Why Optimists Are Idiots

optimism is the stubbornness of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst I have a confession to make I am a natural Optimist almost to the point of naivity I broadly tend to overestimate how well things will pan out and I'm surprised when they inevitably do not go according to plan and the thing is I am not alone if you believe many psychologists most of us are prone to this sort of optimistic bias where we are far too positive in our predictions of how life will go for us but this is a philosophy Channel

and in that vein I ought to put my own predisposition to the test so today we are going to look at some of the most Ardent critiques of optimism from across history and see whether there is truly any wisdom in being an optimist for my purposes here I will define an optimist very broadly as someone who views things as better than they are and I'll go into specifics later in the video get ready to learn the different forms of optimism how The Optimist can quickly morph into a cynic and how we may be able to

look the sufferings of the world in the face and still remain positive as always bear in mind that this is just a taste of the literature out there on this topic and also that since I'm attempting to criticize my own position there will not be much defense of optimism in this video until right at the very end also the words optimism and Optimist are going to completely lose meaning for me in about 2 minutes so let's begin by looking at one of the classic problems for The Optimist that they try to justify the unjustifiable but

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best of all possible World among gotfried Liv Net's many achievements are huge Innovations in calculus a metaphysics whose sophistication was even admired by Bertram Russell and the title of the last Universal genius however he also came up with an Infamous form of optimism that has survived in new guyses in the present day lienet believed that there was an all powerful and all loving God but at the same time he rubbed up against the existence of evil in the world so he came up with a proposed solution since God would not create anything less than the

best world he could and since he is omnipotent this must be the best of all Poss possible worlds there simply could not be a world that is better than this one obviously I am slightly simplifying liet's Point here but you get the picture despite being widely criticized for this Liv's optimism is still found in a modified form today perhaps it is most prominent in sayings like everything is for the best or everything happens for a reason with the implicit assumption that this must be a good reason these all basically amount to the same proposition that

our world the one we inhabit right now is the best world that even can be every EV that happens is part of a plan or purpose that is unassailably good and in some cases not just good but the best possible plan anyone could come up with this is slightly broader in scope than Li nitz's original position but I'm going to dub all of these views Li nitan optimism for the sake of convenience libnan optimism is importantly different from some of the other types of optimism that we will discuss later because it does not make predictions

about what specifically will happen only that whatever does happen will be in some way good and not just good subjectively but good objectively everything is and always will be as it should be this makes it somewhat retrospective as an optimistic Doctrine but nonetheless it is still a pretty prevalent standpoint in the received wisdom of our day this is also a type of optimism that I think is right for criticism and perhaps the most famous example of this is found in the work of French philosopher voler in his novel candid he outlines two main problems with

the LI nitan view the first is that it discourages action and the second is that that it tries to avoid acknowledging the genuine horrors of the world for instance at one point in the tale candid goes to rescue a man from a shipwreck but he is stopped by his philosopher friend pangos who argues that it is really for the best that the man would drown for Vol the idea that everything happens for the best undermines human agency it implies that Providence has already set things out in accordance with its Supreme values and we are now

powerless to change anything in the case of candid it meant that he let someone die because if Providence willed it he would survive and if Providence did not will it then it is better that he dies voler himself seems to consider this his primary critique of liian optimism as he closes the book with candid remarking that instead of trusting in Divine laws we must work to secure our own faith or as he puts it cultivate our garden I find this an interesting criticism because optimism is normally considered a spur for action and indeed there is

some research to suggest it is a spur for successful action after all optimist to think things will go well and if you think that everything is destined for the best then surely you would be very happy to make Grand plans and embark on Bold decisions however volair warns that if this attitude becomes too extreme it Teeters into the idea that whatever I do things will ultimately turn out for the best if we dine too much at the table of optimism then we will become bloated and complacent and so passive agents in our own lives ironically

this is not unlike the classic picture of a DieHard pessimist both the extreme pessimist and the extreme Optimist think that there is no point to acting the first because things will just turn out horribly in any case and the second because everything is already fated for the best the idea that our actions have definite effects in the world completely Falls away it is not just a determinist position but a fatalist one secondly voler thinks that this sort of extreme optimism can become not comforting but instead cruel the idea that everything is for the best or

