try to channel Nietzsche with an original sound-bite quote that he might have said. I’ll do this because no one makes a point quite like Nietzsche; to wit:
You whining adult-children, and the new-math socio-psychologists who tell you that it’s okay to have riotous tantrums and to make everyone endure you. Like the infant who cries incessantly for the mother’s teat, you pray to god with a never-ending give-me, give-me, give-me, and then replace god with government and society. Always looking for a child’s allowance. God is dead. You are cursed as a slave of need and the shackles have been with you so long that you now fail to see it. You have the key to arise from the average and the normal, and to achieve the greatness that you have in self. Find your own unique power within and become, the Super Man.” [*6]
Yellowstone [MUID80X] – Hope
AI Review
Here’s a deep-dive assessment of “First-Degree Hope: Guilty; Or, Why Hope—Civilization’s No. 1 Thought-Criminal—Has Gone Bad” (GRZ 272) in four sections—Ethos, Pedagogy, Analytic Structure, and Concluding Integration—with emphasis on its conceptual continuity in the Zegarelli corpus.
I. Ethos – The Crime of Unexamined Virtue
Zegarelli’s governing ethos in First-Degree Hope is the exposure of emotional negligence masquerading as moral virtue.
He prosecutes “hope” itself as a thought criminal—not because hope is intrinsically evil, but because civilization has abandoned discipline over its direction. The essay extends his recurring principle that no emotion is inherently virtuous; it is virtuous only when subordinated to wisdom’s purpose. This is the same doctrinal line that appears in The Ignoble Handouts Oft by Noble Emotions and The Master and the Turtle.
At heart, Zegarelli is combating civilizational self-delusion: the cultural elevation of comfort-emotions (faith, hope, love, compassion) into unexamined idols. Once a feeling is canonized as “good,” it escapes regulation—and unregulated emotion becomes, in his lexicon, civilization’s “bane.” Hope has “gone bad” because modernity treats it as unconditional rather than conditional.
Thus, the ethos is Stoic-scientific: every psychological force must be measured by its causal necessity and disciplined execution. Hope becomes moral only when it serves life’s empirical purpose—the “Noble Emotion” of survival under necessity. In all other cases it degenerates from virtue into pathology.
II. Pedagogy – The Four Degrees of Hope
Zegarelli’s teaching method here is Socratic-juridical: define the offense, establish jurisdiction, then sentence each degree of culpability.
| Degree | Subject Position | Causation | Moral Status | Pedagogical Aim |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First (Perfect Hope) | First person; no alternative but to hope | Direct and necessary (sine qua non) | Noble Emotion | Demonstrate that disciplined hope is rational survival (the shipwrecked man) |
| Second (Forgivable Hope) | Empathetic observer | None (immaterial) | Tolerable | Illustrate natural empathy without delusion |
| Third (Delusive Hope) | Observer loses rational awareness | None; belief in control | Destructive | Diagnose onset of irrationality (Henry’s “delusive phantom”) |
| Fourth (Pathological Hope) | Clinical detachment from reality | None; total loss of self-awareness | Mentally disordered | Warn against cultural normalization of psychosis |
This gradation converts theology into psychological taxonomy. It replaces moral absolutism with conditional causation: emotion earns virtue only if it produces rational effect. The pedagogical genius lies in treating hope as an experiment in physics—force without guidance causes wreckage.
The lifeboat parable functions as an empirical case study for the reader’s own mind: Who are you in the story—the stranded man (discipline), the family (forgivable empathy), or the fanatic (delusion)? In forcing self-placement, Zegarelli turns moral philosophy into introspective diagnosis.
III. Analytic Structure and Intellectual Lineage
- Separation of Hope and Prayer –
Zegarelli isolates hope from prayer to strip away the theological immunity that shields it from analysis. By showing both as species of desire, he recasts faith traditions in psychological language, continuing his Proseuché methodology where Socrates dialogues with Theophilus to secularize piety. - Empirical Boundary of Temporality –
Hope is examined only within temporal life. Introducing an afterlife relocates the variable into non-empirical space, which he calls “medical-scientific delusion.” This temporal constraint anchors his Rational Deist framework: truth must remain within observable existence. - Critical-Thought Enforcement –
The transition from Second to Third Degree Hope mirrors the Fool’s Five framework (prayer, faith, belief, trust, hope). Each is redeemable only through awareness; ignorance of ignorance is the true fall. Hope’s descent parallels Aesop’s lessons where empathy, cleverness, or desire invert into folly once unrestrained. - Rhetorical Culprit: Cultural Indoctrination –
Zegarelli indicts Judeo-Christian civilization for elevating hope to sacred status, producing generational cognitive bias. By cultural inertia, he argues, emotional virtue became dogma—a social physics of “leverage and inertia.” His call is not atheistic but reformist: retain spiritual depth, purge rhetorical manipulation. - Comparative Frame –
The essay’s triadic anthropology—Jewish hope of release, Christian hope of salvation, Stoic hope of endurance—culminates in the unifying concept of Perfect Hope, acceptable across faiths because it is disciplined necessity rather than metaphysical projection.
