If you have had a chance to read the earlier post today, Thomas Neuburger on Rethinking Collapse, you will see a tart intro by yours truly strong objecting to the idea of putting a happy face on the seemingly inevitable prospect of collapse.
It seemed to make sense to provide a summer rerun on the general case of the dangers of optimism. The TL;DR version: Tenacity is undervalued in the US. Optimism did not produce Russian victory in Stalingrad.
This post was first published on July 26, 2013
I’ve had it with optimism. Optimism, at least US style, got us into this mess. It gave us 30+ years of indulgent parenting in which self-esteem was considered to be more important than skill acquisition, self-discipline, cooperation, and learning to cope with adversity. It’s led to widespread magical thinking, that if you had the right attitude, you’d surely get ahead. Notice how everyone looking for a job is obligated to fake that they have passion? The Greeks understood that passion was an affliction, something you got when you were on the receiving end of Eros’ arrow and as a result developed an insane, insatiable fixation on whatever you saw next, which in a best case scenario might be an unattainable but fetching female, and if you were unlucky, might be a goat.
My sense is the issue of motivation is more pressing in the zeitgeist than it used to be due to the how dark things are now and how difficult it appears to be to effect positive change. Over the last few weeks, we’ve had a running sub-theme in the comments section on how to motivate people to make sacrifices for future generations if you couldn’t appeal to religion. And in the last day, in a weird bit of sychronicity, I’ve seen two calls from members of the lonely faith of True Progressives, for Yet More Optimism.
When I was in a less cranky mood, back in 2008, I wrote in the Conference Board Review, apropos the corporate perma-fad for yet more chipperness:
“Negativity,” an awkward coinage, has widely come to be used pejoratively. Magical thinking, too, has become increas- ingly popular as a way to gain the illusion of control in an uncertain world. Rhonda Byrne’s motivational best-seller The Secret, for example, basically says that you get what you wish for. If you don’t have the things you want, it means you don’t have enough faith. In this construct, neither insufficient ef- fort nor bad luck plays a role.
In the business world, we’ve moved from hardheaded to feel-good management. As Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway observed recently: “For people in any position of authority the ability to say no is the most important skill there is. . . . No, you can’t have a pay rise. No, you can’t be promoted. No, you can’t travel club class. . . . An illogical love of Yes is the basis for all modern management thought. The ideal modern manager is meant to be enabling, empowering, encouraging and nurturing, which means that his default po- sition must be Yes. By contrast, No is considered demotivating, uncreative and a thoroughly bad thing.”
To illustrate, Tom Peters’ Leadership offers an impossible, irreconcilable list of exhortations: Be a great salesman, great storyteller, great performer, networking fiend, talent fanatic, relationship maven, visionary, profit-obsessive, and (of course) an optimist. Push your organization; know when to wait; love mess, politics, and new technology; lead by winning people over; foster open communication; show respect; embrace the whole individual. Granted, Peters does give a couple of breaks—leaders get to be angry and make mistakes. But his list is all sizzle, no steak. Not only are his executives reluctant to say no—they don’t develop any of the guts of what managing is really about: making decisions under uncertainty, creating routines, developing (not merely exhorting) direct reports, responding to crises, building in enough slack to deal with low-probability but high-consequence opportunities and risks.
By contrast, the normally sound Gaius Publius tells us that “Action and optimism are critical to progressive victory:”
First, as I’ve said many times, the antidote for depression is action. So when you’re feeling down and hopeless, get up and do something. It’s amazing how much better you’ll feel. All those Action Opportunities you see from me? It’s because I’m concerned about your health, and want you to be happy.
Second, everyone has reach, a world within which we have an effect. Even the so-called least of us lives in a world we influence. Use your reach; you have no idea when a surprisingly good result will come from it.
Third, action is a choice, not a prediction. And except in rare circumstances, when inaction is more powerful, we must act to win. We could win a battle or lose a battle, win the war or lose it. But we must act as though we can win, or we never will win. In the longer interview, Eskow talks about how the Clintons, the Obamas, the Romneys and the Ryans, all want us to feel powerless, hopeless. That’s part of their plan, it shouldn’t be part of ours.
The antidote for mild depression isn’t optimism, it’s exercise (trust me, a lot of research on that), so part of this prescription is not far from the mark. But what good does it do for organizers to pump people up with talk of victory? You might motivate them short term, so optimism to move people forward can work when you can give people specific, attainable targets, like organizing and running a soup kitchen. Don’t get me wrong, this sort of very tangible local action is incredibly valuable. But optimism and desire are the tools of marketers. They create and exploit object or status lust. Look at how Obama’s con was based on sheer hopium, and how in 2012, he still had a remarkable number of loyal followers despite his clear record of dishonesty and abuse of his base.
