Numb. 931 No Time For Optimism

Truly, we do need our optimists*

without whom we would cease to exist.

They insist, gleefully, on keeping on.

They resist knowing when hope is gone.

When a realist would cease and desist,

an optimist will forever persist.

As a pessimist, I am averse

to optimists generally making things worse. 

It is, I’ll admit, a puzzling twist,

that even the best of psychiatrists

cannot free the optimists from their delusion

that there can be — EV-ER! — a happy conclusion.

We’re doomed by the positivists in our midst

They will be the end of us. Class is dismissed.

——————

*We are rational creatures, Professor Jove explained; hope is irrational. We thus set ourselves up for one dispiriting fall after the next. Anger and depression are not diseases or dysfunctions or anomalies; they are perfectly rational responses to the myriad avoidable disappointments that begin in a thoroughly irrational hope….

 …Hitler was the most unabashed doe-eyed optimist of the last hundred years. That's why he was the biggest monster. Have you ever heard of anything as outrageously hopeful as the Final Solution? Not just that there could be a solution—to anything, mind you, while we have yet to cure the common cold—but a final one, no less! Full of hope, the Führer was. A dreamer! A romantic, even, yes? If I just kill this one, gas that one, everything will be okay. I tell you this with absolute certainty: every morning Adolf Hitler woke up, made himself a cup of coffee, and asked himself how to make the world a better place. We all know his answer, but the answer isn't nearly as important as the question. The only thing more naively hopeful than the Final Solution is the ludicrous dictum to which it gave birth. Never Again. How many times since Never Again has it happened again? Three? Four? That we know of, mind you. Mao? Optimist. Stalin? Optimist. Pol Pot? Optimist. Here's a good rule for life…no matter where you happen to live or when you happen to be born: when someone rises up and promises that things are going to be better, run. Hide. Pessimists don't build gas chambers.

—Auslander, Shalom. Hope: A Tragedy.  Riverhead Books. ISBN13: 9781594488382.