Pessimism

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
An optimist and a pessimist, Vladimir Makovsky, 1893

Pessimism is a mental attitude in which an undesirable outcome is anticipated from a given situation. Pessimists tend to focus on the negatives of life in general. A common question asked to test for pessimism is "Is the glass half empty or half full?"; in this situation, a pessimist is said to see the glass as half empty, or in extreme cases completely empty, while an optimist is said to see the glass as half full. Throughout history, the pessimistic disposition has had effects on all major areas of thinking.[1]

Etymology

The term pessimism derives from the Latin word pessimus, meaning 'the worst'. It was first used by

Leibniz who maintained that this was the 'best (optimum) of all possible worlds'. In their attacks on Voltaire, the Jesuits of the Revue de Trévoux accused him of pessimisme.[2]
: 9 

As a psychological disposition

In the

black bile in the body. The study of pessimism has parallels with the study of depression. Psychologists trace pessimistic attitudes to emotional pain or even biology. Aaron Beck argues that depression is due to unrealistic negative views about the world. Beck starts treatment by engaging in conversation with clients about their unhelpful thoughts. Pessimists, however, are often able to provide arguments that suggest that their understanding of reality is justified; as in Depressive realism or (pessimistic realism).[1] Deflection is a common method used by those who are depressed. They let people assume they are revealing everything which proves to be an effective way of hiding.[3] The pessimism item on the Beck Depression Inventory has been judged useful in predicting suicides.[4] The Beck Hopelessness Scale has also been described as a measurement of pessimism.[5]

Wender and Klein point out that pessimism can be useful in some circumstances: "If one is subject to a series of defeats, it pays to adopt a conservative game plan of sitting back and waiting and letting others take the risks. Such waiting would be fostered by a pessimistic outlook. Similarly if one is raking in the chips of life, it pays to adopt an expansive risk-taking approach, and thus maximize access to scarce resources."[6]

Criticism

Pragmatic criticism

Through history, some have concluded that a pessimistic attitude, although justified, must be avoided to endure. Optimistic attitudes are favored and of emotional consideration.

psychosomatic illness. Criticisms of this sort however assume that pessimism leads inevitably to a mood of darkness and utter depression. Many philosophers would disagree, claiming that the term "pessimism" is being abused. The link between pessimism and nihilism is present, but the former does not necessarily lead to the latter, as philosophers such as Albert Camus believed. Happiness is not inextricably linked to optimism
, nor is pessimism inextricably linked to unhappiness. One could easily imagine an unhappy optimist, and a happy pessimist. Accusations of pessimism may be used to silence legitimate criticism.

The economist

Anirvan Banerji told The New York Times: "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day."[17] Economist Nariman Behravesh said: "Nouriel Roubini has been singing the doom-and-gloom story for 10 years. Eventually something was going to be right."[18]

sanguine) miss.[citation needed
]

Other forms of pessimism

Philosophical pessimism

Main article: Philosophical pessimism

Philosophical pessimism is not a state of mind or a psychological disposition, but rather it is a worldview or philosophical position that assigns a negative value to life or existence. Philosophical pessimists commonly argue that the world contains an empirical prevalence of pains over pleasures, that existence is ontologically or metaphysically adverse to living beings, and that life is fundamentally meaningless or without purpose.[19]

Epistemological

There are several theories of epistemology which could arguably be said to be pessimistic in the sense that they consider it difficult or even impossible to obtain knowledge about the world. These ideas are generally related to nihilism, philosophical skepticism, and relativism.[citation needed]

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819) analyzed rationalism, and in particular Immanuel Kant's "critical" philosophy to carry out a reductio ad absurdum[citation needed] according to which all rationalism reduces to nihilism, and thus it should be avoided and replaced with a return to some type of faith and revelation.[citation needed]

language-games that served our purposes in a particular time. Therefore, these forms of anti-foundationalism, while not being pessimistic per se, reject any definitions that claim to have discovered absolute 'truths' or foundational facts about the world as valid.[citation needed
]