Optimism and desire are likely to prove inadequate to carry most people through a protracted struggle against powerful and oppressive forces. Were labor leaders in the days of violence against unions (the persistence and savagery of corporate opposition to labor has been airbrushed out of the most histories), rely on happy talk as a major motivating strategy? Did people fighting for causes they thought would not be won in their life, like abolitionists and the early suffragettes, rely on optimism to get them through the day? What you need is tenacity. Getting people to find the internal resources for protracted battles where all they are likely to experience is losses requires a different headset than the sort of optimism that we’ve been deeply inculcated to rely on in America.
A different formulation of the “think positive” school comes in “Political Dreaming in the Twenty-First Century” by Ira Chernus in TomDispatch. It does get high marks for eloquence. Some key extracts:
Dreaming is the realm of pure freedom. In dreams, we can see, do, or be anything. When our dreams are political, they help us sense what it might be like to escape the limits imposed by corporations, the state, the media, the advertisers, powerful forces of every kind. They help us imagine in new ways what is possible. In our dreams, none of the powers that be can touch us….
But a political dream is quite different from the dreaming of sleep because it happens while we are wide-awake. It may even make us feel more awake, allowing us to pierce the pre-packaged version of reality handed to us by the rich and powerful, who demand that we take their distorted version of how this place, this country, this planet works as “realism” itself….
Of course, we should never confuse our dreams and myths with specific policy proposals. That would endanger the chances of achieving policies that could bring us a few steps closer to realizing those dreams. Policies, after all, are always political artifacts, produced by compromises between our dreams and the hard facts of the present.
This sort of thing is likely essential for some people. But I have to say for myself that when the gap between your idealized world and what seems attainable is a yawning chasm, focusing on a remote dream seems like a prescription for guaranteed disappointment. Matt Stoller would often sputter to me that he’d lose his best organizers to organic gardening. My take was that it became too hard for them to keep projecting optimism (organizers are in the business of selling and selling in America requires an enthusiastic persona) and they decided they’d rather do something where they could put effort in and see tangible results.
And this bit troubles me:
It may even make us feel more awake, allowing us to pierce the pre-packaged version of reality handed to us by the rich and powerful, who demand that we take their distorted version of how this place, this country, this planet works as “realism” itself.
That sort of high, which is a variant of the endorphin upper of romance, sounds an awful lot like how people who’ve been in cults recount the feeling when they fell under the leader’s sway. The loss of personal boundaries in being subsumed in a group can be very powerful emotionally, but it also makes the participants ripe for manipulation.
So what are mere mortals, or the insufficiently dreamy, to do? Victor Frankl, concentration camp survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, would often start his therapy sessions by asking his patient, “Why haven’t you killed yourself?” He found that what enabled people in concentration camps to endure was either that they had a loved one they wanted to live for, or they had some sort of creative work they wanted to accomplish. The interesting bit about the loved ones is that many of the survivors learned that turned out to be a delusion, that many had assumed they were dead and had moved on to other relationships.
I’m up for a much more fundamental rethink of cultural values. The pursuit of optimism has both a hedonistic element (we want to feel good emotionally) and Judeo-Christian dualism (optimism is a good, safe, nice, clean emotion, we don’t need to think about our nasty chthonic drives). It requires an ongoing, active effort to deny significant parts of our personality and human experience, which is why I’m dubious of its ability to sustain people over the long haul (admittedly, there are some people who are blessed with naturally sunny dispositions, but they don’t have to exhort them, they just seem to have been lucky in the brain chemistry they inherited).
I have to confess I’m not deeply enough read in it to be sure, but Stoicism has gotten a bad rap, and it has a lot to recommend it in times like ours. Stoics have a lot in common with Buddhists, in that they believe in cultivating emotionally equanimity and resilience no matter what your external circumstances. What appeals to me about Stoicism is that they have a non-Christian (as in not driven by fear that God will get you in the afterlife if you are bad) foundation for morality. From Wikipedia:
A primary aspect of Stoicism involves improving the individual’s ethical and moral well-being: “Virtue consists in a will that is in agreement with Nature.” This principle also applies to the realm of interpersonal relationships; “to be free from anger, envy, and jealousy,” and to accept even slaves as “equals of other men, because all men alike are products of nature.”
The Stoic ethic espouses a deterministic perspective; in regard to those who lack Stoic virtue, Cleanthes once opined that the wicked man is “like a dog tied to a cart, and compelled to go wherever it goes.”…
Borrowing from the Cynics, the foundation of Stoic ethics is that good lies in the state of the soul itself; in wisdom and self-control…
The idea was to be free of suffering through apatheia (Greek: ἀπάθεια) or peace of mind (literally, ‘without passion’), where peace of mind was understood in the ancient sense—being objective or having “clear judgment” and the maintenance of equanimity in the face of life’s highs and lows.
