We have to try to understand the meaning of this inhuman insanity. To scorn is to condemn the other person to complete and final sterility, to expect nothing more from him and to put him in such circumstances that he will never again have anything to give. It is to negate him in his possibilities, in his gifts, in the development of his experience. To scorn is to rip his fingernails out by the roots so they will never grow back again. The person who is physically maimed, or overwhelmed by mourning or hunger, can regain his strength, can live again as a person as long as he retains his honor and dignity, but to destroy the honor and dignity of a person is to cancel his future, to condemn him to sterility forever. In other words, to scorn is to put an end to the other person’s hope and to one’s hope for the other person, to hope for nothing more from him and also to stop his having any hope for himself.
And what is the penalty for scorn? It is that having killed the hope for another, one can only lose hope for oneself. He who scorns is he who no longer entertains any hope for himself and who forbids it to himself. In that case, the only thing left is spiritual nihilism. That, in fact, is what we have lived through.
Jacques Ellul, Hope in Time of Abandonment. trans. C. Edward Hopkin (New York: Seabury Press, 1977), 47.
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