Political and cultural

Main article: Cultural pessimism

Philosophical pessimism stands opposed to the optimism or even

social progress can actually improve the human condition. As Cioran states, "every step forward is followed by a step back: this is the unfruitful oscillation of history".[21] Cioran also attacks political optimism because it creates an "idolatry of tomorrow" which can be used to authorize anything in its name. This does not mean however, that the pessimist cannot be politically involved, as Camus argued in The Rebel (1951). Pessimism about the human condition was also expressed by Hobbes (1588–1679).[22][23]

There is another strain of thought generally associated with a pessimistic worldview, this is the pessimism of

social decline. Anthony Trollope summarised the attitude with gentle mockery in 1880: "Everything is going wrong. [...] Farmers are generally on the verge of ruin. Trade is always bad. The Church is in danger. The House of Lords isn't worth a dozen years' purchase. The throne totters."[24]

Weimar Germany. Similarly, traditionalist Julius Evola (1898–1974) thought that the world was in the Kali Yuga
, a Dark Age of moral decline.

Intellectuals such as

Anti-consumerists identify rising trends of conspicuous consumption and self-interested, image-conscious behavior in culture. Post-modernists like Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) have even argued that culture (and therefore our lives) now has no basis in reality whatsoever.[1]

anti-communist. Social conservatives often see the West as a decadent and nihilistic civilization which has abandoned its roots in Christianity and/or Greek philosophy, leaving it doomed to fall into moral and political decay. Robert Bork's Slouching Toward Gomorrah and Allan Bloom
's The Closing of the American Mind are famous expressions of this point of view.

Many economic conservatives and

the state and the role of government in society is inevitable, and that they are at best fighting a holding action against it.[citation needed][25]
They hold that the natural tendency of people is to be ruled and that freedom is an exceptional state of affairs which is now being abandoned in favor of social and economic security provided by the
emigrate.[27]

During the

survivalist thrill some people derive from predicting, reading, and fantasizing about the collapse of civil society through the destruction of the world's economic system.[28][29][30][31]

Puolanka, a municipality located in the Kainuu region in the northern Finland, has been called the "most pessimistic municipality in Finland",[32] and in 2019, the municipality gained worldwide publicity when the BBC published a video about Puolanka, describing it as the "most pessimistic town in the world".[33] Pessimism has a long tradition in the Kainuu region, mostly because Kainuu was a poor region that had often suffered from famines in the late 19th century and early 20th century, which is why the region is also called a "hunger land".[34]

Technological and environmental

Technological pessimism is the belief that advances in science and technology do not lead to an improvement in the human condition. Technological pessimism can be said to have originated during the

Romantic movement was also pessimistic towards the rise of technology and longed for simpler and more natural times. Poets like William Wordsworth and William Blake believed that industrialization was polluting the purity of nature.[35]

Some social critics and environmentalists believe that

ecological collapse.[36] James Lovelock believes that the ecology of the Earth has already been irretrievably damaged, and even an unrealistic shift in politics would not be enough to save it. According to Lovelock, the Earth's climate regulation system is being overwhelmed by pollution and the Earth will soon jump from its current state into a dramatically hotter climate.[37]
Lovelock blames this state of affairs on what he calls "polyanthroponemia", which is when: "humans overpopulate until they do more harm than good." Lovelock states:

The presence of 7 billion people aiming for first-world comforts…is clearly incompatible with the homeostasis of climate but also with chemistry, biological diversity and the economy of the system.[37]

Some

Neo-luddites can be said to hold to this type of pessimism about the effects of modern "progress". A more radical form of environmental pessimism is anarcho-primitivism which faults the agricultural revolution with giving rise to social stratification, coercion, and alienation. Some anarcho-primitivists promote deindustrialization, abandonment of modern technology and rewilding
.

An infamous anarcho-primitivist is

Unabomber manifesto, he called attention to the erosion of human freedom by the rise of the modern "industrial-technological system".[38]
The manifesto begins thus:

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced" countries.

One of the most radical pessimist organizations is the

voluntary human extinction movement, which argues for the extinction of the human race through antinatalism
.

Pope Francis' controversial 2015 encyclical on ecological issues is rife with pessimistic assessments of the role of technology in the modern world.