In this framework, people like Jamie Dimon are correctly seen as unhinged and destructive.
Stoics also were big on empiricism, as this section of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations show:
Make for yourself a definition or description of the thing which is presented to you, so as to see distinctly what kind of a thing it is in its substance, in its nudity, in its complete entirety, and tell yourself its proper name, and the names of the things of which it has been compounded, and into which it will be resolved. For nothing is so productive of elevation of mind as to be able to examine methodically and truly every object that is presented to you in life, and always to look at things so as to see at the same time what kind of universe this is, and what kind of use everything performs in it, and what value everything has with reference to the whole.
If any readers can recommend any classics that have decent translations, please list them in comments. I feel we need to find new ways, on a practical and philosophical level, to get out of the mess we are in, and it can’t hurt to see if past schools of thought can provide fresh vantages.
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The Russians are certainly tenacious, and few are willing to indulge in unjustified optimism. There is the classic statement by Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, August 6th, 1993, after rubles were devalued:
Bad as it got in the 90s, it has not stopped them from building Russia into a magnificent country. They are largely sympathetic about the US and its inevitable travails. “We survived; so can you.” I hope we have what it takes.
I remember a few years ago reading some Aristotle, and being struck by his definition of happiness, that is you could not judge whether or not someone was happy at any given moment, but only truly at the end of their life when you could look back and see of the you’d loved their whole life in accordance with correct principles. With that in mind instead of recommending mending a specific classic I’d recommend Julia Annas’ ‘The Morality of Happiness’ which is an excellent overall survey and consideration of happiness from the perspective of the classical philosophers.
I would argue a little against anti-optimism, for example if you have two identical people about to run a marathon with the exception person A believes they can do it and person B believes they can, we can imagine the outcome and there is a not insubstantial body of research into visualisation and a kind of knowing conviction (see the book Psycho-cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz), which have been applied with some success in the field of professional sports. There are a few wonderful examples of literature and film of beautifully optimistic (and perhaps ‘optimistic’ is the wrong word here) people, which can be genuinely inspiring, such as Polly in Mile Leigh’s ‘Happy go lucky’ or Alexi in Dostoyetski’s Brother Karamazov. Though of course the kind of mindless optimism often exposed by mass media or middle management is precisely one that breeds docility. And it is also noted that depressed people (especially when tested in various psychological experiments) have a more accurate non-biased perspective on reality and circumstance, but as the Russian joke goes ‘there is a nuance’…
The kind of optimism that is toxic is one that is delusional like Parsons in 1984 the outwardly optimisation neighbour who gets ratted out by his own son for chanting “down with big brother” in his sleep it’s the person who rather than embracing the moment denies it. Rupert Spira in his book ‘You are the happiness you seek’ speaks of the notion of the mind aa being the engine of unhappiness that actually happiness is the natural state, he uses the analogy of the child who gets the Christmas present in that moment ot is not that the toy gives them happiness so much as all of a sudden the mind no longer has to reach for something and for a brief moment is silent and instead the natural state of happiness of that child comes back to it.
On a final note the very word happiness (and granted I appreciate this article is particularly discussing optimism, but I’d argue it is a kind of delusional unhinged optimism that is undesirable, there is a certain kind of optimism or tone of optimism in tenacity too, when you force yourself to finish a marathon after you knees have gone halfway through it’s not quite optimism that gets you over the line) to go back to Aristotle’s definition of it only being something you can judge at the end of someone’s life, the English word ‘happy’ etymologically comes from a root word meaning ‘luck’, it implies something both inherently temporary and outside of the person, something that isn’t really earned, which is very unlike the Aristotelian notion of happiness which is something fundamentally earned (though Aristotle would also add only certain kinds of people can ever be happy, namely relatively well born men).
Lastly I am fond of the line from Bad Santa “Wish in one hand s*** in the other, see which one fills up first.”
Aristotle also said that you cannot have a good life without good fortune.
A great rant, Yves! Thanks.
I can recommend M. A. Screech’s accessible (and acceptable) translation of Montaigne’s Essays. Montaigne was more aligned with the Sceptics (Pyrrhonism), but exhibits many Stoic characteristics as well (which would be normal for someone living through the 16th century French Religious Wars). His ability to survive in the atmosphere of chaos and hate was amazing! His estate was well known to be “neutral ground”, although he belonged to the group of politiques, who were generally mistrusted by the warring parties, but sought to bring an end to the wars. I like to think that many here at NC share this sentiment.