everything happens for a good reason is often used to console people in times of hardship but this denies that sometimes things just suck at another juncture in the novel a woman is telling the story of her unimaginable hardship she has been tortured abused kidnapped sold and everything in between but the response of candid ever The Optimist is to reassure her that this is all for the best as they live in the best of all possible Worlds the trouble with this position is pretty evident sure it can make reality not seem so bad but that is

cruel to tell someone whose reality actually has been bad and moreover it is incredibly difficult to sustain in the face of true suffering to say to someone who has lost a child or become terminally ill that everything is for the best comes across as almost heartless it essentially says sure you are suffering but don't you see you are supposed to be suffering it is similar to the character of father panu in Alber kamu the plague who initially tries to make sense of the horrible suffering his town is is going through by saying that those who

have the plague must have sinned and so deserve their fate denying the more brutal sides of reality that there is genuine suffering and pain and death and that this is by no means for the best can be just as condescending as it is comforting and it may stand in the way of us being able to help one another through these troubling times for voler The Optimist is not just refusing to look reality in the face but doing so in a way that is intensely damaging both for their ability to their own lives and their attitude

towards the sufferings of others sure it may help The liian Optimist to think that their own pain is for the best but as a way of approaching other people it essentially tells them that they have no reason to be upset and this both seems unkind and also flies in the face of our intuitions regarding the rationality of holding certain mental States sometimes we want to say that it is rational to have been upset but to be fair this sort of retrospective metaphysically tinged optimism is only one form of the worldview what about the much more

modest idea not that everything is for the best but rather that life is a fundamentally good thing and is characterized by Pleasure if you want to help me make more videos like this then please consider subscribing to my patreon the link is in the description two a life of ignorance it is almost a presupposition of our continued existence that we consider life worth living if we did not think so then why are we still here why have we not ended it all and re-embraced the strange release of non-exist the optimistic answer here is that we

believe our life is worth living because it is fundamentally good and pleasant our lives are likely to go well and we will get to the end of them having been very glad that we've lived them however there are a whole series of philosophers and thinkers that have set out to challenge this view these are the pessimists and they have a pretty simple proposition life is significantly Less Pleasant than we tend to think and some even go so far as to say that it is not worth living not just in special cases but in general this

broad concept comes in many different flavors we find it in the ancient Buddhist idea that life is characterized by suffering and unsatisfactoriness or in the Christian idea that we live in a fallen world but most modern variants utilize the insights of Arthur schopenhauer schopenhauer's philosophy is pretty complicated and esoteric but at its base level it asserts that Human Experience is Define far more by suffering than by Pleasure I'm also going to draw on some of the work of anti-natalist philosopher David benitar here as he is very helpful on this point shophow argues that the driving

force behind Human Action is the will and the will is motivated by desire right so far so obvious but schopenhauer points out that having a dissatisfied desire is a very unpleasant experience we even have a word for it frustration the notion of Desire being used here is rather broad So Hunger would be classified as a desire because it is an Impulse to eat food as would thirst the sex drive as well as emotions like fear anger or anxiety in each case they signify a need or a want that must be accomplished in order for the

pressure of the desire to be alleviated moreover these desires and wants come to us very naturally we normally do not have to try hard to desire something but simply find a want appearing spontaneously in our minds or driven up by some basa Instinct as in the case of hunger let's call all of these states of unsatisfied desire frustration though that is a broader meaning than we normally give to the term schopenhauer says that frustration is the characteristic human State we spend much of our Lives largely in a position of wanting something and being put in

an unpleasant frustrated mood we then go out and Achieve that thing and find a brief moment of relief maybe even active pleasure however no sooner has this Blissful State Arisen then we find a new desire to occupy our minds and the vicious cycle repeats again schopenhauer thinks that we are kept from noticing this by an optimistic bias essentially our mind Whispers in our ear that if we only achieve this desire it will fin fin let us rest and we will be free from frustration for an extended period however this is a Lie the will has

