Optimist Primers

Economics and War are funny things: generally any study of them can be referred to as a 'dismal science.' In other words, depressing as fuck.

The two are ideologically more animated then anyone would dare admit, with the acolytes of various thinkers stubbornly defending their chosen messiahs of theory as the One True Word. From championing the efficacy of the Free Market to claiming the age of unconventional war is here and conventional warfare can hustle it's ass to the dustbin of history already, theory permeates all.

This latter point is particularly important because considerable amounts of bandiwidth (so at least the bloody trees are finally being spared) are being devoted to an all out clash of viewpoints, with the old cheesy cliche from the movie Highlander reverberating across the heavens: There can be only one! Well, one way of viewing things that is.

What could animate such a zero-sum no quarter given approach to what, in perhaps more civil times, would ideally be an unending series of productive dialogues between rational individuals?

Sadly the celebrated 'new weird' author China Mieville beat us all to the punch in his latest book Kraken. To badly paraphrase the tentacled text about apocalyptic cults, one of the characters makes an interesting observation that we currently live in an epoch of Ends; that is from Al-Qaeda vs. Global Warming to Kali Yuga vs. Ragnarock, every sort of belief system is vying against each other to prove just how correct their version of the End of the World is that's happening RIGHT NOW.

Depressing or absurdly piss your pants laughable? Either response would indicate a general mindset about a person: optimist or pessimist. Perhaps it is crudely simplistic to lump the current crux of global problems into two manichean camps, but the idea of optimism is certainly worth another look given the general theme of things lately. That is, the world is currently suffering from a chronic deficiency in optimism which rapidly pushing people into these zero-sum mindsets. Or more bluntly: the pie is only so big and worse still, it's getting smaller so cut me the biggest damn piece already and fuck everyone else!

Such mindsets can inevitable lead to arms races, currency devaluations, collapsing economies, entrenching of wealth and power, trade wars, environmental destruction, slashing of social budgets, fierce competition between advanced states or even outright war and just a general lack of belief that things really can get better, as opposed to just getting worse.

Listing other maladies currently plaguing global news outlets would be an endless and honestly pointless task. We're all familiar with them as they bombard our senses every single bloody day. Instead, it is worth returning to the original point about economics and warfare, daring to flip the two on their heads: instead of thinking in terms of winning the next war, thinking in terms of just how much hard work it takes in preserving peace; instead of forecasting economic downturns and recessions yet to happen, thinking in terms of just how we can get an economy or system functioning that can and consistently benefit people as a whole.

Diametrically opposed of course, but worth thinking about beyond crude stereotypes that would label and dismiss these ideas away as pure hippy nonsense. After all, that's the zero-sum mindset talking and proof in the pudding that the world is suffering a chronic deficiency in optimism, a lack of courage in daring to view anything in positive terms.