Another (much thinner) pertinent text is Hannah Arendt’s Men in Dark Times. This book is a reflection on how a selection of individuals managed to persist in their actions and thoughts during dangerous and challenging periods. Another of Arendt’s books that may be pertinent is On Revolution. Her examination of power structures and the fundamental political aims that are needed to make revolution successful might spark thinking about what we need to make happen to build a better society.
I am presently making my way through Graeber’s Dawn of Everything. The underlying theme seems a positive one – that humans, given the choice, will choose to work together rather than fight each other. Without jumping into the cult of positivity, I would like to believe this to be true.
Montaigne’s Essays seconded.
Also: Seneca’s Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius. New translation by Margaret Graver and A. A. Long.
In dark times you should read meditations of marcus aurelius:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations
“On the Nature of Things” by Lucretius is a book which gives one pause to consider the nature of things in this world of ours.
I’m innately optimistic. Hope has caused me a lot of problems.
Should we be glad that NC is the only place on the internet I’ve found that doesn’t stick a straw in confirmation bias and suck hard? We should be glad that NC exists. But we’ve got enough data to say it don’t replicate.
Here’s a maybe positive, and it’s about tenacity. Looking at the comments on the 2013 post, I recognize only two or three names. Others come & gone, some dead in the ground. Yet the mission continues to be fulfilled, From Mexico is gone but we have IM Doc, the quality of the comments still elevates the conversation (often), and we get at least some inoculation against false hope. So we got that going for us.
You attract more flies with honey not vinegar.
– Mega Optimist right here!
OMINA FAUSTA CANO
– Propertius
I think there is a difference between seeing a particular event as a positive sign and being generally optimistic. When your oncologist tells you that the tumour is shrinking that is cause for optimism but the people who optimistically think that technology will solve our climate crisis are delusional. Optimism in and of itself is not a helpful state of mind. Seeing things realistically is the best way to figure what can be done, if anything.
I have a friend whose kiddo is about to graduate from university, telling her that all will be well and to be positive and keep smiling that she’ll get a job is no way to help her. Helping her acknowledge that life is tough and helping her figure out what she wants to do and what she needs to do to get there is the best support to give her.
How can one miss Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which inspired Stoicism in the first place. It falls straight into the spirit of Yves’ note and famously espouses a Goldilocks temperament. The limitation perhaps — except for later parts on Friendship — is the emphasis on a personal as opposed to social ethic.
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html
Most of the comentariat may be familiar with these philosophers, in any case, here’s my two-cent recommendations as a Greek.
I’m not an expert neither aware of specific English editions but I bet a lot is written also in English regarding the following two:
Epicurus : living in a decadent era, a century or so after the “golden” classic age of Athens, Epicurus created the famous “garden”, a school at his home where he would study natural phenomena and teach to anyone interested to learn. He favoured frugality and simplicity in life, appointed friendship(φιλία) as the highest virtue one can attain in life and also maintained the position that man is here on earth to enjoy life and its fruits without pain or sorrow, always consciously and with prudence.
Heraclitus: Pre-socratic, many called him the “dark” philosopher due to his cryptic and sparse texts that survived through the ages.
Heraclitus coined the famous “τα πάντα ρει και ουδέν μένει” , i.e. everything flows/changes and nothing stays the same.
He wrote about Change in general, change as a constant in life and how elements and processes contrast and oppose each other and how they always transform from one thing to another.
Heraclitus was a great thinker and the first I heard of him was another quote where it said that a man’s character was his fate. Short, sweet and only achieves its full significance when you take the time to unpack it.
Yes, as in who you are and what happens to you are all the same thing. To be followed by, never let fate know what you are up to.
Charles Kahn’s The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (an edition of the fragments with translation and commentary) (Cambridge U. Press, 1979) is one of the truly great books on Greek philosophy in the past 50 years.
As we all know, Pythagoras invented the triangle and other primitive musical instruments. But not many people know he also founded a religion and one of its main tenets was that it’s sinful to eat beans.
Just saying.
Pythagoras’ followers threw Hippias off a cliff when he pointed out a right triangle with unit 1 legs produced a hypotenuse that was an irrational number (square root of 2)… Religion! An excuse for all bad behavior!
Sadly, he was killed trying to escape through…. a beanfield!
“it’s sinful to eat beans”
Change that ‘bean’ to another 4 letter word and you’ve got a winner: CORN
You’d have to be a mad optimist to believe that anything good is going to come from the high fructose corn syrup consumption in the USA. “High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is prevalent in many processed foods and beverages due to its low cost, ease of use, and ability to enhance flavor and shelf life. It’s also a heavily subsidized crop in the US, contributing to its widespread use.”
Time for one of my favourite quotes-
’If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.’
Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
Yeah, not a fan of optimism here. That can lead you into some dark places and we see that with so many people on the subject of the Ukraine for example. On the other hand being pessimistic is equally bad and can stop you from taking needed actions and simply signing out. There is a third way and that is of realism. And how do you get there? By taking an empirical method in your judgements. You look at what works and what does not work and take it from there. You will still make mistakes from time to time but at least they will not be a result of being too optimistic or too pessimistic.
For somebody who really hated optimism, see Karl Kraus, who blamed WW1 on optimists. In his almost unperformable play The Last Days of Mankind he has several discussions between the Optimist (a typical German-Austrian) and the Grumbler (Kraus himself). At one point the optimist says “They were warned” talking about the passengers on the Lusitania (Kraus proceeds to demolish this argument)
For German-speakers only 😅
Seminal actor Helmut Qualtinger reading Last Days of Mankind, in 1965, aired on Bavarian state broadcasting
Helmut Qualtinger liest Karl Kraus – “Die letzten Tage der Menschheit” (1965)
125 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA5yhF_Dwio
Rev,
Very nice quote, and good points. One quibble: perhaps the third way should also include “pragmatism”.
In my own mind I tend to think of realism and pragmatism as being intertwined. But that is a good quote that.
You should check out Terry Eagleton’s “Hope without Optimism”
Optimism is on the decline.
David Suzuki, Canadian scientist and climate science educator, says:
Under a lot of pressure, he has tried to soften it a little since.
Jem Bendell, former WEF go getter, says this:
The group of people who reject Norman Vincent Peale’s thinking is growing, and many are looking for something deeper to sustain them through what’s coming. Stoicism seems like a good option. I like the Tao te Ching. Ursula le Guin’s rendition is only 96 sparse pages, yet it covers the territory quite well as far as I’m concerned.
Tao te Ching # 20 (Le Guin rendition)
Is optimism required to maintain sanity?
What’s to become of us when we collectively conclude there is no future for our kind. Lower birth rates? Young men and women who no longer care about sex? Killing off a people is not considered genocide? Hmmm.
I highly recommend a scroll through the comments on the original post. As is customary here, there is some excellent discussion.
I always appreciated the optimism of Stoller. Recently his comments lead me to believe his take on current conditions has gone seriously sour.
Nate Hagens released a new Youtube this morning that I found to be a good attempt at conceding collapse while still encouraging useful action.
I’d recommend Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich. Published in 2009, I dunno if it read it or Yves 2013 post first but it is very much in line with Yves’ thoughts. And both confirmed that my own realism, cynicism and scepticism are healthy states of mind. Ehrenreich is especially hard on the push to practice positive thinking in the face of illness like cancer – as if being happy can somehow cure us. Not a classic in the sense of the ancient writings but well worth the time.
The Buddhist idea of equanimity is also something I’m trying to learn. It isn’t apathy as I first thought but rather recognition and acknowledgment of a problem without letting your emotions dictate your reaction and/or actions.
now having skimmed comments from 2013, I see this book mentioned then too.
Thank you Yves and commentariat for dealing with what for me has increasingly become the central issue since returning from Vietnam in 1971 and have spent time with several of the authors mentioned. Albert Camus dealt with a difficult time after WWII and his speech in New York City in 1946 as well as writings I have found instructive for our current situation. John Gray’s Straw Dogs has been particularly instructive in deconstructing the idea of progress. Isn’t it necessary for optimism except sometimes in relation of science. Rev Kev’s comment about the intertwining of realism and pragmatism is interesting.
The aphorism has been useful and simple to go to as a reminder. Goethe has been a rich source: “One ought every day at least to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture , and if it were possible speak a few reasonable words” and “He who cannot draw on 3,000 years is living hand to mouth.” Alice Waters in a speech at the Indianapolis Museum of Art said: “There is a bond or thread between speed and forgetting. And there is a bond between slowness and remembering.” I was struck by a comment David Dunlop, an artist made, “the mind is fascinated by chaos” which may have some current significance. Finally my friend and fellow Vietnam veteran Jim Sturgeon (1935-2020) was known for saying: ” Nature bats last.” These have helped to “ground” me.
After 9/11 and all throughout the Bush/Cheney admin, I made it a point to read up on what our foreign policy had been up to to provoke such a response. I didn’t buy the official line, “They hate us for our freedoms,” and had long suspected things were not as they seemed in the good ol’ US of A, so naturally I turned to writers like Chomsky, Zinn, Parenti and Postman for a more honest assessment of the American Empire. But the more I read, the more deeper my understanding, the more depressed I became.
