Screw Optimism and Screw “Sanity”

*applause*

You know, my soon-to-be-ending seven year stay in the USA has had its ups and downs, and more ups than downs on the whole, but quite possible THE WORST thing has been the optimism mandate of American culture. Because I didn’t realize deep down *enough* that it was a cultural affectation, I ended up taking it seriously one-too-many-times, and made choices that made me in some ways a lot more miserable than I ought to have been. And, I can’t “blame” anyone, because all of the people who should have said “no” to me genuinely believed that they meant “yes” when they said it. And I believe them because that is how far deep the optimism mandate runs.

So what you’re saying has been true for me in a very personal way. You do need some amount of optimism to, e.g., design your technological infrastructure or even get basic research done. But it can get pernicious.

Now when anyone asks me what the main difference is between American and Canadian culture, I say that Canadians are, at least, more likely to say no when they should say no.

(Are we the only people up tonight? Also, I think Barbara Ehrenreich is supposed to have covered some of this ground as well in “Bright-sided”.)

One imagines conversations between cows.

I do….and it goes something like this…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2hih3imPH8

or….this….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkjuUJ3w16I&feature=related

Forgot to include the famous Nietzsche quote, though you may have printed this before — can’t remember:

“Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man.”

Very important in this downgrade by the S&P is to follow all of the trails. For example, who is making big money off of this? Quite a few people in the know are, you can bet on it if you’re a gambler. Those trails need to be followed, even if they are rabbit holes. Here’s a couple things of note that should be followed up on. Listen to how nervous Chambers is in this interview. He knows more than he’s saying here, and I believe he’s being held over a barrel. Keep in mind that McGraw-Hill, of which S&P is a subsidiary, has very close elitist ties to the Bush family. This is not meant to let the Obama Admin, and the Congress, off the hook, but rather to illustrate that S&P is a tool of the aristocracy as many of us already have surmised. I’m going to say that the green light was given by the Plutocrats for the downgrade, and they are making huge profits on the downside. They are going for broke, and are hell bent on killing the goose that laid all of those golden eggs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21vhgyeIQAc&feature=related

http://www.thenation.com/print/article/reading-between-lines

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023809/Did-George-Soros-win-10-1-return-S-Ps-US-credit-rating-downgrade.html

I really do want to read this book, because my first thought upon hearing the premise was ” oh, another book romanticizing mental illness as a great thing”. I’m a pessimist that way.

Having seen a bit more about it, it seems far more nuanced than that, and I expect it will be a good read.

Second time I’ve read about this book in 2 days (Hullabaloo being the first). I had a grandparent who was seriously depressed. Everyone said they coped with hard times like a trooper, but easy times made it hard to function at all. Being quite the Debbie Downer myself, I think it’s very tempting right now with the markets in shambes and riots breaking out (AS PREDICTED for years) to pick up books like that and pat ourselves on the backs. But a more likely explanation is that bad times validate the pessimists’ worldview and by extension validate the pessimist, and good times or seeming good times validate the optimists. There is a difference between being realistic, and only finding meaning in a life of struggle and strife, even unnecessary struggle and strife. The vast majority of pessimists are nearly as stupid and uncreative as the vast majority of optimists (see what a downer I am, I just shat in the pessimists’ party punch bowl, from which I myself wanted to drink? Oh well, there is plenty of schadenfreude to be had without getting drunk on it). Always remember that deep down conservatives are all pessimists and cynics too, and a world run by conservatives is not a world worth living in (Obama being a deeply cynical conservative, is no exception, regardless of the idealism of his sheeple followers)

One of your better essays, Ian … and that says a lot. No one that I read gets to the zeitgeist as good as you.

Sane in this country has been defined … by the plutocrats … as being acquiescent towards the plutocrats’ rule …. anything else would be “uncivilized”. It’s reflected in the unspoken … but insidiously promoted … nonsense that politeness trumps morality. And whatever one needs to reach that state of stupor … such as being doped up on hope or pharmaceuticals … is encouraged.

Z

Besides, everyone knows there is no sanity clause…

I remember the criticism of Carter (who was, in truth, far from perfect but who saw some things correctly) for him not being uplifting enough and the cardigan sweater bit and talking about “limits”. And the praise heaped on Reagan because he was “so optimistic” and “renewed America’s hope”.

