[lbo-talk] Individualism and psychiatric treatment

[Carrol Cox]

The terms optimism and pessimism are pretty fuzzy. Pessimistic about
what? Optimistic about what? The original form of optimism was the
theory that this was the best of all possible worlds, which made both
Voltaire and Samuel Johnson roar! (Candid; Review of Soame Jennings)  
In terms of formal thought, that's the only optimism I knwo of. Or it
can mean Dennis R's happiness about the misery of some 400 million
Chinese -- what the hell, it's a dvelopmental state and makes everything
for th best. Or there's Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive
Thinking, which was a version of Coue's Every day in every way every
thng is getting better and better. And there's the pessimism of the
knowledge that sooner or later our descendants are going to have to
live, then die, under the shadow of a cooling sun and inevitable
destruction of the earth. And if we can be indifferent to what is going
to happen in a few million years, why not in just half a million years.
And if indifferent to what's goin to happen in half a million years, why
not in 100k years and so on. The dinosaurs lastsed the rather incredible
time of 60  million years, and then were only eliminated by an asteroid
hitting. Do we have to belive that humans will last longer in order to
be optimistic.

And isn't deliberate sa crifice of one's life (as throwing oneself on a
grenade to save othrs) the height of optimism: It suggests that there
are things that mean more than one's own life, and is that any easy
notion to wrap one's mind about? The book in which Carolyn Heublein
announced to the world that at some epoing she was going to kill herself
was entitled _Time's Last Gift: Life after 60_. That sounds like a
rather  cheerful title. Was she an optimist or a pesimist?

Pope wrote "Whatever is, is right" but he also wrote, "LIht dies before
her uncreating word / And universal darkness buries all" as well as the
phrase, "this long disease my life." How do we classify him? Brdvold
wrote an essay entitled "The Gloom of the Tory Satirists" in which he
rather joyfully celebrated that gloom as a vigorous recognition of what
was. Shelley wrote both "The *Triumph of Life" and "Prometheus Unbound."
I don't know those poems very well, but I think both of them coud be
viewed as the ultimate in gloom and the ultimate in bounless hope.
Engels wrote that eventually human life would end -- but probalby life
was evolving in some planet some place. Which was that, optimism or
pessimism?

Perhaps we could say cheerfulness is willingness to get up in the
morning; dolefulness is the desire to hide one's head under the covers.

Carrol