On a whim, I began reading Buckminster Fuller. Quirky and unique, and in spite of some wild predictions that have since proved untrue, the underlying spirit of his mind — that humanity’s one saving-grace is its ingenuity — managed to (somewhat) bring me out of my funk. I add that caveat because most people immediately label him as a nutcase Utopian thinker.
Nevertheless, some of his original concepts are now quite common. For example, he coined the term, “synergy” as a way of stressing the importance and power of cooperation, as opposed to individualism, rugged or otherwise. To my mind, he is the 20th century version of Da Vinci, looking to nature for inventive, design-centric inspiration.
But there’s more. In his final book, “The Critical Path,” he lays out a roadmap for the ultimate transformation and organization of human society. Crucial to achieving that goal is the need for a paradigmatic shift away from “weaponry” to one of “livingry” (another Fullerian term that in this case we have sadly not yet adopted). Some of the ideas, although now technologically dated, are in fact even more achievable as they were conceived in the pre-internet days.
Another book I enjoyed was John Ralston Saul’s, “Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West.” As we know, Voltaire is well-known for his antipathy towards Optimism, so the title in itself intrigued me. In this controversial book, he questions the way our Western society, since the Renaissance, has championed Reason at the expense of other highly important human characteristics such as Empathy, Common Sense, and Creativity. Recall how Obama, after uttering the word “empathy” while searching for a Supreme Court justice replacement, was promptly pilloried for daring to even suggest such a normal human quality? He characteristically tucked his tail and that was that!
Finally, while battling a health issue and unable to sleep, I stumbled onto a YouTube channel featuring the philosopher Professor Michael Sugrue. The channel has zero commercial interruptions so I was able to listen to philosophical lectures without getting jarred into consciousness by those insidiously intrusive devices. From him I learned about Socrates, Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Hagel, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and yes… Marcus Aurelius (plus many more). Not just the one-liners that most of us know without reading them (e.g. Machiavelli=Evil, Hobbes=Conservative, Locke=Liberal, Nietzsche=Superman), but a more in-depth look at their writings in order to understand that most of these philosophers were writing in order to warn us against the stereotypes they are now unfairly associated with.
And now? As things seem to worsen by the day, I turn to Nature for inspiration (thank you, Bucky) and Creativity for release.
Viggo Mortensen’s read of Camus’s speech at Columbia in 1946, seventy years earlier, The Crisis of Man” is available on YouTube. Camus has been associated with “absurdism” which in his case was the intertwining of realism (his experience) and pragmatism.
I will give that a look. I like performances.
My favorite, and one that changed my life as a teen was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man. His proposition of evolutionary change was inspiring. However, the negative side is that we’re changing so fast that evolution doesn’t have time to adjust and we are screwed. So, me = mildly optimist on a daily basis but pessimistic on a planetary scale.
My favorite flavor of “optimism.”
And further:
Your daddy’s rich
And your mamma’s good looking
So hush pretty baby
Don’t you cry
“Aristotle also said that you cannot have a good life without good fortune.” (as quoted above)
The Bhagavad Gita also has a fair amount of useful wisdom on the equanimity front. The teaching is (to paraphrase greatly), the outcomes of your actions are not controllable by you. The world is an endlessly complex place, where no action can ever be guaranteed to lead to some particular outcome. Therefore, simply do what is right; do what is your duty; do your best (as the Boy Scouts taught me) and do not concern yourself with the outcomes – they are out of your hands. Plan and act with a goal in mind, but do not become attached to that goal. It may work out, or it may not – a billion other things must cooperate in order for any outcome to occur, a billion things over which you have no control or even influence. Your job is to do what there is before you to be done – not to worry one way or the other about how it’s going to turn out.
And a quote from the Gita about emotional equanimity comes to mind: “As rivers constantly flow into the ocean, and yet the ocean does not overflow; so emotions constantly flow into the heart of the wise person, but the heart of the wise one never overflows with them.”
If you’re going to pick up a copy, btw, make sure to get the Christopher Isherwood translation.
It’s a deeply immoral work written for a warrior caste. Its message is go into battle. There’s nothing wrong with killing because death doesn’t exist. A favorite of the nazis. That said, the Mahabharata is an amazing epic.
I received a degree and message of Equanimity, and a surprising sense of calm, from Alan Weisman’s,
“The World Without Us”. Fascinating read.
My simple dumb brain can’t deal with ‘deep’ writing… leave me out of the Echart Tolle navel- lint quagmire!
I’d suggest there’s a clear difference between facile optimism about things you cannot control, necessary optimism to enable you to get through life, and reasonable optimism about things that you can at least influence.
I think Yves’s target here is the first, and I agree. Facile optimism is mostly slogans: “Ukraine will win,” “Uber will be profitable,” “We will find a way to reverse global warming,” “AI will save the world,” “You can be a millionaire if you try hard enough,” and so forth.