no intention of relenting and in its raging it will keep us frustrated clawing for more from life and never truly satisfied and this is if we are even lucky enough to achieve our desires at all for most of us a huge portion of our wishes will be permanently frustrated there will be jobs we cannot have achievements we will never accomplish people we will never get to meet or spend time with or be with we are rejected neglected and eventually left dejected for shophow The Optimist is simply lying to themselves they have no particular reason to

believe that their life will be anything other than long periods of frustration and dissatisfaction with short breaks of relief for a refreshing change of pace before plunging right back into frustration again later pessimists like Emil Kieran picked up this theme and called it the frustration of achievement by contrast schopenhauer also thinks that our happy states are significant less potent than our unhappy ones sometimes this is expressed as the claim that happiness is transparent that is he denies that pleasure has a positive characterization and says that we do not notice it when it's there at points

shophow even treats pleasure as if it was simply the absence of any major negative State however we do not need to go nearly that far to cast doubt on the intensity of our pleasure we could talk about the near Universal experience of looking back on a time we once saw as stressful and anxiety inducing but viewing it with Nostalgia referring to it as the good old days we did not see them as such when they were there and all the pleasure passed us by without notice so subtle were its effects it only became apparent when

it was contrasted with a far worse situation in essence the claim is that states of happiness that are powerful enough to shock us into noticing them like ecstasy or extreme excitement are comparatively rather rare whereas our pains stresses and anxieties quite often do distract us and force themselves into our minds not particularly pleasantly moreover David benitar also argues that since we have a positive duty to prevent pain but not one to cause pleasure pain must be in some way more bad than pleasure is good though his argument for This is complicated I'm going to do

a whole video on anti-natalism at some point you'll just have to bear with me or subscribe so that you don't miss it I feel like I should say that now that I'm a proper YouTuber the conclusion these thinkers draw is that while we may experience happiness and pleasure our lives are far more defined by their opposites and if this is true it is a real blow to the optimistic worldview optimism is normally of the opinion that things will generally go rather well and life will be rather Pleasant however if schopenhauer and others like him are

correct then this belief is simply false and not just false but Way Off the Mark even if optimists were to achieve all of their goals they still would not be happy they would be like Tolstoy lamenting their own misery in a manor house surrounded by glory for shop power optimism is a form of dire self-deception he does not blame anyone for having it in fact he sometimes hints that it is better to have the illusion than face the wicked truth but at the same time he probably would call optimists fools however there is an obvious

response The Optimist can take which is that even if optimism is a delusion if it's one that is necessary for living and living well then what's so bad about that well as sympathetic as I am to this answer there is one incredibly interesting criticism to to look at and it suggests that Reckless optimism and outright cynicism are two sides of the same coin three The Optimist and the cynic as a general rule we tend to conceive of optimism and pessimism as if they were two ends along a scale with something akin to realism lying in

the middle on this model we would think that someone can be optimistic but if evidence challenges this view they will become slightly less optimistic over time and eventually they may start to become pessimistic however in the opinion of Friedrich ner this is unlikely to be how things turn out because for him someone is far more likely to go from relentlessly optimistic straight to relentlessly pessimistic than find a sensible middle position and in looking at this we can learn some fascinating lessons that transfer to other philosophical issues as well n primarily uses this in his analysis

of nihilism but it is equally applicable to pessimism according to Nature when someone loses their faith in objective meaning or God they are not likely to immediately come to a sensible reexamined position on the topic unless they just so happen to have a natural zest for life or a particularly organized and strengthened will instead nature predicts that they will become nihilistic and cynical they will be inherently distrustful of any attempt to reintroduce a sense of purpose to their lives because they have been burned before they had an idealized but illus position on the world that

they leaned very heavily on and when this was shattered they were not only left without a replacement but with a total lack of faith in meaning at all even even meaning they could craft for themselves nature argues that most people would only be able to create their own meaning through self-overcoming once they get over this initial Pitfall and many just never will or if they do it is not because they will have truly leared to make their own values but rather because they have leapt into the arms of another Grand Illusion to keep them happy

