7 How Learned Hopelessness Became the Default Setting
Seligman’s Dog, the 1960s University of Pennsylvania experiment—not to be confused with Pavlov’s other dog—explains far more about the plight of older people in modern Christianity than most theologians could or would. They still have an answer for everything, mostly taken from Matthew Henry or other commentator clergymen wearing collars and standing behind the “coffin on end” called a pulpit.
Seligman discovered,
You take an animal, trap it in a cage, shock it randomly until it realizes it can’t escape…
and soon it stops trying.
Even when the door opens.
Even when the pain can stop.
Even when hope is possible.
And it is the same for the two-legged mammals called humans. “Learned Hopelessness.” Stop trying. Give up.
That is the spiritual condition of millions who sincerely love Jesus—but have only ever seen the System.
They tried:
- small groups
- programs
- serving roles
- volunteering
- conferences and retreats
- concerts
- discipleship classes
- better “preaching”
- Bible studies
- more Bible studies
- and even more Bible studies
But nothing produced the Acts 2 life.
Nothing produced daily priesthood.
Nothing produced rivers of living water.
Nothing produced Zoe.
So, they stopped looking for it, or expecting it, or demanding Jesus Life as He Designed it.
They “learned hopelessness”:
- “This is just the way church works.”
- “Don’t expect too much.”
- “Someday you’ll be realistic, like the rest of us.”
- “That was only for the first century, we have the Bible now, so we don’t need life that is truly Life anymore.”
- “Someday we’ll all be in Heaven with Aunt Bea, and that’s good enough for me.”
- “People are messy, so just accept it.”
- “Weekly is all anyone can do.”
- “Deep Christianity is for the few special ones.”
- “We can’t live like Acts; it’s impractical. Two-income mortgage, children’s soccer, you know.”
- “People aren’t ready for real community.”
- “We tried that once; it didn’t work.”
- “This is the best we can do.”
But the truth is far more painful:
They have never seen the Ecosystem.
Only the cage. Only the calculated, contained System.
And when the door opens—when the possibility of daily life, daily priesthood, daily transformation is offered—the System-trained soul recoils, like a dog refusing to escape into freedom.
This is why Jesus said:
“No one who drinks old wine wants the new, for they say, ‘The old is better.’”
Learned Hopelessness.
The oldest religion of all.