What You Should Know About Pessimistic Optimism
For one thing, it can help you avoid ramming all those icebergs floating around out there waiting to sink you.
Why on earth would you want to subscribe to something with a weird name like Swimming Downstream From the Culture Pool, with a logo of the Titanic gracefully sinking beneath the waves with nearly a full cargo of soon-to-be dead people aboard? I mean, aside from the common sense of the notion itself. After all, don’t they call it common sense because it is…well…common?
Well, if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge…er, an iceberg…you might be interested in. (Cash money on the barrelhead, please). More to the point, as some dead white Frog named François-Marie Arouet (you might know him better by his handle, “Voltaire”) once remarked, “Common sense is not so common.”
Even worse, when common sense does rear its ugly head, it more often than not finds itself greeted with disdain, if not anger and open hatred. We live in troubled times, and not the least reason for it is that common sense no longer finds itself much welcomed at our intellectual, institutional, and cultural hearths. It is no accident that one of the most inflammatory tracts ever written by an American was itself called Common Sense, penned by a bomb-thrower named Thomas Paine. This missive was so incendiary that even the second President (and Founding Father) of the United States, John Adams, remarked: “I dreaded the effect so popular a pamphlet might have among the people, and determined to do all in my Power to counteract the effect of it.”
Common sense is not just dangerous, it is frightening, (many things that are dangerous are not in themselves especially frightening - tobacco springs to mind) because at its heart it is an essential recognition and acknowledgement of reality. And many people spend much of their lives constructing bulwarks against this recognition, because they find reality threatening to their peace of mind at best, and to their very existence at worst.
Dr. Benjamin Rush, another American Founder and Framer understood the phenomenon well, when in somewhat awe-struck tones he said of Paine’s work, “Its effects were sudden and extensive upon the American mind. It was read by public men.”
Sudden and extensive. That’s just how common sense can work, whether on an individual or an entire nation. And therein lies the problem. Humans mostly don’t like sudden and extensive anything, especially if it requires them to change. Another very human characteristic is to prefer ignorant happiness to knowledgeable gloom. We are human. We don’t like pain. And yet pain is what teaches us the things we need to learn, grow, and survive. It is nature’s way of telling us to take our damned tongues off the electric hot plate.
We want to whistle a happy tune, even if the melody may pied-piper us right into a Titanic and watery grave. The solution is to take a long, hard look at those happy assumptions everybody likes so much, and rigorously examine them for potential downsides. I discuss that notion further here, although the concept is simple enough. And to answer that pesky question cui bono, well, you do. Because only when you have checked all the happy-crappy for booby traps hanging off its nether regions can you achieve a state of optimistic pessimism in which you have discovered the pessimistic possibilities of the downsides, and because of that, you can be optimistic about your chances of avoiding them, rather that waltzing into them unwarned and unaware.
Another old dead white guy, this one a Greek named Socrates, told us, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” not long before he put paid to his own life by gargling down a cup of hemlock. So come, take my hand, and together we shall examine our own lives, paying particular attention to the many monkey wrenches common sense and reality may fling into our fondest assumptions. It may be mildly painful, but it will be a good pain.
Hurry up. We’re about to get started.
You know what to do.
Oh, and one final sweetener. If you are one of those who has been after me for the past few years to write the sequel to my best selling dystopian novel Lightning Fall, I’m going to be writing and posting it, chapter by chapter, along with ancillary material every month going forward. I’m shooting for two chapters a month, plus reader discussions. But you have to be a paid subscriber to read this content.
Swimming Downstream From the Culture Pool is a reader-supported publication. To receive the full range of my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Free is good, too, but it just won’t be as much fun for either of us, darling.