A Brief Introduction to Pessimism
I once read that you can learn more from what has gone wrong than what has gone right. The idea is that a mistake presents myriad opportunities for reflection, analysis, and learning; a success leads to enjoyment of that success, and no meaningful reflection. I have no reason to doubt that this is true, yet what initially concerns me is the all-too-prevalent focus on the negatives of life — the anger, the jealousy, the failure, the flaws, and the many mistakes. Is it any wonder that students of the arts become cynical and hesitant?
Take Plutarch’s Lives, for instance. We soon learn that the aristocracy control society, but give plebeians the impression that they have a say. Bribery will always take place, the trick is ensuring you bribe the people who would bother to tell others about it. Good men will never win, because they’ll be killed by someone bad before they upset the status quo. Why settle things peacefully and compromise when we could fight to the death and one of us will get limitless power?
Or if you’d like a slightly later period, look at Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars. One man may gain unlimited power and do as he wishes, so long as he can ensure that the greater fear of the public is that someone else takes power.
Zamyatin’s We, Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Huxley’s Brave New World, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: a small group of individuals will always control a larger group of individuals. They’ll invent new technologies to improve their control; most people will never be aware that they’re controlled (the illusion of free will), or will be aware of the fact but not mind it. Some abnormal individuals may see what is happening or manage to escape, but they will either not be able to bring themselves to escape the system, want to go back after they’ve escaped, or will die. War is a way of making money, but we’ll end up destroying the world some day. Humans don’t actually want individuality; they just want not to have to think for themselves.
García Márquez, Camus, Süskind, Mishima, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov — and even Oscar Wilde. Each shows us a different human flaw, most often fatal. There are humans so deranged that they will do things that I don’t particularly want to write about here.
If literature doesn’t demonstrate pessimism clearly, a more to-the-point book is Vaclav Smil’s Global Catastrophes and Trends. I have yet to find a better dose of pessimism in just a couple of hundred pages.
Many of you, I’m sure, will have been adding your own books to the above list. It is just a snapshot of some of the pessimism that comes to my mind, and if you’d like more abundant examples, think of the news that we read every day. Political crises, deaths, personal crises — some important, some not — all negative.
Writers see it as more worthwhile to write about the negative than the positive; they believe there’s more to show and more to learn from. The negatives permeate most novels and histories — and if they didn’t, would there be a gripping storyline? Stories, which include histories, need negatives to function. Mistakes, disasters, worst-case scenarios and deaths are what get through the most to the reader — we like crises, especially if they’re followed by a more positive conclusion. And if they’re not? Well, that’s when we get those stories that really shock us and stick in our minds. Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, for instance.
Is it any wonder that cynicism and pessimism have become what often seems the dominant mood of society?
I choose my next book to read, and read it expecting to learn of another crisis that could happen to me. I don’t expect to feel uplifted; and if I am, I read on in fear of the inevitable plot twist.
Optimism that we do see in life is in many ways an optimism born from a deeply-held pessimism. Dystopic novels, for instance, hint at possible solutions, or ways to avoid the undesirable end displayed. Fahrenheit 451 (a novel that made me think deeply) suggests a solution in safekeeping the stories of the past:
“All we want to do is keep the knowledge we think we will need, safe and intact… For if we are destroyed, the knowledge is dead, perhaps for good.”
There are glimmers of positive human emotions, and smatterings of optimism, amongst a text built on foundations of pessimism.
I also see optimism built on pessimism within one of the most optimistic industries in the world. Elon Musk appears supremely optimistic, saying that we can most definitely create conditions on Mars where humans could live. It takes an optimist through-and-through to believe this is possible. Yet, when asked why humans would want to live on Mars, Musk retorts that our planet is inevitably going to be destroyed by something, someday — just look at the fossil record — and so we may as well start making alternative arrangements. Musk wants to work out a way of keeping humanity, and its knowledge, intact from inevitable destruction — just as Bradbury’s characters do.
Ironically, this post is not intended to be purely pessimistic. For I believe that optimism built on pessimistic foundations is most often a boon.
A great proportion of technological breakthroughs come as a response to an impending crisis or problem. The increased use of renewable energy is a positive thing, and is a direct response to global warming. Space exploration came largely as a response to the apparent threat that the United States and the Soviet Union saw in each other. Commerce drives incremental improvement; crisis drives exponential improvement.
An education, in its broad sense, seems in many ways almost synonymous with an acceptance, a submission, to pessimism. Becoming educated means understanding the failings of individuals and society, so that these failings can later be mitigated at the least, and hopefully rectified. To know how to fix something, you need to understand the problem first.
It comes back to the ancient Chinese scholar’s debate from the Hundred Schools of Thought period about whether individuals are fundamentally good but then corrupted (as Confucius and Mencius believed), or fundamentally bad but made good through education (as Xunzi believed). The difference is that here we apply these categories to the world as a whole.
It seems that the dominant belief is that left to its own devices, the world will do bad things. We subscribe to the Xunzian view of human nature.
But submission to pessimism is not submission to a life full of negatives. It is submission to the idea that if we do not do something — if we do not stage an intervention — then the world in its natural state will be seen through to its pessimistic end. Inherent in this belief is the fact that we can do something. And there lies human optimism.
Pessimism is, in short, a prerequisite to optimism.
And if you, like me, believe that optimism is a good thing; let’s go find all the pessimism we can.