Entropy pessimism

See also: Heat death of the universe, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen § The relevance of thermodynamics to economics, and Ecological economics § Methodology
Natural resources flow through the economy and end up as waste and pollution.

"Entropy pessimism" represents a special case of technological and environmental pessimism, based on thermodynamic principles.[39]: 116  According to the first law of thermodynamics, matter and energy is neither created nor destroyed in the economy. According to the second law of thermodynamics—also known as the entropy law—what happens in the economy is that all matter and energy is transformed from states available for human purposes (valuable natural resources) to states unavailable for human purposes (valueless waste and pollution). In effect, all of man's technologies and activities are only speeding up the general march against a future planetary "heat death" of degraded energy, exhausted natural resources and a deteriorated environment—a state of maximum entropy locally on earth; "locally" on earth, that is, when compared to the heat death of the universe, taken as a whole.

The term "entropy pessimism" was coined to describe the work of

Romanian American economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, a progenitor in economics and the paradigm founder of ecological economics.[39]: 116  Georgescu-Roegen made extensive use of the entropy concept in his magnum opus on The Entropy Law and the Economic Process.[40] Since the 1990s, leading ecological economist and steady-state theorist Herman Daly—a student of Georgescu-Roegen—has been the economic profession's most influential proponent of entropy pessimism.[41][42]
: 545 

Among other matters, the entropy pessimism position is concerned with the existential impossibility of allocating Earth's finite stock of mineral resources evenly among an unknown number of present and future generations. This number of generations is likely to remain unknown to us, as there is no way—or only little way—of knowing in advance if or when mankind will ultimately face extinction. In effect, any conceivable intertemporal allocation of the stock will inevitably end up with universal economic decline at some future point.[43]: 369–371  [44]: 253–256  [45]: 165  [46]: 168–171  [47]: 150–153  [48]: 106–109  [42]: 546–549  [49]: 142–145 

Entropy pessimism is a widespread view in ecological economics and in the degrowth movement.

Legal

Bibas writes that some

criminal defense attorneys prefer to err on the side of pessimism: "Optimistic forecasts risk being proven disastrously wrong at trial, an embarrassing result that makes clients angry. On the other hand, if clients plead based on their lawyers' overly pessimistic advice, the cases do not go to trial and the clients are none the wiser."[50]

