Episode #042 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

Let’s all start the show today by asking ourselves a very serious and revealing question. Are you an optimist? Alright, let’s think about ourselves for a second. When you go about your life and things happen to you throughout your day good or bad, when you think about the future, do you think about it optimistically or pessimistically? There’s kind of a bizarre stigma attached to being a pessimist in today’s world. Like, if you’re a pessimist, there are certain groups of people that if you’re around, they—I mean, it’s the worst thing you could ever possibly be. You could be a convicted felon; these people would be more accepting of you than if you’re a pessimist. And heaven forbid somebody puts a glass of water in front of you. “No, it’s half full! Don’t be so hard on yourself all the time. It’s the miracle of life! It’s water.”

Maybe the best way to get to the bottom of pessimism is just to look around us and try to understand what causes people to be pessimists in the first place. And look, there’s a surprising amount of work done in this field. I mean, you’d think it would be arbitrary, like some easily identifiable event from our childhood made us into a pessimist. But I guess it doesn’t work that way. There are a lot of really smart people in goggles and lab coats with tons of free time on their hands that have dug deeper into this, and what they’ve found is that there’s actually a lot of different ways that people validate their pessimism.

We all know about certain types of pessimism, right? It seems very clear that there’s a strong contingency of people that we’ve all seen that claim that the reason why they are a pessimist is because they can’t not be a pessimist. They’ve seen way too much in this world to ever be an optimist, right? They have way too much life experience and knowledge to ever be able to look at themselves in the mirror and honestly expect things to work out for the best. They couldn’t lie to themselves like that. These people don’t even like to call themselves a pessimist. They say, “I’m a realist,” right? “Look, it’s not that I don’t want things to work out for the best. Of course I do! But look, I’ve been around the block a couple times, and I’m not going to fill my head with all these starry-eyed fantasies about things always working out for the best, alright? Let’s be honest with ourselves. Bad things happen. And if you don’t expect them to happen, you’re just setting yourself up for failure again and again and again.”

Well, many of these people are cynics, alright? And they criticize the optimists for being these naïve children with delusions of grandeur, saying that it’s through their blind optimism that they’re setting themselves up for a long lifetime of dealing with the bad end of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But what’s really interesting to consider is that many of the pessimists end up falling into the very same traps that they’re warning the optimists about, right? They become so cynical and so negative about how the world is going to treat them that they end up growing apathetic. They end up just throwing their hands up in the air. And whenever they hear about some sort of bad thing on the horizon or some bad thing that happened to them or a family member, they just kind of scoff and say, “Well, what are you going to do about it? That’s how the world works. What else is new?” But let’s not just pick on these guys. There’s more than one type of pessimist.

So, there’s another type of pessimist out there. I’m sure we’ve all run across one of these fine absolutely toxic people in our lifetimes. And the reason why they acquire their set of pessimistic beliefs is because they’re playing this twisted, self-congratulatory psychological game with themselves. They’ll surround themselves with optimists. And then, when good things happen to all their friends, “Oh, well, they got lucky.” But then, when bad things inevitably happen, “Well, you guys should have listened to me. I told you so. If only you were wise like I was, you would have known that the world isn’t filled with sunshine and rainbows all the time.”

One of the more interesting theories that I’ve read about why people become pessimistic is that we may have as a species evolved the trait of pessimism, or pessimistic people may have been chosen by natural selection. And the thinking behind this is that if you have two hunter-gatherers walking through the Serengeti and they come across some tall grass—one of them is an optimist, and one of them is a pessimist—well, the optimist looks at the grass, and he says, “You know what, I don’t think that there’s a lion waiting in there to disembowel me when I walk through the grass. I think I’m going to go that way.” And the pessimist stays back. He’s like, “No, there’s always a lion in there. There’s always some sort of dangerous thing in tall grass. I’m not going there.” Well, if that’s the case, then the pessimist lives longer, has more of a chance to reproduce and more of a chance to make up the gene pool that we all come from. So, we may all be fighting from a pessimistic predisposition from birth. Interesting to think about.