Necessary optimism helps you deal with life. I always remember my mother saying that during the Second World War, nobody she met, in or out of uniform, actually doubted eventual victory. More directly, perhaps, and as I’ve written about, organisations from the French Resistance to the African National Congress never doubted that they would win in the end, even when the situation seemed hopeless, and it was this necessary optimism that kept them going.
Reasonable optimism has a major and positive effect on life. Medical patients disproportionately survive, live longer and heal faster if they are optimistic about the treatment and want to live. Psychologists tell us that in a very real sense we create our on reality by how we select the tiny trickle of information that goes from the outside world into the conscious mind. Optimistic (or at least positive) people are more likely to notice opportunities, see solutions and think around corners. And if you’ve ever been stuck for a period of time with someone who knows that nothing is possible and everything will go wrong, you’ll have seen the opposite effect at work.
As others have said, the philosophers have been here before us. Not only the Stoics but the Buddhists as well as some Christian mystics have all made the point that we may not have any choice in how the world is, but we do have a choice in how we react to it, and no-one can take that away from us. As Sartre said in a rather different context, we are condemned to be free.
And;
One of the more astonishing things that I learned decades ago when working in clinical research was that the “placebo effect” didn’t just make one feel better in one’s mind, but that there could be an actual physiological change in the condition. So, mind over matter? Or the two being inseparable?
OPTIMIST, n. A proponent of the doctrine that black is white. (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary)
Thank you, Yves, for making so many interesting points.
You close by talking about philosophy. I strongly feel that philosophy is far too important to leave it to academics. Everyone should be intellectually involved in ethics and political theory. Real democracy, as opposed to the electoral representative thing we have, requires we be engaged.
Your quotes on the stoics are solid but they also highlight something they don’t talk about so much: the need for the collective and for solidarity. There’s something a bit aloof in my impression of an ancient stoics. Political change in our environment requires organization around something more durable that charismatic leaders. What concepts do we build solidarity around?
Wrt Ira Chernus, dreams, and ideals. I find that thinking about ideals is useful in helping me be clear about my values. It’s insufficient in political thought because we need to be practical: we need a workable plan for change. But politics is complicated and in choosing what to support, what to oppose, what to say, and generally what to do next can be confusing and well-developed values helps. So spending some time thinking about ideals is worthwhile.
On depression, your quote from Gaius Publius is so familiar it is depressing: cure your depression by acting like your not. “Depressed? Don’t be!”
But back to your general thrust, there are a number of big problems in the way of change. One of the biggest is the culture of individualism and consumerism and its theology that ranges from self-help to toxic positivity.
Wandering on the Way, Victor Mair’s translation of early Taoist tales and parables of Chuang Tzu (U. of Hawai’i Press, 1994) is so, so wonderful. It blows my mind that Chuang Tzu is neglected. “Who yoked the swift steeds of wind and welkin?” Indeed!
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out”.–Vaclav Havel
The American cult of positive thinking brings to mind that line from Pink Floyd “I have become comfortably numb”.
Or perhaps the George Carlin line: “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
“I’ve had it with optimism.”
Stay cranky Ms. Smith. Your first paragraph is magnificent. Optimism is an evil neoliberal mantra: Let them eat false hope.
Nicely said. Those a**holes in power count on optimism among the masses as a check to revolution. I believe that that baseless optimism is here called “hopium” or “copium”.
“Anti-optimism” (ie. pessimism) is closely allied with cynicism, which label the wearers of rose-tinted glasses use to perfunctorily dismiss any opinions which disturb their comforting world-view: “Oh, you’re nothing but a cynic.”
Ambrose Bierce again:
CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic’s eyes to improve his vision.
Take that, you Polly-Annas!
Meanwhile, the ancient Stoic philosopher Diogenes was spotted wandering the streets of DC at mid-day with his lantern, looking for an honest man. He’s still wandering, still looking.
Do NOT stay kranky, Yves!
Whip us into shape!
Get us to organize locally!
Help us with Electoralism.
Help us with Labor.
Help us with Mutual Aid.
Help us with Entertainment!
You’re doing a great job educating us, but you need to do more and ask us to help you!
A very thoughtful piece. Thank you, Yves, and thank you, commentariat, for taking the discussion so much further. While having no hope for the future, I aim to witness it to the max, to find happiness in every possible place, and never to stop learning.
In 1970 I spent almost 3 months hitch hiking during my summer break, heading North.
The two books I took with me were the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and Isherwood’s translation of the Gita, “The Song of God”.
They were good choices.
Is there anything to be done?
