One of my intentions with this blog is to share a realistically optimist point of view on our world and society.
Many of us are drawn into a very pessimistic feeling about where we are heading as humanity: with new climate change challenges, continued wars and poverty, the rise of extremism, loss of social cohesion…
We feel like our civilization is on a downtrend, heading to chaos and that it was all better before... But this can not be further from true !
When we look at the data, we have never been better than we are today. We live longer, healthier, safer, wealthier…and even happier it seems! And according to researches, this is not only true in the Western world, it's a GLOBAL TREND.
(And yes I hear all those who argue that the ways we measure this trend are questionable but please hold that judgment, just for now, ^^ thanks )
One would think that the 1st to blame for this pessimism is our news and media industry, right?
Well, I recently learned that it's also rooted in our psychology as human beings. I can't wait to tell you more about the reasons in another article :D
But let's first stay focused on our world today.
Maybe you heard about Steven Pinker? He just wrote a second book showcasing all the data that prove we are living in the best era of all times and putting together the pieces of work done by scientists and researchers from around the world to remind us of the values of Enlightenment: those of Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. The name of the book is Enlightenment now.
It is the name of an intellectual and philosophical movement in Europe during the 18th century. It is referred to as the Age of Reason or Century of Lights.
Back in the 18th century, Immanuel Kant, one of the major Enlightenment thinkers, defines enlightenment as:
''Humankind's emergence from its self-incurred immaturity", its ''lazy and cowardly'' submission to the ''dogmas and formulas'' of religious or political authority.
Enlightenment's moto is ''Dare to understand'' and its foundational demand is freedom of thought and speech.
But we must understand that it's our human nature that brings us back to the same old schemes.
Not our evolution, not our modern conditions, it's our laziness and fear that will always enslave us to ignorance and suffering.
We are victims of ourselves, no matter the time we are living in.
We are our own enemies and this I believe this is very good news! Because when we know our enemy, we can more easily defeat him, right? ;)
Honestly, I was myself very pessimist about our world and future, and I remember I used to proudly think that I was just being realistic about it. I was one of those who believed that the challenges that we are facing are impossible to tackle because we are living in this individualistic, personal-interests oriented and money-driven society. I used to believe that our decline was inevitable and it was better to just accept it and try to make the most of my life and enjoy it as long as I can.
But these beliefs contributed eventually to my own depression.
How could one live happily with this consciously chosen despair and sense of fatality? What's the purpose of living if you are convinced that not only everything is getting worse but there is no solution to make it better or even stop it from getting worse.
Then one day I realized that I was not only hurting myself with this ''realistically pessimist'' mindset, but I was also passively contributing to the said ''decline'' of our society.
I was just accepting to lose a ''game'' without even ''playing''.
And I like to choose this childish image of playing a game against our today challenges. Why the hustle and violence of fighting against something we created ourselves and that contributed to our achieved progress?
We just need to find new solutions to new problems incurred by our path of progress. So I changed my mindset and started looking for optimistic news.
And I was incredibly happy and surprised to find that our world is full of positive and smart people, doing what they love and finding innovative solutions to ''save the world'' and save people.
Now I leave you with this definition of optimism according to the famous physicist David Deutsch from his wonderful book, The beginning of Infinity:
'' Optimism is the theory that all failures -all evils- are due to insufficient knowledge… Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be solved. Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved. An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism. Its institutions keep improving, and the most important knowledge that they embody is knowledge of how to detect and eliminate errors.''
Optimistically yours,
Nad
