Five WHYS: Optimism

Following on with the importance of Hope - for a final time.

Optimism Feeds Hope

Hope is Manawa Ora - the Breath of Life.

An article by Kevin Kelly - the founder of Wired Magazine and author of several books, among them The Inevitable. His TED talks have been viewed over 7 million times.

There are two important sets of reasons why you should be optimistic right now. One is the general case for optimism at any time. The second reason is a handful of forces at work in the world that make specific cases for optimism at this particular time, in 2021.

I start with a handful of reasons why we should adopt the stance of optimism whenever we can:

Pre-visualise success

It is extremely difficult to create a desirable future without first envisioning it. To imagine is really the first step in creating anything. Therefore an essential chore for making a future we want to live in, is to imagine what it is like and how we get there. That plausible path is a form of optimism. Believing it is possible makes it more likely to happen. When hurdles and setbacks arise -- and they will -- the belief in its possibility serves as motivation. 

History is filled with accounts of people who held an optimistic belief others thought unlikely, or even impossible. This optimistic pre-visualisation is a necessary component of change. Since we can not be certain of the future, optimism is only a belief -- a stance that could be incorrect. On the surface, an optimistic belief might seem no more valid than the stance of pessimism. 💡But the deep history of new ideas makes it very clear that the optimistic stance of believing something is possible is a requirement to make anything new real, and is thus more powerful than pessimism. 

In the long run, optimists shape the future.

Civilization requires optimism

Civilization depends on an implicit degree of general optimism. It is a collaborative exercise. Civilization amplifies and accumulates cooperation between strangers. If you expect that you can trust a stranger, that is optimism. If you expect to be cheated or hurt, that is pessimism. 

Societies that bring the most good to the most people, require that people be trusted more than they are distrusted; that they expect more good than harm; they require that people in general have more hope than fear. 

Societies that have more pessimism than optimism tend not to prosper. The default stance in any thriving civilization is optimistic: it operates on the assumption that in general, most people, most of the time, will cooperate. They can be trusted to be honest and this cooperation will produce positive results that add up to more than the sum. Civilization requires trust; trust requires optimism; civilization requires optimism.

Long termism

Humanity progresses by accruing advantages that operate over the long term. The best civilizations create things that take generations to build and whose benefits reward not the builders but those who come after them. Present benefits in fact may be sacrificed for greater benefits to future generations. That is called being a good ancestor.

To be a good ancestor one must assume that good things can be forwarded. Thus, in order to think long term, you can’t be pessimistic. In a real sense, you must trust the future -- and that is optimism. 

An optimistic longview enables us to forgo cheap gains in the short run that can pay out greater over the long haul. It can enable us to pay a price now to be ready for the inevitable disasters and harm that will surely come over time (pandemics, storms, asteroid hits). It means stockpiling during surplus for the famines that will happen. Optimism enables us to reach good and great things beyond the capability of a single generation.

Asymmetric possibilities

All the evidence so far indicates that there are no limits for knowledge or improvement. We’ve encountered nothing we can’t potentially improve. Every question answered by science generates at least two new questions, two new territories of unknown things that we now know we don’t know. In this way our ignorance expands faster than our knowledge, which is healthy. Because behind this expansion there is a great asymmetry: what is knowable but still unknown will always be larger than what we already know, meaning there are more possibilities waiting to be discovered than have already been discovered. 

This asymmetry in knowledge is reason to be optimistic, because it means there are no limits to our improvement. We can always imagine a better way -- and we are also always improving what/who the “we” is. Optimism recognizes that our potential for improvement is infinite in all directions.

Historical progress   

A fair and rational evaluation of the scientific evidence demonstrates that progress is real over historical times. Progress is particularly evident in the last several centuries ever since science has been put into practice. The evidence is unambiguous that lifespans, security, well-being and opportunities for the average person have increased. So, on average, the optimistic view has been correct over longer time frames. There is no guarantee that this long run of progress will continue forward. It could happen that after 10 centuries it suddenly stops. While that sudden stop is possible, it is statistically more probable that it will continue, at least for several more decades. 

This long and on-going trend operates on a scale way beyond our own lifetimes. It is a phenomenon far bigger than ourselves. Being optimistic puts you in alignment with the long arc of history, and a part of something much bigger than yourself.

Deeper currents

However, progress is not the prevailing view in 2021. The ills of society are very visible and the future is assumed to be bleak. There are three reasons why people tend to believe things are getting worse rather than better.

  1) Progress is mostly about what does not happen. Progress means a 92-year-old who did not die today, a boy who was not robbed on his way to school, a 12-year girl who is not married to a 30-year old man, etc. What did not happen does not make the news. The best parts of civilization don’t get headlined.

  2) Bad things happen fast, while good things take longer. So when we ask what has happened in the last news cycle (the last five minutes) only fast moving things show up, which are mostly bad news. Good takes longer than a news cycle. So most news, in any media, even responsible ones, is bad news. If newspapers and websites were only updated every 50 years, they might report: literacy is up, longevity increased, violence is down.

  3) The solutions to most problems will create new problems. But if we can create 1% more solutions than problems, that 1% compounded over decades equals civilization. However 1% of almost anything is invisible in the now, lost in the noise. Such a small differential is really only visible in accumulation and seen in retrospect.

Optimism is therefore inherently hard to see in real life. It is a deeper current that requires counting things carefully, not just listening to tantalizing anecdotes. Optimism is also assumed to be a future-pointed thing. But optimism also springs out of a deep look at the past. Optimism looks past the superficial to reckon with the essence of deeper change.

Healthy resilience

Optimism yields happier and more resilient people. Optimism equips people a greater ability to deal with hardship, and less stress in their lives. Optimism can be learned, especially by children. The psychological temperament of an optimist is not a sunny disposition or a pollyanna delusion that everything is ideal. Rather, optimists believe that bad things are produced by temporary causes that can be overcome, while pessimists believe bad things always happen, and if anything good happens it’s temporary. 

It’s a swap of the default, from the universe is conspiring against you, to the universe is conspiring for you. Studies by psychologists show that those who adopt the optimistic assumption are more resilient, better able to adapt and thrive, while the pessimistic struggle more. 

Everyone is born with a different bias, but a child’s assumption can be shifted toward a more optimistic and resilient view by parenting, training, and education. In this regard optimism is a skill that anyone can get better at. 

Likewise, at the society level, Optimism is a skill that bestows resilience and adaptability.

Future ingenuity

Optimism is not utopian. It’s protopian -- a slow march toward incremental betterment. Over time we continue to get better not only in living standards, but in being able to solve problems. Each year we know a little more, including how to fix things. But the cost of that overall betterment is a barrage of bewildering new problems brought on by progress. We can easily imagine some of the horrific downsides in future scenarios, but the biggest and most difficult problems in the future are actually beyond our capacity to predict. We can’t even imagine the worst. 

But as bad as the world’s future problems will be, the reason we can and should be optimistic is that our estimates of future woes don’t take into account our ability to solve them. 

The ultimate reason we should (and can) be optimistic is not because we must ignore the reality of huge, planetary-scale illnesses and deep systemic problems. We should be optimistic not because our problems are smaller than we thought, but because our capacity to solve them is larger than we thought.