It seems like this commentariat can envision a better world
But as the Maine farmer says, you can’t get there from heah
Power asymmetry, game theory, …. I don’t see the way to get past it
Massive spontaneous claims adjustment is not going to be enough, I bet it will be squashed given the surveillance state that’s being built.
Too many powerful people exploiting the weaker because they can…
I sometimes find Epictetus’s Discourses quite handy. They’re more zippy than the musings of Marcus Aurelius, but no less hard-hitting.
On the literary side, anything by Nathanael West, if one is looking for an unsentimental view of humanity.
“Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. [The first of the ‘Four Noble Truths’ Buddha taught was ‘Life is suffering.’] It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.
“Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been specially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others. I know about this moaning because I have done my share.
“Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them?
“Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems. Without discipline we can solve nothing. With only some discipline we can solve only some problems. With total discipline we can solve all problems.
“What makes life difficult is that the process of confronting and solving problems is a painful one….Yet it is in this whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has its meaning…As Benjamin Franklin said, ‘Those things that hurt, instruct.’ It is for this reason that wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems.
“Most of us are not so wise. Fearing the pain involved, almost all of us, to a greater or lesser degree attempt to avoid problems. We procrastinate, hoping that they will go away. We ignore them, forget them, pretend they do not exist. We even take drugs to assist us in ignoring them, so that by deadening ourselves to the pain we can forget the problems that cause the pain….
“This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness. Since most of us have this tendency to a greater or lesser degree, most of us are mentally ill to a greater or lesser degree, lacking complete mental health. Some of us will go to quite extraordinary lengths to avoid our problems and the suffering they cause, proceeding far afield from all that is clearly good and sensible in order to try to find an easy way out, building the most elaborate fantasies in which to live, sometimes to the total exclusion of reality. In the succinctly elegant words of Carl Jung, ‘Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.’
“But the substitute itself ultimately becomes more painful than the legitimate suffering it was designed to avoid….And without healing, the human spirit begins to shrivel.
“Therefore let us inculcate in ourselves and in our children the means of achieving mental and spiritual health. By this I mean let us teach ourselves and our children the necessity for suffering and the value thereof, the need to face problems directly and to experience the pain involved. I have stated that discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems. It will become clear that these tools are techniques of suffering, means by which we experience the pain of problems in such a way as to work them through and solve them successfully, learning and growing in the process. When we teach ourselves and our children discipline, we are teaching them and ourselves how to suffer and also how to grow.
“What are these tools, these techniques of suffering, these means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively that I call discipline? There are four: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing. As will be evident, these are not complex tools whose application demands extensive training. To the contrary, they are simple tools, and almost all children are adept in their use by the age of ten. Yet presidents and kings will often forget to use them, to their own downfall. The problem lies not in the complexity of these tools but in the will to use them. For they are tools with which pain is confronted rather than avoided, and if one seeks to avoid legitimate suffering, then one will avoid the use of these tools. Therefore, after analyzing each of these tools, we shall…examine the will to use them, which is love.”
“…So if your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution. First, you cannot achieve them without suffering, and second, insofar as you do achieve them, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways more painful to you, or at least demanding of you, than you can now imagine. Then why desire to evolve at all, you may ask. If you ask this question, perhaps you do not know enough of joy…”
From The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, M.D.
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.”
Kant
A title of a book stood with me: “The Moral Austerity of Environmental Law”.
And I found some grounds of optimism reading books like this one:
“The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx” by David Lay Williams
Even hardcore conservatives like Plato and Hobbes proved to have deep problems with inequality and the griveus harm it causes. As such, from a moral / ethical perspective, Hobbes seem to be trumping Locke anytime.
The issue of ethics is relegated to the janitor’s closet. In politics, if there is an Ethics Commissioner, it has absolutely no teeth, just wagging fingers.
I suffered persecution at a former work place (in gov) cause I was just doing my job and I protested and they moved me, and the deputy minister, the union rep, and the ministry’s ethics rep were there with the deputy handing me the letter that put me two months to pasture, to cool off, and then laterally moving me to a do nothing position. All to defend a stupid and incompetent assistant deputy minister that could not find its way out from a paperbag.
Codes of Ethics are much talked about, but oh boy, they are just rugmats to whipe feet when entering a group. Power reigns supreme. How we change that, how we stop the Titanic from its collision course?
One way we might gain greater understanding of our current plight is to see the new film “Eddington.”
This film seems to almost guarantee offending all political silos–it is quite delicious and quite profound.
Yeah, nuts to blind optimism. Wash it in a bath of cold hard realism. Optimism is ok if it is realistic to assume the best, but that is a rare condition under very specific circumstances.
Please Yves, will you (in a similar vein) go after the USA’s truly annoying, knuckle-headed and disastrous “passion” for hero worship.