I really enjoy this analysis of nihilism and its insights are not limited to the particular case of meaning if we zoom out in scope n is arguing that when someone buys into an idealized version of of the world they always run the risk of that worldview collapsing and with nothing to take its place they are likely to then fall into despair it is similar to how sometimes people will fall head over heels for a partner but then run at the first sign that they have some flaw the lover was not dealing with the person as

they actually existed but with an idealized crystallized version of them when that image was shattered they fell out of love just as easily as they fell into it they do not simply revise their image of that person but rather the whole edifice comes Crashing Down and if we accept that some forms of optimism are illusory that is they see the world as better than it actually exists then Nature's criticism becomes particularly pertinent for examining the optimistic position obviously this will hold to very different extents for different levels of optimist at the extreme end imagine someone

who thinks that the world is perfect then it may only take a small crack in their worldview to plunge them into misery this happens at various points in volz's candid as our protagonist struggles to maintain his optimism in the face of the awful things that happen both to him and to the people he loves likewise if we took someone who thought that life was going to be much easier and happier than it actually is then they might be woefully unprepared for just how difficult things can get thus when life becomes hard even temporarily then nature

predicts they are more likely to collapse into despair as not only are they going through a difficulty but their entire worldview is falling apart in such a situation they might very quickly go from life is incredibly easy to life is unbearably difficult and trade in an optimistic illusion for a hopeless position when their idealized view of the world is shattered NE thinks they might lose faith in there being any significant goodness or pleasantness at all however it does seem that this critique only really applies to the more extreme of the optimistic standpoints if we say

a moderate Optimist only slightly overestimates how pleasant life and the world are going to be then it will be much harder to shatter that illusion since it is much closer to the truth it is a bit like how various Christian thinkers have argued it is much easier to break someone's faith if they have a caricatured idea of what God is like an old man who lives in the clouds than someone with a thoroughgoing appreciation of the theological nuances around his nature personally I am an atheist but I think this is a pretty neat observation since

it shows that the further our ideas depart from a plausible reality the more fragile they become I particularly like ne's criticism for two reasons the first is that it's not suggesting optimism is a poor worldview in and of itself but rather that it is potentially quite delicate and the thing that might replace it is extraordinarily awful in ne's view a nihilistic or pessimistic standpoint is to be avoided at all costs because he sees them as fundamentally life-denying for him the reason that optimism can lead to pessimism is simple because optimism refuses to engage with the

world as it actually exists we never learn to love and appreciate life as it is but rather as we wish it would be thus we never developed his coveted trait of amorti or loving Our Fate when the scales fall from our eyes we become disillusioned with the world as it actually is and start to resent it with our pessimism but this too is not engaging with and embracing reality but rather rejecting it as unacceptable and funnily enough I think that n himself is very well placed here to give us a way of moving past this

sort of unreal or naive optimism and towards one that can keep as many of the upsides of the Fantastical optimistic worldview as possible while avoiding its rather spacious pitfalls four post optimistic optimism as I said at the start of the video I am an optimist but I also recognize the merits in some of these philosophical criticisms of optimism so on the face of it I am in a bit of a pickle on the one hand I do want to hold on to my optimism and I may even be dispositionally stuck with it but I also

do not want to be in an unjustifiable position so what are we to do luckily we can draw on some of the very same thinkers who have been criticizing optimism to rehabilitate it into a slightly more robust philosophy on the face of it basically all of the critiques thus far have stemmed from a single Source the fact that optimism is in some sense overestimating reality for voler this was because he thought we clearly do not in fact live in the best of all possible worlds for shophow it was because we are mistaken about the quality

of our lives and so are just fooling ourselves for nature it was because we are prevented from embracing the world as it actually is and as a result this sets us up for later pessimism and nihilism so presumably our goal is to find a version of optimism that is not overestimating what is but rather accepting what is and nonetheless retaining some of the optimistic Spirit if that makes sense so let's dial back optimism into the idea that life is going to be worth embracing in spite of its unpleasant aspects in this case we can take

a leaf from n and kamuz book and ask how we can make the sufferings of the world worth living through and embracing I will warn you this is going to be more of a beginning of a thought than a completed idea but please do run with it and develop it however you wish as with quite a lot of these videos I largely intend this to be an aid in your own thinking in ne's thus spake zarathustra he defines one characteristic of the Uber mench as the ability to not deny anything about life yet at the