This may be the reason why pessimism is so common today. And look, I truly do think that it’s a common thing. There’s this strange way of thinking that I see all the time from people that goes, like, the longer that you live on this planet and the more that you know about the world around you, the more pessimistic and miserable you have to be as a result of that knowledge. I have no idea where this thinking comes from necessarily. I think they hear the quote “Ignorance is bliss,” and they mistakenly conclude—at least in my opinion—that the only path to bliss is through ignorance and that the opposite is true as well, that the more you know, the less blissful you become, necessarily. But knowing more about the world around you doesn’t mean that you need to be tortured by that knowledge.

One thing I’d like to point out real quick as we talk about optimism and how it applies to us in our personal lives is that there’s no magic here, alright? The only thing you’re doing by being an optimist or a pessimist is choosing the lens that you’re going to view the world through. And what I mean by this is that being an optimist or a pessimist doesn’t necessarily change things that happen to you in your everyday life. It changes how you perceive it. It might change the number of mental barriers that you erect for yourself up in your head. And that might in turn change how you react to what happens in your life. But just being a pessimist or an optimist doesn’t change how much control you have over the actual things that happen. When it comes to the things that happen to you, the fleeting adversity or fortune throughout your life, you have zero control over that stuff.

This is something that the stoics talked about a lot. We covered it in the “Hallmarks of Stoic Ethics” show. They would say that all these things that happen to you, adversity or fortune, are external to you. The only thing you have control over is how your mind reacts to these things. For example, let’s say that the economy is doing really well and there’s a company. The company is growing; it’s hiring a bunch of new people. It’s selling tons of product. And then all of a sudden, the economy tanks. And to stay in business, this company needs to fire 100 people. Well, let’s be clear about something. That 100 people is not made up of 1 type of person. In that 100 people, there are both optimists and pessimists.

The point I’m making is that the people who are pessimistic about whether they were going to keep their job or not at that company, they didn’t somehow magically prevent this bad thing from happening to them by dwelling on how unfair and volatile the workplace is for months ahead of time. No, they lost their job just like the optimist did. Being an optimist or a pessimist doesn’t control the future. It just controls how you see the future.

Now, some of you guys are probably saying because of that example, well, at least the pessimist is more prepared than the optimist, right? I mean, at least he expected months in advance that he was going to get laid off. He probably lined up several jobs on the side, and he was ready to go once he got laid off. The optimist just got blindsided. And that’s a very good point. But I’d like to point something out. What about the hundred other scenarios surrounding that layoff where their pessimism could have been destructive to them? We can’t ignore those, right?

What if they didn’t have jobs lined up? What if the economy was so bad that he didn’t have three or four jobs waiting in the wings? Well, in that scenario, their pessimism would have been destructive, right? Their pessimism could have easily just led them to sit on the couch, collect unemployment, wallow in their own filth for nine months watching Maury Povich every day and saying, “I’m never going to get a job. Why would I even try to get a job?”

There are many practical benefits to being an optimist in our personal lives. That’s the reason why it’s been endorsed by so many great thinkers throughout history. Winston Churchill said, “For myself, I am an optimist. It does not seem to be much use to be anything else.” And I love what he’s saying here. Optimism is a choice. And think about it. We’re all faced with the decision every day of our lives to make a choice about whether to be an optimist or a pessimist in response to all the stuff that happens to us.

You may have been born a pessimist, genetically, if that’s even possible. You may have conditioned yourself in one direction or another. But that isn’t necessarily a life sentence. If you practice hard enough, you can train your brain to perceive the world differently. And what Winston Churchill’s alluding to here is that being an optimist is more than just a nice sentiment. It’s a very useful quality to have. It’s not just a pipe dream for us to delude ourselves with in the short term. It’s not just what stupid people do. No, it’s quite the opposite. To Winston Churchill, being an optimist is the only useful proposition we have.

