Optimism In An Age Of Superstition And Decline

Democracy, living standards, and relative global peace are all imperiled. And if you attempt to get a handle on developments along any of these fronts, the most readily available sources of information are literally designed to confound you, if not convince you of lies.

If you were to ask a random stranger to whip out their phone and call up the latest news on almost any matter of significance, what are the odds that they’d come back with something true or close to true?

Is Benjamin Netanyahu dead or alive? A pretty important question at the moment! Yet millions and millions of people believe—and want you to believe—that he’s dead when he’s not.

What’s the most we can say we know for certain about the world based on the intentionally confusing, mass and arbitrary disclosure of the Epstein files? Try going in cold and assembling an accurate mosaic based on torrents of screenshots, decontextualized files, forgeries, hyperventilating allegations, and (occasionally) professional news stories.

Is a piece of information that seems plausible and credible real? Or did some artificial intelligence, prompted by some manipulative charlatan, spit it out to advance some other interest? And this is the sector that’s both propping up the U.S. economy and angling to replace human workers with robots?

The fetal position becomes more tempting by the day.

Thus, regarding the title of this essay, I don’t mean optimism in the sense of odds-making or a sunny outlook. How could I? For all of the above reasons and others, I’m referring to a different kind of optimism. We can loosely define it as anything north of fatalism. It’s the idea that there are enough well-meaning people in the world and in our society that we can still a) take matters into our own hands, in order to b) bring about a stabler, healthier future, such that c) putting in effort, even if just at the margins, remains worth it.

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A mindset like that can coexist with all but the grimmest of forecasts. (In the long-run, we’re all dead, but maybe in the short run, too!)

North of fatalism, wars end; people who lose freedom fight to get it back; societies that endure immense hardship regain prosperity. What did Berlin look like at the end of the war? What did West Berlin look like a decade later?

The question is, how can we maintain optimism, as we’re being swept along by powerful currents? Turnabouts are highly contingent, and can falter without the kind of optimism I have in mind. But where can that optimism, the belief in resilience, be found when most so much of our destiny is out of our hands? What can I or any of us do to stop the war in Iran? Not much. March in the streets? Yell at our members of Congress? How can we, as individuals, revitalize a faltering economy when the people with the most control over it seem intent on running it into the ground, then eating our seed corn?

We can’t, at least not right now. And for that reason, I think the answer to the question—how can we maintain optimism?—lies, for the time being, in the smaller picture.

There will be a three years from now. Between now and three years from now, there’s a set of things we can do, then another set of things we can do afterward. In the near-term, nothing we do is going to make us feel like we’re in command, because we’re decidedly not. But we aren’t powerless either. We are not entirely captive to chaos and willful tyrants.

As individuals, we can opt out of many sources of despair. We can choose not to give our money to the men underwriting our time of monsters. This kind of boycott movement won’t bring them to ruin in all likelihood. But it could help slow the A.I. juggernaut—right-size a rogue industry and begin to place it under democratic control.

It would also help us escape the obfuscatory fog of online life that instills so much of our pessimism.

For instance: If you’re lucky enough, you can delete or suspend your social media accounts, and resume getting your information from independent media first and foremost. This isn’t a pitch for subscriptions. Subscribe to the New York Times, and your local paper if you still have one! But do it, and recognize that you’re likelier to find what’s true about the world in outlets like those than from any algorithm.

Even small actions can open huge founts of optimism, because they help remind us: All the forces of deception and mythmaking in the world can’t break the demand for truth.

What the people we’re up against have on us is something like chemical addiction. The dopamine rush of alerts and engagement and new content. It is within us to develop better habits of mind. We can either kick our addictions or train ourselves to better sort fact from fantasy, diligent communicators from bullshit artists. We can take it in increments. We can get offline. Or we can stay online, but remind ourselves that social-media platforms are terrifying fun houses, not reliable transoms of current affairs.

This mass demand for truth is more than just about gaining a more accurate sense of current affairs. Caring about the truth is anxiety inducing, but it’s also a superpower, and a real source of hope.

Donald Trump and his oligarch loyalists and his enablers in the Republican Party put enormous effort into making truth difficult to divine, and knowledge hard to produce. That is the biggest source of their control. They abhor journalism and scientific research and are trying to crush both.

But they’re up against the fact that we’ve already had a Renaissance and an Enlightenment; we’ve established a scientific method that’s been vindicated by industrial and technological revolutions; we have centuries worth of proof that we can understand and harness the physical world for the betterment of mankind. They can’t erase our mental and physical hard drives overnight. The storehouse of factual and scientific knowledge loose in the world is too big to force us into medievalism without a fight.

To be more concrete about it: What Trump has done to scientific research in the United States is a tragedy and a crime, but he isn’t king of the world and thus can’t snuff out innovation or make us forget what we’ve already learned and created. He can only change where progress happens. He can’t practically prevent knowle