same time rejoice in its most difficult aspects in effect he proposes a radically different approach to the the kind of optimism we have been looking at this optimism is not a proposition about the world but rather one about the self this is also found in his concept of amorti that we mentioned earlier n suggests that we must look at life head on warts and all but learn to love it nonetheless there are various methods he toys with that might achieve this towards the beginning of his Corpus he proposes that we might turn our lives into

works of art and lend meaning to the pain of our existence by immersing it in a sort of narrative later on He suggests that by strengthening and organizing our wills and mastering and harnessing our own Dee rooted instincts we will become much more able to stare down suffering and hardship without losing our lust for life this is not a far cry from an optimistic Outlook but rather than saying the world is better than it is the idea is instead the world is a mixture of good and bad properties and yet I've leared to rejoice in

it all regardless we see a similar idea in Camu absurdism while Camu philosophy is normally applied to problems of meaning and the idea that we should learn to affirm and enjoy life in spite of its inherent emptiness the same approach could also be used to craft an optimistic outlook on suffering this is evident in some of his later works such as the plague in that story an epidemic hits the town of Iran and causes widespread chaos death and suffering kamu examines many different approaches to this like the kind of optimism where the destruction is Justified

and the one that overestimates the future yet ultimately he dismisses both both of them for very similar reasons we have given here towards the end of the novel he gives us the closest thing to a thesis statement we can neither deny suffering nor try to justify it for it is often truly senseless yet at the same time he does not conclude that life is no longer worth living instead he asks us again to imagine Copus happy but rather than this simply referring to the pointlessness of his task it also addresses how agonizingly painful it would

be to roll a boulder up a hill constantly for eternity this certainly sounds something like optimism manifesting as a stubborn wish to reaffirm life in the face of difficulty to draw from another of C's works the rebel he says that sometimes a very human reaction to the metaphysical injustices of the world is to live in order to rebel against it in either case kamu presents the Pains of Life as a challenge to the human will perhaps inspired by Nature he wants us to embrace the situation nonetheless despite all of its suffering we also see this

theme all through the myth of Copus from the injunction to Value the quantity of life regardless of its quality to the famous phrase imagine Copus happy like nature he is an optimist not in the sense of viewing the world as better than it is but rather in his faith that we can learn to love reality not in spite of its difficulties but partly because of them it's a very tricky concept to get your head around and I'm not quite sure how much I would buy into it say I was diagnosed with a terminal illness tomorrow

could I really rejoice in that either way the difference in structure from our original Optimist definition is clear this is almost a second order optimism it does not make predictions that the world will be very good or declare that everything is metaphysically for the best but it is rather a personal commitment to find ways to make our own suffering meaningful and bearable to make our struggles a project as satra might say Obviously the particular way in which we might do this is certainly individual and neither kamu nor n give a clear step-by-step guide but I

do think this is a potential way forward for The Optimist philosophy now we are no longer being deluded about the world but rather seeing it clearly with an active view to try to love some of its worst characteristics kamu and N are both well aware that this is not an easy task but their argument is more pragmatic than anything else we are stuck in this world and there is no one coming to rescue us so we have a few options we can try to lie to ourselves about the nature of reality we can give into

despair when this illusion fails or we can choose to affirm life for its own sake in a world without given values this seems like a perfectly sensible maneuver and it is the one that n and kamu recommend but to end on a Counterpoint isn't this just cope if the world is not primarily good and life is not primarily Pleasant wouldn't it just be irrational to try and love it are kamu and N just replacing one kind of Illusion one about the world with another kind about somehow embracing it fully despite all its difficulties for them

it does not matter since there are no objective values we are radically free to choose what we value and the only limit is what we can practically undertake I will leave it up to you to decide just how plausible this idea is on the other hand if they are right then it provides The Optimist with a glimmer of hope because even if it turns out that we are initially delusional about the world there may still be a way we can justify a positive outlook one that takes full stock of reality and still decides to affirm

life but if you want to learn more about cmu's particular approach to philosophy then check out one of my oldest videos to look at my analysis of the myth of Copus arguably his most influential philosophical work and stick around for more on thinking to improve your life