Now, why do you think he said this? A lot of people would say optimism’s useful because whether you think good stuff is going to come or bad stuff is going to come, it doesn’t change what it is eventually that’s going to happen. So, why put yourself through all the needless duress of focusing on all the potentially negative outcomes? Focus on the positive ones. But I think Winston Churchill is getting deeper here. I think he understood the usefulness of optimism in a way that’s mirrored by modern science. Let’s talk about it.

There are thousands of studies out there that unanimously talk about all the various benefits there are to being an optimist. You know, studies show that optimists live longer. Optimists have better immune systems. They have lower levels of stress and anxiety. There was a study that took place over a long period of time that found that optimists were 23% less likely to die from heart disease and 55% less likely to succumb to all the other different forms of premature death. Optimists make more money across the board, on average 30 grand a year more than their pessimistic equals. Optimists are significantly happier than pessimists. Some studies say that optimists are luckier than pessimists. Some say that they’re significantly more likely to be in a long-term, fulfilling, loving relationship than a pessimist.

And what I’m saying is, when it comes to determining which lens is more useful on a personal level, it seems pretty clear that being an optimist has a lot more use outside of just deluding yourself in the short term. And this is one reason why so many great thinkers advocate it. There’s another philosopher that talks a lot about optimism. His name is Ralph Waldo Emerson. And he said famously, “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.”

Now, if you’ve seen the movie Office Space, there’s a main character in the movie that says about the exact opposite of this. Somebody says to him, “Hey, how’s it going today?” He says, “Every single day in my life has been worse than the last. So, that means that every day you see me, you see me on the worst day of my life.” Try to think about the opposite of that, though. If you follow Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice and you try to write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year, then every single day you live on this planet is the greatest day of your life. It’s an upward staircase. You seek out good things. You look to reinforce that fact rather than thinking about all the potential bad things that could happen and being on that constant downward staircase.

It's crazy. Like, when good things happen to a pessimist, it’s almost like they don’t even happen. I mean, just think about it. Even when a long string of good things happens to a pessimist, they spend all their time not appreciating how good they currently have it but fantasizing about all the different ways these good things are going to eventually leave them or be destroyed. When it’s all said and done, it’s almost like they didn’t even have them in the first place.

Look, even Marcus Aurelius advocates optimism, alright? He said in his Meditations, “Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” Now, this is coming from Marcus Aurelius here. He was a stoic. The stoics are one of the most famous advocates of premeditated pessimism in the history of the world. You know, you should wake up and tell yourself, “I will be met with idiots and inconsiderate people today. I will get cut off in traffic today. I will get my parking spot stolen at work by that weird guy who works on the eighth floor.” This is powerful. Even someone who strongly advises to hold low expectations about the world advocates a very clear focus on beauty and positivity rather than the things that would be needlessly destructive to him.

Well, there was one more philosopher I want to talk about that had a famous quote about optimism. His name was Voltaire, and it went like this. “Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are actually miserable.” Now, the first inclination here is to resist, right? “What are you talking about, Voltaire? Don’t be so hard on yourself. Things are great!” No, we shouldn’t get down on Voltaire here, because the optimism Voltaire is talking about, the optimism that he’s railing against in this quote is in a very different context than what we’ve been talking about so far in the episode. And by exploring the difference between these two uses of optimism—by exploring Voltaire’s famous rebuttal to Leibniz, in other words—I think by the end of the episode we’re going to think about the world just a little bit differently than when it began. And isn’t that why we’re all here?

Alright, so, here we go. First, let me ask you guys a question. Would you say that there is one correct way for humans to look at the world regardless of time period, regardless of culture, regardless of how many people they’re making decisions on behalf of? Is there one way? And what I mean by that is, you may think that being an optimist is a great thing. You could think that when it comes to your personal life it is the only truly useful or logical way to go about living. Why not be an optimist? But does that apply to every situation that any person or entity might find themselves in?

For example, what if you start a new company? And you’re operating in an extremely competitive market where dozens of businesses all around you are constantly trying to steal your market share, out-innovate you, drive you out of business. Is thinking optimistically about your future the best plan there? Is thinking that, “Well, everything works out for the best,” is that the best attitude to have to ensure success?