See also

Notes

  1. ^
    ISBN 978-0-7486-0936-9
    .
  2. ^
    ISBN 978-0-6911-4112-1
    .
  3. ISBN 978-0-312-67684-1
    .
  4. PMID 3985195
  5. PMID 4436473
  6. ^ Wender, PH; Klein, DF (1982), Mind, Mood and Medicine, New American Library
  7. ^ Michau, Michael R. ""Doing, Suffering, and Creating": William James and Depression" (PDF). web.ics.purdue.edu. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2009-02-26. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  8. ^ Justin Fox (May 26, 2010). "What Exactly is Nouriel Roubini Good For?", Harvard Business Review.
  9. Little, Brown
    .
  10. ^ Thomas I. Palley (2013). From Financial Crisis to Stagnation; The Destruction of Shared Prosperity and the Role of Economics.
  11. North Bay Business Journal
    .
  12. ^ Jayson MacLean (May 6, 2020). "Nouriel Roubini warns of Great Depression just like he did last year (and the year before that)," Cantech Letter.
  13. ^ "Market gurus:Overrated Dr Roubini flops—again," Moneylife, March 10, 2011.
  14. AZ Central
    , May 8, 2014.
  15. ^ Joe Keohane (January 9, 2011). "That guy who called the big one? Don’t listen to him." The Boston Globe.
  16. ^ Tony Robbins, Peter Mallouk (2017). Unshakeable; Your Financial Freedom Playbook
  17. ^ Emma Brockes (January 23, 2009). "He told us so," The Guardian.
  18. ^ Helaine Olen (March 30, 2009). "The Prime of Mr. Nouriel Roubini", Entrepreneur.
  19. ^ For discussions around the views and arguments of philosophical pessimism see:
  20. ^ Cioran, Emil. A short history of decay, pg 146
  21. ^ Cioran, Emil. A short history of decay, pg 178
  22. ISBN 978-94-009-3485-6
    . Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  23. ISBN 978-0-226-49697-9
    . Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  24. ^ Trollope, Anthony (1 January 2003) [1880]. "62: The Brake Country". The Duke's Children. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 31 July 2023.
  25. ^ Compare: Holmes, Jack E.; Engelhardt, Michael J.; Elder, Robert E. (1991). American Government: Essentials & Perspectives. New York: McGraw-Hill. p. 16.
    ISBN 9780070297678
    . Retrieved 31 July 2023. [Those] more sympathetic to libertarian views on the role of government have been in the position of fighting a holding action against the growth of government [...].
  26. S2CID 156005171
  27. S2CID 5989051
  28. ^ Pessimism Porn: A soft spot for hard times, Hugo Lindgren, New York, February 9, 2009; accessed July 8, 2012
  29. ^ Pessimism Porn? Economic Forecasts Get Lurid, Dan Harris, ABC News, April 9, 2009; accessed July 8, 2012
  30. ISBN 0739166220
  31. ^ Pessimism Porn: Titillatingly bleak media reports, Ben Schott, New York Times, February 23, 2009; accessed July 8, 2012
  32. ^ "Pessimistinen Puolanka". Yle (in Finnish). 3 January 2020. Retrieved 25 November 2023.
  33. ^ "The world's most pessimistic town". BBC. 1 November 2019. Retrieved 25 November 2023.
  34. ISBN 952-91-0373-5
  35. ^ "Romanticism". Wsu.edu. Archived from the original on 2008-07-18. Retrieved 2010-06-02.
  36. ^ The New York Review of Books Gray, John. "The Global Delusion, John Gray". {{cite magazine}}: Cite magazine requires |magazine= (help)
  37. ^ a b The New York Review of Books Flannery, Tim. "A Great Jump to Disaster?, Tim Flannery". {{cite magazine}}: Cite magazine requires |magazine= (help)
  38. ^ The Washington Post: Unabomber Special Report: INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND ITS FUTURE
  39. ^ a b
    S2CID 154728333
    .
  40. ^ Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas (1971). The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Full book accessible at Scribd). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
    ISBN 978-0674257801
    .
  41. ^
    S2CID 13441670
    . Retrieved 23 November 2016.
  42. ^ a b Kerschner, Christian (2010). "Economic de-growth vs. steady-state economy" (PDF).
    doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2009.10.019
    .
  43. ^ Daly, Herman E., ed. (1980). Economics, Ecology, Ethics. Essays Towards a Steady-State Economy (PDF contains only the introductory chapter of the book) (2nd ed.). San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company.
    ISBN 978-0716711780
    .
  44. ^
    ISBN 978-0670297177. Archived from the original
    (PDF contains only the title and contents pages of the book) on 2016-10-18.
  45. ^
    ISBN 978-0803916487
    .
  46. ^
    ISBN 978-0631171461
    .
  47. ^ Gowdy, John M.; Mesner, Susan (1998). "The Evolution of Georgescu-Roegen's Bioeconomics" (PDF). Review of Social Economy. 56 (2): 136–156.
    doi:10.1080/00346769800000016
    .
  48. ^ Schmitz, John E.J. (2007). The Second Law of Life: Energy, Technology, and the Future of Earth As We Know It (Author's science blog, based on his textbook). Norwich: William Andrew Publishing.
    ISBN 978-0815515371
    .
  49. ^ Perez-Carmona, Alexander (2013). "Growth: A Discussion of the Margins of Economic and Ecological Thought". In Meuleman, Louis (ed.). Transgovernance. Advancing Sustainability Governance (Article accessible at SlideShare). Heidelberg: Springer. pp. 83–161.
    ISBN 9783642280085
    .
  50. ^ Bibas, Stephanos (Jun 2004), Plea Bargaining outside the Shadow of Trial, vol. 117, Harvard Law Review, pp. 2463–2547.

Further reading

External links

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