Optimism

1866:

Are we generally optimistic about the future? Do we have reason to be? I’d say most people see nothing positive in store for the future. They’re pessimistic, and perhaps that could be a self-fulfilling prophecy - if enough people see the future in that negative way, our collective consciousness will fall into line and we’ll self-destruct. Maybe you and I won’t be around to see it happen, and in many ways this is the cause of so much of today’s selfish, destructive and violent behaviour.

Is this the source of our ‘comfortable pessimism’ then? Is this the reason why we don’t care about repairing things properly now? If so, this is the classic opposite of altruism. And who’d want to see themselves in such a light? It’s so unattractive. Is it that we want to avoid pain, and want to seek pleasure? Is this why we say, “Make hay while the sun shines?” The thought of tightening our belts and imposing personal disciplines isn’t a pleasant idea. But what if we could turn that attitude into pleasure – the pleasure deriving from being useful and repairing and restructuring.

If we aren’t that creative, if all we can imagine are the pleasures we are used to now, then we might simply prefer to coast along. But in reality, with so much information available, we can’t help but see the warnings about systems-collapse, everywhere. Our ecosystems, our economy and our ethics are obviously going downhill rapidly. Most of us realise that something has to be done. To ignore all the warnings would seem crazy. But specifically, what can any of us do? We might argue that if we waste a lot of energy trying to repair the unrepairable, our efforts will come to nothing, and won’t be appreciated by people who come after us. And what’s more, they’ll say we didn’t address our problems because we “didn’t care enough”, and we’d have trouble explaining why that was an unfair assessment of us. This would be the ultimate put-down.

How would they ever know what we went through? How could they guess why we didn’t feel optimistic enough to strike out?         

         

Out of self-pity, every older generation asks the succeeding generation for forgiveness, even though at the time we wouldn’t have had the clarity of hindsight. And every new generation blames the last for being irresponsible when, from the future perspective, it is quite clear what we should have done. Our successors, in turn, leave the same legacy to the next generation, and are subsequently judged, and so it goes on, without there being any substantial change in the fundamentals of human nature.

         

And if there’s something one would want to change in our world today, wouldn’t it be ‘human nature’, in the form of a transformation of our deeply rooted attitudes? And I’m thinking particularly of our speciesism which, like racism is today, will be something quite incomprehensible to those who come later.

         

So, today we ‘live now, pay later’, preferring that any payment-to-be-made will come after we’re gone from this world. Could it be this which has brought about our infamous irresponsibility - not caring about a world fifty years, a hundred years hence? And, if so, then that’s surely the ugliest face of pessimism, and the heaviest weight we carry. This cynical outlook on life signifies only one thing - an inability to see how things could be.

         

How do we envisage what is going to come about? And if we are pessimists, how heavily will that bear down on us? Is our inability to deal with our own overwhelming personal problems making us incapable of addressing global problems? Do we each ignore the significance of our own obvious shortfalls, simply because in addressing them we fear worse pessimism, preventing us from seeing beyond our own reality?

Have we in fact almost given up? Are we mesmerised by one dead-end thought, that in this day and age (of huge, powerful, political corporations making decisions for us and doing so many things we disagree with) that there’s nothing we-the-ordinary-people can do to stop them?

Could it be that we are so caught up in a world of destruction, that we don’t even look the world’s future? And that, because we can’t stop the powerful people in our society who are SO destructive?

Surely, everything changes when we personally boycott everything we don’t agree with. Others’ slowness shouldn’t provide us with an excuse to not get on with our own programme-of-boycotting.