Here at the Rational Pessimist, it reads as a bit of a post-mortem. He hasn't finished the series yet, and I imagine that it will end with a "reason for hope" type of a thing, but I imagine it will ring hollow, in the same way that David Wallace Wells' optimism in The Uninhabitable Earth did. In the year or so since I read that book, his attempt at optimism almost seems silly, although I understand it as a necessary part of what was a fabulous, if disturbing, read.
This brings me to where we are, as a society as I type this. That fuckstick in the White House is taking his acquittal victory lap, and it's difficult to come to any conclusion other than, "What the fuck is actually happening here?" Maybe that's a question not a conclusion. But whatever. It gets me to pondering the nature of fatalism, and whether or not it's ever justified. Despair is so fucking unhealthy. Pessimistic people die early. At this rate, my wife will outlive me 50 years. So where do we eek out some optimism when you feel like the slice of moldy cheese in a turd sandwich?
I think it comes with having a plan. A plan for the kids. But that plan cannot be based upon some apocalyptic vision of the future. Read this piece in the Bulwark. It talks about an experiment using colored dots that shows just how shitty our wiring is...
Researchers showed people a series of colored dots in shades ranging from blue to purple and asked them to sort them. When they showed people the same frequency of blue dots at the beginning and the end of the trial, they would identify them at a consistent rate. But when they decreased the number of blue dots, people began to interpret purple dots as blue. They expanded their idea of what “blue” is in order to keep seeing blue dots.Other than having and outstanding title, the piece is a great reminder, along with the works of Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker, and others, that our (and especially my) tendency toward seeing some kind of disaster around the corner is usually, probably unwarranted. The key is, as always, in balance. Finding that sweet spot between blind optimism and unjustified pessimism.
That brings us back to the question. What the fuck is actually happening here? Are the problems, as I see them, with our society and with humankind as a whole, nearly as bad as I tend to think that they are, or am I seeing phantom blue dots? Is the state of American society divided beyond repair? Is climate change the existential threat that it appears to be? Is every new Star Wars film really that shitty, or am I just a dick whose expectations are way too high? Remember, people see the purple dots as blue even when they are warned about it.
So that brings me back to having a plan. In November of this year, there will be an election that could shape the future of the American experiment. The Trump campaign is already launching an information warfare campaign sure to be the envy of authoritarian dictators everywhere. Regardless, our country is pretty evenly divided between the two extremes. I think it can be wagered that the outcome will be close. I think Trump is going to win. This is because pessimism is kinda my shtick. But also because there is too much division amongst the forces that are supposed to be united under one banner: defeat Trump.
Analyzing this, and anything else that I view as an existential and too-likely-for-my-liking threat, will take a rigorous adherence to the idea that the dots are probably purple.
