I had a conversation with a pessimist this past week. I don’t mean I had a conversation with somebody who sees a problem or an issue and thinks, “oh, that’s not surprising…the glass is half empty!” I mean that I had a conversation with somebody who believes that the world is naturally bad, life is naturally hard, and things are naturally going to look down.
To illustrate this perspective, simply imagine that if you were to go into a state of never making decisions — being a person who just “goes with the flow” as much as possible — then you are going to find yourself in hard times more likely than not.
I had asked him to tell me one thing he believes that very few others do — one of my favorite questions, as the answers somebody gives are great indicators of whether or not they have a contrarian streak — and he told me, point blank, “I am a pessimist.” A philosophical pessimist, meaning that his metaphysical view of the world is one given to chaos and downlookingness.
To say pessimism is inspiring can itself seem like a contradiction. How can a philosophy based on the idea that things are looking down from here on out one that inspires, drives one to create, and move towards a point that is higher relative to the now?
People like to downplay the importance of pessimism, philosophical and otherwise, by saying things like, “life is beautiful, you just have to look for it!” or “things are going to look up!” or “the world is a beautiful place!” Each of these statements have an element of truth to them — life has its beautiful moments, things may look up if you work towards making them look up, and the world really can be beautiful — but they implicitly deny a very real thing about the world: for things to get better for yourself, you have to make them better yourself.
If the natural direction of the world, outside of your own action, is to go downwards, for things to be bad, and for life to have the potential to be very hard, then there is even more reason for the individual to be driven to action. Pessimism is inspiring in a very real sense of the word. It inspires the individual to work against the natural tide of things, to create something new, to build something different than the metaphysical nature of the world.
The inspiration is two-fold. It is now-oriented and past-oriented. For the now-orientation, we see the natural path of the world as one going down and are then given an incentive to just do something about it. Doing something about it is the only way that things are going to stabilize, get better, and ultimately give themselves over to your will for creating a path forward. For the past-oriented direction, we can look to men and women who have created something for themselves and know that they did something against the natural ways of the world. We can view them as inspirations, and persons we can attempt to embody.
Rejecting pessimism outright doesn’t necessarily mean that one sees the world as a place of unicorns and rainbows, but it does seem to deprive the individual of some of that extra incentive to be driven to creation, to build a path forward, and to be a person against the grain.