- [T]he core reason for the disconnect between the nation’s pretty-good condition and the gloomy conventional wisdom is that optimism itself has stopped being respectable. Pessimism is now the mainstream, with optimists viewed as Pollyannas. If you don’t think everything is awful, you don’t understand the situation!
Objectively, the glass looks significantly more than half full.
Job growth has been strong for five years, with unemployment now below where it was for most of the 1990s, a period some extol as the “good old days.” The American economy is No. 1 by a huge margin, larger than Nos. 2 and 3 (China and Japan) combined. Americans are seven times as productive, per capita, as Chinese citizens. The dollar is the currency the world craves — which means other countries perceive America’s long-term prospects as very good.
It does have a classic #lolbrooks feel to it, especially the title.
I am seeing so much of this attitude come out of Canadians following the wildfires in Alberta. I've seen people who instead of having their cold dead hearts warmed by regular people helping out in any way they could actually found a way to be pissed off that these people had too. I'm fairly certain some of them were happy to have something new to bitch about. Having said that if America was one person it would probably be a very damaged pretty girl. At first it can seem like a good idea, but when you get to the little details it's best stay away. At least that's the impression I get. So although I think lack of optimism is a problem it's just one tiny part of whole thing. If you don’t think everything is awful, you don’t understand the situation!
The Rational Optimist: ‘We cannot absolutely prove,’ said Macaulay in 1830, ‘that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason.’ So, too, would say all that came after him. Defining moments, tipping points, thresholds and points of no return have been encountered, it seems, by pessimists in every generation since. A fresh crop of pessimists springs up each decade, unabashed in its certainty that it stands balanced upon the fulcrum of history. Throughout the half-century between 1875 and 1925, while European living standards shot up to unimaginable levels, while electricity and cars, typewriters and movies, friendly societies and universities, indoor toilets and vaccines pressed their ameliorating influence out into the lives of so many, intellectuals were obsessed with imminent decline, degeneration and disaster. Again and again, just as Macaulay had said, they wailed that society had reached a turning point; we had seen our best days. The runaway bestseller of the 1890s was a book called Degeneration, by the German Max Nordau, which painted a picture of a society morally collapsing because of crime, immigration and urbanisation: ‘we stand in the midst of an epidemic, a sort of Black Death of degeneration and hysteria.’ An American bestseller of 1901 was Charles Wagner’s The Simple Life, which argued that people had had enough of materialism and were about to migrate back to the farm. In 1914, Britain’s Robert Tressell’s posthumous The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists called his country ‘a nation of ignorant, unintelligent, half-starved, broken-spirited degenerates’. The craze for eugenics that swept the world, embraced by left and right with equal fervour, after 1900 and caused the passage of illiberal and cruel laws in democracies like America as well as autocracies like Germany, took as its premise the deterioration of the blood lines caused by the overbreeding of the poor and the less intelligent. A huge intellectual consensus gathered around the idea that a distant catastrophe must be averted by harsh measures today (sound familiar?). ‘The multiplication of the feeble-minded’ said Winston Churchill in a memo to the prime minister in 1910, ‘is a very terrible danger to the race.’ Theodore Roosevelt was even more explicit: ‘I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized and feeble-minded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them.’ In the end, eugenics did far more harm to members of the human race than the evil it was intended to combat would ever have done. Or, as Isaiah Berlin put it, ‘disregard for the preferences and interests of individuals alive today in order to pursue some distant social goal that their rulers have claimed is their duty to promote has been a common cause of misery for people throughout the ages.’
Optomism and pessimism are both signs of mental illness. One shouldn't expect either a fantastic or dismal outcome, you should try and predict the rational range of outcomes of any situation which you have influence over or which preparing for will benefit you. To adopt any other position is setting oneself up to less from the opertunity of foresight. It doesn't matter if you are an optimist facing negative consequences that you don't have a plan to ameliorate or a pessimist who has positioned himself so conservatively that he can't feed on the bounty that was likely his if he had just tried to accurately gauge his good things he had coming. If the matter at hand is something one has no control over and which preparation for is futile like an election or a sports ball game than pessimism is obviouslt the preferable path. A pessimist will go through life being pleasantly surprised how well things turned out or at least being unsurprised at the winds of fate while an optimist gets to spend their time either being disappointed or mearly satisfied that things have turned out as suspected. The path of greatest profit will always lie with the rationalist who tries to predict and prepare themselves for a range of probable outcomes. Anyone who wants to engage in a bout of magical thinking about changing probable outcomes with the power of their will can just eat a dick. Optomism is more than uncool, it's a sign of mental deficiency.
I tend to disagree. I think the way I define optimism (and how I tend to view myself) is that even if I fail (which happens with striking regularity) that I think that I can learn what I did wrong and do it better at the next opportunity. Maybe a better way to divide the world isn't between optimism and pessimism, but rather hope and fatalism. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from mk. He said, "Never marry a pessimist." I couldn't impress anything better on any unmarried person.
Just looks like another swing of the pendulum in the other direction for a bit... Based off what I've seen, the optimism seems to mask dysfunction (on this note oyster's assessment doesn't look far off) - the counterbalance becomes misplaced pessimism to a fault rather than pragmatics. But, hey, what do I know. You're born, life sucks, then you die.
First -- Just because we're better than we were 30 years ago does not mean we're good. A huge chunk of the world is still in poverty, and we have the capability to eliminate that completely but we don't use it. We still have climate change, overfishing, et cetera wrecking long-term environmental havoc that won't be fixed by simply decreasing our CO2 output. The middle east is still a bloodbath and it doesn't look like that will end any time soon. Workers around the world, even in America in some places, are being exploited as much as they were in the 20s. So no, it doesn't seem to me that the world is just peachy right now. Second -- I can't speak for liberals, but we on the far left are still fervently optimistic. We're seeing all this shit going on around us, and we still think we can make it better if we try hard enough. However, the writer of this article seems to define 'optimism' as 'faith that everything is all right'. In that sense, no, we're just about as pessimistic as can be, and we've been pessimistic since the 19th century. All the problems we have today are fixable, but most require radical solutions that 'optimists' like the author of this article would probably shy away from.
Which candidate should I be excited about again? The way I understand the process to function, Sanders is mathematically incapable of beating $Hillary at this point. Super delegates control the process. I refuse to hold the 'Watch the world burn' pro-trump view. The best of all possible bad options is still not good.
As it stands, Clinton has 1716 and sanders 1433 pledged delegates, which is roughly in line with the 56% of the vote she's won. If anything, sanders is slightly over represented in the delegate count, as he's won 42% of the vote (or thereabouts) and has 46% of delegates. Would we in the US really benefit from having someone who loses the popular vote by several million be the nominee? I don't think we would. Super delegates will only come into play if they switch their support to sanders.
Were you naive and expected some outcome other than that which we are getting out of the presidential process? Are you sad now? is that what you are trying to say? Did you get kicked in the head by a horse and now you need to put a dollar sign in front of Hillary's name every time you write it? If that's what happened get treatment because it's fucking annoying. Sounds like you sad in the pants optimist and you should really get over it. This is the wages of optimism, big frowny faces.