I have to admit that when I see a particularly fine piece of bullshit, when I read the incoherent babbling of a highly skilled (albeit delusional) craftsman at work, I am filled with admiration lately. In the past I was often disgusted. When important issues affecting millions of people are at stake, and the bullshit in question seeks to whitewash the situation to maintain an astonishingly unfair status quo, disgust is natural reaction in a person who is marginally more conscious than a primordial flatworm.
But nowadays, I tend to see some piece of exquisite human bullshit as a fine work of art by a master craftsman. This more aesthetic point of view helps to sustain what little sanity I've got left. Certainly it helps me maintain my sense of humor.
Todays' fine bullshit comes from a mainstream hack named Zachary Karabell, and appears in a Reuters column called The Audacity of Optimism. I read it this morning at The Atlantic in a post called Why Do People Hate Optimists. I was only slightly surprised to see at the end that
This post originally appeared on Reuters.com, an Atlantic partner site.
What I took to be an independent news service (Reuters.com) is a partner with The Atlantic, which is a mainstream "analysis" (i.e., fluff) generator. Happily, we are safely ensconsed deep inside the Bamboozle.
Like Jesus, but not like Jesus if you know what I mean, Zachary wants to tell us the Good News.
Over the past four weeks, we’ve had a run of undeniably good news. A panoply of data has shown that the U.S. economic system appears to be on firm ground. More people have jobs, albeit not necessarily sterling jobs, and the pace of overall activity as measured by GDP is at the highest level in two years, expanding at 4.1 percent annually. On the political front, Congress passed a budget for the first time in more than three years, which suggests a period ahead where Washington tantrums do not threaten to upend whatever delicate equilibrium currently exists.
Despite our waxing fortunes, doubts exist.
And yet, an aura of unease still seems to hover over us.
In the year or more that I have written this column, I have often emphasized the way in which things may be going at least a bit right. That contrasts with the frequently repeated mantra that we are going dangerously off the rails. Of course, like anyone, I may be right or wrong or somewhere in between.
What’s been perplexing about responses to this column, however, isn’t whether the analysis is right or wrong, wise or naïve, but that the very hint of optimism makes a fair number of people extremely angry.
It may be, of course, that my optimism is misplaced. It may be that the United States is actually headed to hell in a proverbial handbasket...
But possibly being wrong doesn’t explain the anger my columns have provoked, in the form of email and online reactions..
This bullshit requires a complicated set-up. As with great art, the creation of high-quality bullshit is hard work. Michaelangelo did not paint the Sistine Chapel's ceiling in a day.
But why does optimism about today’s world generate such strong hostility? Perhaps because it contradicts what many people believe. Positive views on the present are seen as a slap in the face by people who have negative experiences, which, according to some polls, is the majority of Americans.
Surveys suggest that more Americans than ever—66 percent, according to one poll—believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction. Other polls say much the same thing. Two years ago the numbers were even worse. Americans of the past few years are less positive about the future than they have been at any point since the 1970s.
That completes the set-up. What comes next raises this bullshit above the ordinary to the sublime.
The problem is that in a country of 300 million people, let alone a world of 7 billion, any statement about an economic or societal trend is likely to differ from the actual experience of a great many people.
In this case, just counting Americans, that would be 66% of them.
While there may be upsides to the changing mechanisms of our economic system, there are unequivocally winners and losers and many shades between. Any suggestion that the struggles of one group may be juxtaposed against, though not offset by, the flourishing of another group can seem disrespectful and even indifferent to the challenges faced by many people.
The answer, however, is not to focus relentlessly on what isn’t working.
Every society must find some balance between addressing real shortcomings and building on real strengths.
Optimism, as the theoretical physicist David Deutsch so brilliantly describes in The Beginnings of Infinity, doesn’t mean surety about good future outcomes.
Optimism is simply the certainty that any human progress to date has been a product of our collective ability to understand how things work and to craft solutions. The conviction that the present is a prelude to a bad future negates that collective ability.
Yes, we may indeed be at the end of the line, but by angrily dismissing optimistic arguments we are likely to fail more rapidly.
Why bother striving for constructive change if you firmly reject the possibility? That leaves only one viable alternative: to envision a path forward.
That path may not materialize, but striving to find it is a vital component of creating the future we dream about, and not the one that we fear.
And I could add, not the one we have. But nothing I might add could (following A. Lincoln) add to or detract from this bullshit. It stands alone, a monument to ... I don't know, something. I have never liked art critics of any kind, and I am not about to follow in their foolish footsteps by attempting to deconstruct this fine bullshit. Sometimes it is better to say nothing.
Some (past) readers of DOTE have been offended by my unrelenting realism pessimism about the Human Condition and the Human Future. Like Mr. Karabell, I have encountered great hostility.
Why do I feel so pessimistic?
Humbly, I submit Zachary's extraordinarily fine bullshit as Exhibit A on the way to demonstrating why the human race is completely, irrevocably and irredeemably fucked.
What he considers "undeniably good news" is really quite hilarious. People have shitty jobs, the stock market is doing well thereby boosting some meaningless number called the GDP, and one of the most corrupt institutions on earth managed to pass a budget, a very basic function of said institution, in which Republicans (almost all of whom are bigoted anti-intellectual war mongering corporatists, as with many of their Democratic colleagues to a slightly lesser degree) got most of what they wanted. And this is undeniably good news. Wow. He must not realize the rose colored tint on his glasses is actually excrement.
Posted by: Cookielemons . | 12/26/2013 at 12:07 PM