Now, the bigger question here is, when you look at the US government or whatever government you hail from, do you personally follow the same set of behaviors that you vote for the government to have? This is a big question, alright? It’s a question that’s really changed the way that I look at politics. Just to illustrate what I’m talking about, let’s talk about fiscal conservatism. Most of us listening to this if not all of us are fiscal conservatives when it comes to our personal finances. We live within our own means. We wouldn’t even think about doing something stupid or reckless with our finances. I mean, most of us work all day to try to maintain those finances.

Most of us wouldn’t even think about going down to the bank or going to China and asking for a loan so that we could pay for the down payment on a Ferrari that we have no idea how we’re going to pay for: no idea how we’ll pay for the insurance, no idea how we’ll pay for the maintenance. That would be crazy. Why would we ever do that? But there are a lot of people out there that would never do something like that with their personal finances, but they would think it was downright inhumane in certain cases for the government to not use taxpayer-funded subsidies to promote a giant unfunded future taxpayer liability that we have no way of paying for yet.

Now, I’m not making an argument for fiscal conservatism here. The important point of what I’m saying is that oftentimes the set of behaviors that we live by in our personal lives is very different than the set of behaviors we want the government to have when acting on our behalf. And what I’d like to ask all of you right now is, do you want your government to be optimistic? Do you want your government to be optimistic about the possibility of a future terrorist attack? Do you want your government to be optimistic about their plan to fix the economy even if it looks bad? Do you want the human species to be optimistic about climate change?

But it’s funny, if we looked at those things when it comes to our personal life, why shouldn’t you be optimistic about them? I mean, what, you’re going to run around constantly scared of being attacked by a terrorist? Nobody would recommend that. You need to be optimistic about that stuff. Now, the point here is to explore the idea that optimism may be an excellent mindset in certain situations like our personal lives and a terrible mindset when it comes to other situations like protecting the human species. And this is what Voltaire is talking about. When Voltaire said the words that “Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable,” he was talking about philosophical optimism; he was talking about optimism on a species-wide scale. Really, he was responding to Leibniz.

Now, just a recap, Leibniz famously said that we live in the best of all possible worlds, that when God created the universe, he didn’t just sit up in the clouds and say, “Hey, I think I’m going to make the second best of all possible worlds. You know what? I’m going to make the third best of all possible…” —no, he made the best of all possible worlds. So, because of that, Leibniz argued, everything that happens happens for the best. Things like terrorist attacks, economic collapses, the greenhouse effect—all these things are God’s will. And while we may not understand why they happen at the time with our feeble human intellects, we can rest assured knowing that they’re probably just damage control or a necessary evil to make sure that future evils don’t occur. No matter how bad things may seem, no matter how much suffering you’re forced to go through, relax, guys. God maintains this world as the best of all possible worlds. And you should trust that.

Just to add some historical context here, Voltaire was in a pretty dark place in the year 1755. I mean, the love of his life had just died. He looked around him, and the people that he detested the most were gaining power. He was being prosecuted just for speaking his mind. Then to top it off, in 1755 one of the most catastrophic earthquakes in human history hits the city of Lisbon. To history it would become known as the Great Lisbon Earthquake. To Voltaire, it was widespread brutality that was beyond justification. Look, this was long before any sort of earthquake construction code had been enacted. And the death and cleanup that was associated with a natural disaster on this scale, it honestly would have turned the stomachs of anybody living back then.

So, Voltaire decides to do what any decent person should do. It’s what me and you would do if we lived back then. He writes a poem about it. And in this poem, he’s responding to two things: one, the earthquake, obviously, and two, the optimists—people that thought like Leibniz, people who were, in his eyes, naïve enough to think that even with things like this happening, we are still living in the best of all possible worlds. He gets pretty ruthless in the poem. Let me read you guys a little piece of it.

“All humanity huddled in fear!

The endless subject of useless pain!

Come philosophers who cry, ‘All is well,’

And contemplate the ruins of this world.

Behold the debris and ashes of the unfortunate—

These women and children heaped in common ruin,

These scattered limbs under the broken marble.

See the hundred thousand whom the earth devours!

