Forget the headlines! Why I’m optimistic about 2019.
The year 2019 isn’t looking too promising. Everywhere the press is alerting us to the growing risks of financial crisis, economic crisis, political crisis, environmental crisis, etc. But are crises that last for decades still crises?
Everything seems to indicate that the world is collapsing before our eyes without us doing anything else but commenting and becoming indignant. However we continue to view our world through a distorting prism: that of headlines, selected and written to attract our attention. Fire, blood, horror, fear, death are these triggers that focus our attention to the point of forgetting everything else.
A few days ago, Steven Pinker published a column in The Economist in which he said that journalism, even the most demanding, was forced to paint a picture distorting reality. For Pinker, the news focuses on catastrophic events, because the good news does not interest anyone. And this creates a market for chaos promoters who take advantage of fear and indignation to make them talk about saturation.
This distortion has a major impact on our mental state and our apprehension of reality. He recalls how in the past we have experienced crises far more catastrophic than those we are experiencing today. Between 1970 and 1980, for example, we experienced the nuclear stalemate between America and the Soviet Union, communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe, fascism in Spain and Portugal, military conflicts in Latin America and Asia, the Marxist and secessionist terrorist brigades in Europe, the civil wars in Africa and the Iran-Iraq war that killed more than half a million people … So obviously, everything is not always better for everyone.
Today the major concern is the rise of populism. Pinker’s vision on this subject is a real provocation for the common man, fed up with the infernal cycle of continuous information. He is disarmingly optimistic. He claims that the most passionate populists of today — radical, intolerant, uneducated — will give way, by demographic effect, to a future electorate that is more educated, open, diverse on an ethnic and social level.
In the same way, isolationism and militant nationalism will be engulfed by the unavoidable wave of globalization. The problems facing the different countries — migration, pandemics, terrorism, cybercrime, nuclear proliferation, environment — will require more and more international solutions. Pinker concludes by reminding us that to get an accurate picture of the world, we must not just read but look at the data!
Indeed, in previous decades, more people died from war, homicide, infectious diseases and terrorism. Our world was experiencing more poverty, autocratic regimes, nuclear weapons, air pollution in rich countries and more contaminated water in poor countries. Since the Enlightenment life expectancy in the world has increased from 30 to 71 years, extreme poverty has fallen from 90% to 10%, the literacy rate has increased from 12% to 83% and the proportion people living in democracies went from 1% to two-thirds. Since 1945, inter-state wars have become rare, combat deaths have been divided by 10, and billions of lives have been improved by the revolutions of the rights of racial minorities, women and gays.
No one can predict with certainty how the coming year is shaping up, but as our optimist of the day points out, to understand the world and better anticipate it, it is more reasonable to rely on the data than on the headlines.
If I can afford a wish for 2019, I wish you a year without headlines, but a year full of curiosity, reflection and openness to new topics. I wish all of us out of our media and algorithmic bubble, to meet the unknown, the other, who, behind the TV screen, the smartphone, or behind a vest, whatever color, will have something new to teach us.
When everyone loses faith in the future , our only possible resistance is optimism. Because optimism and hope are the bases on which commitment and action are built. Also for 2019, I wish you to be optimistic, reasonably, but resolutely, optimistic!
Michel Lévy Provençal
CEO, Boma France