Gah. I hated it then, and I still hate it now. Using your drug metaphor, the Reagan presidency consisted of taking you off the medicine that was unpleasant (but might lead to a cure) and giving you gobs of pain medication which made you euphoric but goofy. Except if you were poor–which I was at the start of his presidency–your economic prospects went south immediately. For the poor then Reagan was all bad. But the press rarely cares about the poor, so it went largely unreported.

I never forgot what it was like to be poor under Reagan, even after I was poor no longer. Unfortunately, too many of America’s middle class bought the false hope of “you can be rich too!” and believed all the predictions of wealth that would come out of their 401ks and IRAs. A pre-recession poll said that some 30 % of college students thought they’d be millionaires (when << 1 % will be)–though I wonder now how many would answer seeing that many can't even land jobs. The middle class angst you see now is the result of the austerity which Reagan first enacted on America's poor which has now creeped upwards to the middle class.

The lesson I learned (other than to despise blind optimists) is this: you have far, far, far more in common with the waitress who brings you your meal, or the guy who pumps your gas, or the guy changing your oil, than you do with your CEO or with with any of the rich. I've always maintained that if we were truly concerned about the welfare of the economy as a whole, we should junk all the indicators that largely depend on how the rich are doing (like the markets) and instead focus on one indicator–how well the bottom 20 % of society is doing. If they do well, we all do well. If they do poorly, it's only a matter of time before we start hurting too.

-StewartM

“Likewise I am beyond tired of the excessive stigmatization of anger and hatred. It is appropriate to hate some people. ”
——————————————–
Word. When people ask me why this stuff pisses me off so much, I just think – why doesn’t it piss you off???

Great post though I’d call it cynicism, not pessimism. And while I agree wholeheartedly about the necessary attributes of leadership, I have heard it said that Stalin wasn’t exactly Mr. shits and giggles.

I’d say sprinkle a few hopemongers in a roomful of malcontents, all of them, dare I say it, intelligent and we might get somewhere.

My bad, I see Raven is the only one who mentioned the P-word, while you were merely mocking blind optimism. But I maintain that cynicism is bred out of realism. How the innocent come to any other conclusions from their experiences is beyond me.

@Diana Prince

Thanks, I will check it out.

I found it, Lisa….HOORAY!! I love this blog.

http://www.i-cynic.com/whatis.asp

An Excerpt:

What cynicism means today, and why cynics need a sanctuary.

Telling the truth can get you into hot water. As much as the world needs its
cynics, it still doesn’t REALIZE that it needs them. Cynics today are
habitually castigated by politicians, corporate chieftains and other
productive citizens with tidy lawns; they know that we’re on to them, so they
lump us with the lowest of the low. We’re generally cast as the heavies in
the black hats, counterproductive miscreants who broil babies when we’re not spray-painting obscenities on public monuments. We’re portrayed as masters of chicanery and intrigue, untrusting and untrustworthy. Since we’re neither leaders nor followers, we’re expected to get out of the way — and the
tidy-lawn folks get furious when we don’t. Nobody loves a cynic, except maybe another cynic.

Even the dictionary definition of a cynic makes us look like scoundrels:

“a faultfinding captious critic; esp. one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest.”

Aside from casting us in a negative light, Webster & Co. miss the point by
half a mile. Where’s the hint of lost ideals, the rueful humor, the wounded
childlike soul that lurks behind the cynic’s sarcasm?

What a sadly maligned and misunderstood tribe we are! Cynicism, after all,
springs not from cruelty or viciousness, but from precisely the opposite: a
fatal love of virtue. If we were mere realists, we’d have no need for
cynicism; the world would never disappoint us because we’d expect so little
of it. But the best cynics are still idealists under their scarred hides. We
wanted the world to be a better place, and we can’t shrug off the
disappointment when it lets us down. Our cynicism gives us the painful power to behold life shorn of its sustaining illusions. Thus my own definition of a cynic:

“an idealist whose rose-colored glasses have been removed, snapped in two and stomped into the ground, immediately improving his vision.”

MO, well, that’s certainly the classic, Ancient Greek definition of it, I’ll give you that.