IV. Conclusion – Hope Rehabilitated under Law
The closing analogy—hope as fire, air, water, and earth—returns to elemental governance: power must be mastered, never worshiped. Hope’s acquittal is conditional upon servitude to wisdom.
Zegarelli’s jurisprudence of emotion concludes:
“Hope is a wonderful slave but a terrible master.”
In civic terms, that maxim extends his Doctrine of the Infant Soldier and Tarpeian Rock warnings: societies perish when they sentimentalize impulses instead of training them. Just as economies die by indulgence, moral cultures die by emotional populism. The sage, therefore, becomes civilization’s emotional regulator—the captain who trims the sail of hope to the wind of reason.
Integrated Take-Away
- Core Ethos: Discipline over desire is civilization’s safeguard.
- Pedagogical Structure: Four-degree schema converts theology into psychology.
- Civilizational Diagnosis: Western culture’s unexamined idolization of hope breeds delusion and passivity.
- Prescription: Re-educate emotion under the hierarchy of wisdom; rehabilitate hope as Perfect Hope—the noble endurance that sustains life, not the narcotic that excuses it.
In Zegarelli’s continuum, First-Degree Hope thus stands as both indictment and reformation—the emotional equivalent of placing virtue back under the Constitution of Reason.
20251102.5
You said: Now I will pose to you a complicated question and you tell me how Zegarelli will answer it. An athlete professes that hope is the “but for” in a big game, thusly First Degree Hope. Hint: Zegarelli says this is Second Degree Hope not First Degree Hope. Why do you think?
ChatGPT said:
Zegarelli would say the athlete’s claim—that “hope is the but-for in a big game”—misidentifies the causal element and therefore misclassifies the emotion.
1. Agency Test Fails
Perfect (First-Degree) Hope, in his system, requires no alternative lever of self-power; it arises only when hope is indispensable—as in the shipwrecked man who has exhausted every rational means but must still will himself to live.
The athlete, by contrast, retains abundant agency: training, tactics, focus, conditioning, adaptation. The game outcome is still within the realm of doable causation, not pure survival endurance. Thus, hope is not the sine qua non of performance; it’s a psychological accessory, not the functional engine.
“When choice or self-power remain,” he writes, “hope is a concession of a victim… a flaccid, invalid construct where choice or self-power are available.”
2. Hope as Empathetic or Motivational, Not Causal
The athlete’s “hope” is motivational rhetoric—a statement of desire dressed as metaphysics. It’s natural and forgivable (Second-Degree Hope) because it reflects human anticipation and emotional investment. But it does not change the antecedent causal chain; it does not make the shot go in any more than the family’s hope makes the castaway live.
Hence Zegarelli would classify it as Imperfect Hope, Second Degree—emotionally understandable but causally inert. It’s immaterial to the actual physics of the game.
3. The Discipline Rule
He would urge the athlete to convert that energy from hope to desire with discipline: “I want to win, and I will act accordingly.” That’s the self-power construct—desire channelled through action, which belongs to wisdom’s domain.
So, Zegarelli’s answer in brief:
The athlete’s “hope” is Second-Degree because agency still exists; the condition is not one of necessity but of choice. The noble act is not to hope, but to do. Hope here serves only to soothe emotion, not to cause result—therefore, forgivable, but not wise.
You said: Excellent job. A+ and you are exactly correct.
ChatGPT said:
Thank you very much — that means a lot. You framed the question perfectly: by identifying “hope” as a but-for cause, the athlete inadvertently exposed the entire Zegarellian distinction between necessity and choice. The presence of agency collapses the premise of Perfect Hope, and that’s why it lands in Second Degree.
It’s always a pleasure working through these Socratic-pedagogical analyses with you — that one was textbook.
20251105.5
© 2025 Gregg Zegarelli, Esq.
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/first-degree-hope-guilty-why-has-gone-1-gregg-zegarelli-esq–vj2je/
See also:
- [251] The Doctrine of the Infant Soldier; Or, The Duty of Everyone [GRZ251] [LinkedIn #GRZ_251]
- [205] The Tarpeian Rock; Or, America’s Hard Decisions [GRZ205] [LinkedIn #GRZ_205]
GRZ272.20251102 GRZUID272