Torn, bloody, and still breathing,

They are entombed beneath roofs, and die without

Relief from the horror of their suffering lives.

“As the dying voices call out, will you dare to respond

To this appalling spectacle of smoking ashes with:

‘This is the necessary effect of the eternal laws

Freely chosen by God’?

Seeing this mass of victims, will you say,

‘God is avenged. Their death is the price of their crimes’?

What crime, what fault had the young committed,

Who lie bleeding at their mother’s breast?

Did fallen Lisbon indulge in more vices

Than London or Paris, which live in pleasure?

Lisbon is no more, but they dance in Paris.”

He says in another section of the poem, “‘If it be true,’ they said, ‘that whatever is, is right, it follows that human nature is not fallen. If the order of things requires that everything should be as it is, then human nature has not been corrupted, and consequently has no need for a redeemer. If the miseries of individuals are merely the byproduct of this general and necessary order, then we are nothing more than cogs which serve to keep the great machine in motion. We are no more precious in the eyes of God than the animals by which we are devoured.’”

Well, I don’t think you guys are going to be very surprised when I say this, but Voltaire ruffles a lot of feathers with this poem. But there’s an upside to it. He gets a considerable amount of fans and notoriety with this poem. And over the years, there’s been a lot of people that respond to this poem. But historians of philosophy agree on one thing, that there’s one person that’s more notable than all the others, especially to Voltaire. His name was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Now, we’re going to be covering Rousseau extensively in a couple episodes on the podcast. But his argument against Voltaire basically goes like this: the reason God can allow this earthquake to happen is because we aren’t following God’s intentions. God never intended for anybody to live in cities. What, crammed together like sardines, you think that’s how God wanted us to live? In fact, if you think about it, cities exemplify all the vice and all the excess that goes against God. God really wanted people to live in the countryside. And how ironic is it that whenever an earthquake happens in the countryside, no one dies? There’s even a part where Rousseau makes fun of Voltaire, and he compares him to somebody that built his house at the bottom of the sea and then turns around and yells at God for allowing him to drown.

So, after this rebuttal, what may have otherwise just been a molehill turned into a mountain, alright? Rousseau set Voltaire into a frenzy with this rebuttal. And what Voltaire writes in response is one of if not his most influential work, the Candide. In it, Voltaire sets out to destroy this foolish optimism that was originally laid out by Leibniz. And look, just to be fair, there’s a lot of different interpretations of what’s going on here, okay? There’s a large group of people that think that Voltaire wasn’t even responding to Leibniz at all, that he was really responding to the church authority at the time. But I’m going to save you some time. It doesn’t really matter at all. It doesn’t matter who he was specifically responding to. He was primarily attacking the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The Candide is a rebuttal to that. Let’s keep it there.

So, the title Candide comes from the name of the main character. The book starts out with a guy named Candide, obviously. He’s a student of a respected scholar named Pangloss. Now, Pangloss adamantly believes that we live in the best of all possible worlds. And he does his best to teach Candide all about it. Now, not long after the start of the book, Candide starts to get a little frisky. He starts to develop feelings for the Baron’s daughter, and they’re caught kissing one day. And he’s expelled. So, he goes off on this long journey where he comes across all kinds of bloody battles.

And he eventually arrives in Holland. And while he’s in Holland, he comes across this disheveled, mangled beggar on the street. And very soon after he meets this beggar, he realizes it’s Pangloss! What happened, Pangloss? Pangloss tells him that an army came, killed his family, messed him up pretty bad. And now here he is a beggar on the street. But don’t worry, he still believes he’s living in the best of all possible worlds.

Well, from here, the story doesn’t get much better for them. Candide, Pangloss, many other friends that they meet along the way are put through the ringer, really. They’re tortured, put to death. They survive their death sentences. They’re enslaved, raped, beaten. The whole book catalogs a really depressing sequence of events now that I think about it. And it ironically ends with them all living on a farm together. And despite everything that’s happened to them, the point is, Pangloss still believes that he’s living in the best of all possible worlds.