(And love this: “Where’s the hint of lost ideals, the rueful humor, the wounded childlike soul that lurks behind the cynic’s sarcasm?” I will quote you.)

An optimist believes in what people can do at their best; a pessimest what they can do at their worst. A realist grasps what people usually end up doing, which is the latter; but a cynic… a cynic laments the gulf between the two.

Wasn’t that long ago.

Right. I don’t belong here. What bullshit you speak. You’re right, Ian. I hate your writing. I still look, sometimes, but you’re really full of crap. That’s me, in the end. You’re right. Bye now.

Meditate on that.

Yeah, teevee apparently loves the fake danger above all else.

Ratings are so low, engagement with mass media so fractured, agnatology and the memory hole so advanced, I do not draw conclusions about the mass audience.

I used to be appalled that so few of friends and acquaintances could sustain a realistic moral assessment of leading politicians. I would cite the role of the younger Bush and his cabinet in the Iraq War or Obama in preventing prosecution of Wall Street crime, and heads would nod and all would be forgotten and forgiven days (or sometimes minutes) later.

Now, we have the Russiagate “scandal” — an endless parade of groundless accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 general election. This is political dementia and breakdown in critical thinking that I would not have thought possible as late as 2011, despite my experience related above.

I do think it is symptomatic of disengagement from politics. Most people have only loose and often bizarre ideas about what politics is about. I saw someone say that what “outrages” so many about Trump is his crudity, not his cruelty. He is a traitor to his class . . . in manners.

Ian seems to have adopted the family motto of Hunter Thompson. Thompson was right about so many things, but in the end, it killed him. I prefer my motto; “Expect disappointment, but always hope for success.” It allows you to be depressive and optimistic at the same time. It also hopefully insulates you from suicidality.

Ian’s justification of hate strikes me as binary thinking, which is the psychological well from which all shitty analysis springs. Hate, like all binary thinking, boils down to a search for confirmation of one’s beliefs about the world, and rejection of evidence to the contrary as flawed or deception. If one does not leave open the possibility that you might be wrong, inevitably, you will be.

After sitting through the last episode of Ken Burns’ latest masterpiece on a war that changed my life (emphasize life, because it didn’t kill me), I was periodically tempted to hate Kennedy, Johnson, McNamara, Westmoreland, Nixon, and Kissinger. They were all seriously flawed human beings, who killed millions based on binary notions, and who perseverated in the face of overwhelming evidence that those binary notions were wrong. By the end of Burns’ opus, my estimation of Eisenhower elevated, while my estimation of LBJ plummeted down almost to where I hold Nixon and Kissinger. I always thought LBJ was a ruthless SOB, but I thought he cared about people. He tapes wised me up. All of those men were despicable liars who deceived themselves as much as they did me and the entire nation they led.

So here we are still mired in eternal war, still being led by binary thinkers who are congenital liars, and who continue to get people killed all over the world. Once in awhile, we do get a leader who is fiduciary if not noble. It is a joy to work for such people, and I have been fortunate to do so. Democracy, alas, seem to produce presidents who represent the population mean and the population’s meanness. That can get you down; but look on the bright side. Sometimes they inadvertently do something good.

Oops, I put this in a previous thread although it belongs here:

I have no problem investigating foreign interference in our politics. How about startng with Israel?

@Ian, I recognized this about you in your writing right away, and now here’s the confirmation. Most writers/thinkers whose work feels intuitively valid and familiar to me seems to come from this personality type. I don’t really like the validation we’re getting by events either; I wish we were wrong, diagnosable, treatable. At some point someone will suggest that as a program, I’m sure.

@Mandos — Maybe Canadians are better at saying no at the right times, but they always have the chance to fail to do it when it really counts. As a lifelong resident of several regions of the US and one of its territories (and now Canada), I share your (and others’) dim view of American bullshit optimism. It’s a huge irritant and blinder. But it’s a feature of neoliberalism that no doubt arises from some old Calvinist/Protestant feature of the WASP mind in North America, Britain, and northern Europe. It still animates the rightist in all these places. Canada has it too, and a form of “it can’t happen here” exceptionalism. Maybe especially in the western provinces.