Optimism and Pessimism are Bipolar

Posted on March 30, 2003 in Crosstalk Thinking

These times challenge our platitudes as Sinister Sister is discovering.

She shared this quote by Max Ehrmann:

“You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”

And then she said:

sure, this is a cool and hippie way of looking at life but i wouldn’t even try to tell it to the coalition troops presently fighting it out ( and probably thinking what they are doing ) on the warfront in Iraq

Around the time of this country’s founding, Voltaire wrote a book called Candide, subtitled Optimism. By propelling his naive hero through various cataclysms and atrocities, he challenged the life-depriving philosophical maxim that “everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds”. His was a time of tyrants and the men and women who read Candide and took the message to heart, changed the world.

Optimism means that you see the bright side of everything. Pessimism means that you see the darkness. When you take a step back and think clinically for a moment, you may notice that these poles correspond to mania on the one hand and depression on the other. They therefore represent the kind of thinking that one has while feeling the effects of a mood disorder.

The middle ground is Realism: everything is neither good nor bad. Life throws you a mix of experiences.

Growing up in the 70s, I most often found Ehrmann’s thinking thrown at me by the guys who didn’t want to put away their bongs for long enough to see the injustice around them and do something about it. “Everything’s cool, man. It’s all going to work out.”

More recently, I witnessed when Bush was installed as president by the United States Supreme Court. “Oh, there are plenty of checks on him,” people said. “He won’t do much damage.” And now as this war rages, I hear some saying that “This must have a greater purpose” as if the finger of God were shoving the allied troops over the Iraqi desert as one might flick a crumb across the table. There’s an attitude implied in that which feeds the sanguinary self-importance of the usurper in Washington. He’s banking on us not doing anything, making disastrous changes to our way of life which he thinks no one will overturn once he hammers them in place.

Everything is not for the best. And it will continue not being for the best as long as good people do nothing about it.

The realist prefers a different set of values, represented by the Serenity Prayer which was originally penned by the theologian Reinhold Neibuhr in 1932:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

It’s an earnest, realistic request. And I say unto you, that you have the power to work with others to end Ares Americana, the decline of our honest nation into a bestial one.

I wrote at Sinister Sister’s blog:

…But why not work to make it for the best? We may be nothing more than incidental chemical reactions, but we have minds and the power to change our surroundings. Let’s do it instead of sitting on our hands and watching the slaughter of the innocents in Iraq.