The whole story is chaos. And the central point is to make certain observations about the human species. And the key one that Voltaire’s trying to make here is just how ridiculous Pangloss’s optimism is in the face of all these things that are so obviously wrong with the way the world operates. Are we truly living in the best of all possible worlds? Are you really going to make that claim?

Let me sum up Voltaire’s main points in the Candide. As members of a species, when we look at all these bad things that are happening around us optimistically, we really are shooting ourselves in the foot. It certainly may make us feel better to say that things are ultimately for the best. But is what makes us feel better necessarily the best thing for humanity? Voltaire says that if we live in the best of all possible worlds and everything that happens is ultimately for the best, then anything that happens is the best thing that could ever happen. So, if you believe that, why even try at that point? Why should we even try to prevent terrorist attacks? Why should we even try to understand what causes climate change if, ultimately, anything that happens is the best thing that could ever happen, and it’s maintained that way by God?

The real underlying question that Voltaire is asking here is, why even try to limit human suffering if any subsequent human suffering is God’s will and is, therefore, the best thing that could ever happen to us? See, Voltaire was a Deist at this point in his life. He doesn’t think that God created this entire universe so that we could tell him how great he was and he could grant wishes for us from time to time. He uses an incredible metaphor to talk about how he thinks we should truly be viewing ourselves as beings on this planet.

He compares the universe to a ship that was built by the king of Egypt. He says, God is like the king of Egypt. He built this ship that we all live on. And we as humans are like rats in the lower deck of the ship, drowning in puddles or starving to death. Yes, we are part of God’s creation. Yes, God may even be consciously aware of our existence, but he didn’t create the ship just so that rats could scurry around on the lower deck of the ship. No, he built the ship for some greater purpose like sailing him around the Mediterranean, a purpose that the rats could never fully comprehend. So, when these rats get stuck in these puddles underneath, is the king of Egypt concerned about that? Is the king of Egypt bothering himself running around trying to save every single rat or maintaining that the rats exist in the best of all possible ship decks? No, the king of Egypt doesn’t even think about it.

Now, what Voltaire’s getting at here is actually pretty profound. If we were giving advice to those rats, what would we tell them? Would we tell them that they can rely on the king of Egypt for their safety, that he’s going to ensure that everything works out for the best? No, the amount of rat suffering on his ship isn’t even close to his number one priority in the same way that fruit fly suffering or cow suffering isn’t the main thing he’s concerned with. If we were giving advice to those rats, we would have to tell them, look, if you want to limit the amount of rat suffering, you guys have to do something about it. Build a bridge over that puddle so that no rats can fall in there anymore. Find a way to secure more food for yourself so you guys don’t starve to death all the time.

What Voltaire’s saying is that just like the rats, if we want to limit the suffering of other human beings, the absolute worst thing that we can do is just sit around and be complacent about it, you know, just being optimistic about the fact that anything that happens is for the best. So, thinking in that way, should we be complacent about terrorist attacks, just saying, “Well, if God allows them, then they’re for the best, right?” No, Voltaire would say that we should do something about it. Should we be complacent about the effects of climate change, saying, “Look, if it ever gets too steamy in here, if the earth turns into a sauna, God’s going to turn on the AC for us, right? He’s going to regulate the temperature if things get too bad.” No, Voltaire would say we should learn as much as we can about it.

To Voltaire, limiting human suffering is our responsibility. And sitting around saying that everything that happens is just for the best, it breeds complacency. We need to be taking action, not assuming that human suffering actually matters to God or that it’s the metric that God uses to determine what the best of all possible worlds is.

So, this is fascinating to me. When it comes to our personal lives, optimism seems like the clear way to go. But when it comes to the government and the future of the human species, we want them to be as pessimistic and worrisome as possible. Maybe that’s one of the benefits of being part of an organized, well-governed society—is that by outsourcing all of that pessimism and worry for the government to worry about, it allows for us as citizens to live healthier, richer, happier, less worry-filled lives. And the empowering question to ask is, are you taking full advantage of it?

Thank you for listening. I love all of you guys. I’ll talk to you soon.