There’s a truism that goes “pessimism is a sign of decay, optimism is a sign of superficiality.” Can one see the world as it is, without either lens?
Pessimists generally see the world more clearly than optimists, especially during times of great darkness. Optimists, struggling to find silver linings in the swirling miasma of intersecting storms churning out monstrous tornadoes, spew misleading drivel like:
“One thing is certain: an end to Trump’s reign of error would help detoxify the world. Freed from him and his two poisonous comrades-in-arms, Putin and Xi, the demoralized, suffocating peoples of the west could breathe again. Hope and confidence would renew.”
Pundits like this refuse to see that Trump, Putin and Xi are manifestations, not sources of the world’s toxins. Without dealing with the dominant tendencies of division and greed in human nature within us, leaders will only be replaced by someone temporarily better, like Trump was by Biden until Trump 2.0 was unsurprisingly voted back to office.
Some pollyannas insist that it’s human nature to cooperate and care, though a great deal of false cooperation is occurring in the absence of caring.
For example, a record 45 million Americans are flying or driving all over hell this three-day holiday weekend, even as the chorus of complaints about gas prices and “affordability” reaches a fever pitch in the media. It takes a tremendous amount of cooperation for that degree of functional cooperation to exist, but the contradiction and self-centered activity it exemplifies is mind-boggling.
Though ancient Greece is the taproot of western civilization, the Greeks were hardly the optimists of popular conception. When Midas asked Silenus, the jovial, wine-loving tutor of Dionysus, what fate is best for man, Silenus answered:
“Pitiful race of a day, children of accidents and sorrow, why do you force me to say what were better left unheard? The best of all is unobtainable — not to be born, to be nothing. The second best is to die early.”
To counter this worldview, many scholars agree, “The profoundest feature of Greek drama was the Dionysian conquest of pessimism through art,” especially tragedy ironically.
What I’m driving at is certainly not the “tragic optimism of the strong man” that Nietzsche espoused. That approach degenerates into the nihilism of the strongman through “the will to power.” Rather, we can face the world as it is, and be nothing, though in a very different way than Silenus meant.
A shrinking global ecological space that the ancient Greeks could not have imagined, plus interconnected economies along with systems of manipulation and control at scale (whether by reactionary governments, transnational corporations or online “influencers”) signify that man’s fragmentation is nearing a limit, both inwardly and outwardly.
The increasing chances of nuclear war, the danger of various ecological tipping points, and AI infiltrating almost every aspect of our lives, are part of a myriad of global, catastrophic threats that are feeding into one another. That has compelled the experts behind the Doomsday Clock to symbolize humankind’s nearness to zero hour at 85 seconds, the closest it’s been since the clock was conceived in 1947 in response to the threat of nuclear war.
Even so, time is the enemy, and not simply because we’re running out of space for collective error.
The Doomsday Clock was created by a group of Manhattan Project nuclear scientists who wanted to warn the public and politicians of the dangers of destruction they had helped unleash on humankind. The real and present dangers of AI are being compared to nuclear war, but like the nuclear threat, nationalistic mindsets and capitalistic assets are taking priority.
Meanwhile, as one of the Guardian’s “optimistic” columnists put it, we are witnessing “universally negative knock-on effects of the unprovoked, avoidable conflict with Iran unfold daily…undermining democratic accountability, political stability, human rights, the UN charter, the Geneva conventions, environmental conservation and climate policy.”
Straining with herniated optimism however, he sees hope for reining in the Trump influence through Britain’s “special relationship” with America; in France’s calling for “a coalition of independence” of middle powers; in EU, African Union, G20 and Brics groupings; and even more implausibly, in the UN Security Council taking a unified stance.”
The effect of this kind of optimism adds to pessimism and contributes to people’s despair.
Confining one’s thinking to the machinations of nation-states when the polycrisis has made nations secondary, if not irrelevant, doesn’t just add to psychological pessimism but increases the cascading challenges facing humanity.
As Einstein famously said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Indeed, though thinking clearly and logically is essential, thought cannot solve our problems, because thought has created them. Our brains have another virtually untapped capacity.
Building walls is stupid, outwardly or inwardly. The first thing is to clearly see what is happening at the core level of human consciousness, across the increasingly porous borders of countries and cultures.
It’s essential to see that humankind is on a quickening downward spiral, and that to be optimistic about where we’re headed as a species is to willfully delude oneself, whereas to remain pessimistic is to despair and not care.
The problem isn’t Trump, Putin and Xi. Humankind is in a race to the bottom, with the worst aspects of human nature — division, egoism and greed — possessing unstoppable momentum.
There’s a feeling in the air of an inexorability of events. The reckless Israeli-American war against Iran has triggered an economic world war. Trump has no control of himself, much less over events. If there’s a real provocation from Tehran, such as a successful attack on an American carrier, he’ll use tactical nukes, especially as it gets close to mid-term elections.
The darkness in human consciousness has a death wish for the human spirit. Non-accumulative learning through self-knowing keeps one inwardly alive and growing. That is the true response to this, the sum of all the dark ages of man.
One person can make a difference, if she or he awakens the virtually untapped capacity in the human brain for insight, and doesn’t apply it to knowledge creation. (AI will soon be able to generate vast amounts of new knowledge, but it cannot and will not ever have insight.)
In the end — for this age if not for good — the core existential question for the individual that cares about the present and future humanity is: Will the human being of insight and true intelligence be ready when Homo sap hits bottom?
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