Pessimism is always big box-office. Pessimists sound like they’re trying to help you. Data scientists, carrying out the sentiment-mining (of the people’s opinion) show the world is becoming gloomier day by day. The airwaves are crammed with doom. The bookshops groan under ziggurats of pessimism. As good news is presented as bad news, consumers become glum, misperceive risk, harbour contempt and grow desensitized. A kind of collective-refusal to believe that life is getting better, critics that pan a book are perceived as more competent than the critics that praise it. Those that predict the worst are hailed as prophets. They can expect a Nobel-peace prize. Journalists believe they’re discharging their duty as watchdogs, muckrakers and whistleblowers. In fact, they’re accentuating the negative. In the constant drumbeat of pessimism if you say the world has been getting better you may get away with being called as naïve and insensitive, embarrassingly mad & everything from imbecile to flat-earther and criminal. Optimists sound like trying to sell something. Someone who offers a solution is dismissed as not a panacea, a silver-bullet or a magic-bullet but a band-aid that fails to get at the root causes and has side-effects and unintended consequences. Complaining about modern society is a backhanded way of putting down ones rivals.
Ourgeneration that has experienced more peace, freedom, leisure time, education,medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones, and massages than any generation inhistory, has all along been listening to implacable predictions of growingpoverty, coming famines, expanding deserts, imminent plagues, impending waterwars, inevitable oil exhaustions, mineral shortages, falling sperm-counts,thinning ozone, acidifying rains, nuclear winters, mad-cow epidemics, Y2Kcomputer bugs, global warming, receding glaciers, terrorism and even asteroidimpacts that would bring us to terrible end. As living-standards shoot up,intellectuals are obsessed with imminent decline, degeneration anddisaster. Doom after doom are promised.One by one these scares come and go. One or other of these scares is solemnlyespoused or hysterically echoed by the distinguished and serious elites like,Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Al Franken, Al Gore, John Gray, and MichaelMoore.
Nocharity ever raised money for its cause by saying things are getting better. Nojournalists ever got a front page by telling his editor that he wanted to writea story about how disaster was now less likely. Good news is no news. Themedia-megaphone is at the disposal of any politician, journalist, or activistwho can plausibly warn of a coming disaster. In effect pressure groups andtheir customers in the media frantically search even the most cheerfulstatistics for ‘glimmers of doom’. Defining moments, tipping points, thresholdsand points-of-no-return have been encountered by pessimists in everygeneration. The drumbeat has become a cacophony. Pessimists are right when theysay, ‘if the world continues as it’s, it’ll end in disaster for allhumanity’. Apocaholics exploit andprofit from the natural pessimism of human nature, the innate reactionary in everyperson. Despite progress having been made in every field of our life,pessimists have had all the headlines. Arch-pessimists are feted, showered withhonours, and rarely challenged, let alone confronted with their past mistakes.The Ming and Maoist emperors had ruled restricting the growth of business,forbidding, unauthorized travel, punishing innovation, limiting family size.They don’t say so, but that’s inevitable world that the pessimists want toreturn to when they speak of retreat.
Theproblem is partly ‘nostalgia’. In the 8th century BC, Hesiod was nostalgic fora lost golden-age when people dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands withmany good things. There has probably never been a generation that didn’tdeplore the fecklessness of the next, and worship the golden memory of thepast. The endless modern laments about how texting and emails are shorteningthe attention-span go back to Plato who deplored writing as a destroyer ofmemorizing.
Theyouth of today are pooh-poohed as shallow, selfish, spoiled,feral-good-for-nothing, full-of-narcissism, spend-too-long-time-in-cyberspace,which scalds and defoliates their minds and deprives them of moral agency,imagination, and awareness of consequences. The ‘enterprise-culture’accordingly means competition, overwork, anxiety and falling ill, even thoughthe children were more overworked, and fell lot more ill in the industrial,feudal, agrarian and Neolithic and hunter-gatherer past.
Peoplefear flying. Almost no one fears driving. Plane-crashes make the news.Car-crashes which kill far more people almost never do.’Availability-heuristics’ induces a sense of gloom about the state of theworld. Because of amygdala-function and media-competition our airwaves are fullof ‘prophets-of-doom’. Because of the ‘negativity-bias’ and the ‘authority-bias’,as also due to our local and linear brains, of which Dunbar’s number (OnFacebook people may have thousands of friends but they actually interact withonly 150 of them) is but one example, we treat those authority figures asfriends which triggers a tendency to give preferential treatment to those, webelieve in our own group and makes us trust them even more. Once we startbelieving that the apocalypse is coming, the amygdala goes on high alert,filtering-out most anything that says otherwise. Whatever information theamygdala doesn’t catch our ‘confirmation-bias’ –which is now biased towardconfirming our eminent destruction–certainly does. The population is convincedthat the end is near and there isn’t a damn thing to do about it. If we’re headingfor disaster then having these biases could be an asset. But this is wherethings get even stranger. The facts seem to have been confirmed and they’restartling. Forget the hole we’re in being too deep to get out of it there’sreally not much of a hole.
Asif the pessimism-genes might quite literally be commoner than optimism-genesour species’ predilection for bad news is incredibly moaning pessimism. It’salmost people cling to bad news like comfort-blanket. A combination of’cognitive-biases’ and ‘evolutionary-psychology’ being the core problem,’loss-aversion’ is what often keeps people stuck in ruts. It’s an unwillingnessto change bad habits for fear that the change will leave them in a worse placethan before. Thanks to the evolutionary-psychology component, we might begloomy because gloomy people managed to avoid getting eaten by lions in thePleistocene.