If you’re anything like the millions of people who grew up around the constant exploitation of socially desireable outlooks on life in 21st Century America, you must know of the tremendous and almost burdensome requirement of optimism and happiness.
Television marketing is a great example of this:
...the woman who looks just too damn happy deep-throating that spoon of peanut-free peanut butter and nearly climaxing at that “unbelievably low price”. That creepy attractive couple looking like they’ve just been blown by the Pope himself while filing for bankruptcy. (Because it’s just that great and easy). Or that lifeless, lower faculty, stare through what is very clearly supposed to be, the cleanest fucking wine glass thanks to a new formula improvement of the new commercialized dish soap. Ever jizzed at the sight of your clean dishes?
I believe that the United States is ushering itself into a restructured contingency of Leibniz’s movement of “philosophical optimism”: one that involves less religion (as the original premise suggests), and more social acceptance as a driving force. To briefly explain this is a short, specific context, Optimists, at that time, entrusted that God, is all good and that all evil (or our perception) is simply a by-product of our limited, mortal, view of this complex world. So indeed, the world is all good and we live in the “best of all possible worlds”. This led to a myriad of strange, and rather absurd acceptions to what seems like a bizarre and unjust exception to things that happened to them. In the famous book, Candide, written by Voltaire, Pangloss, the main character’s mentor, embodies this “Optimist” philosophical thought.
Found on the side of the road in a busy town, Pangloss evidently had both part of his nose missing and syphilis. Clearly burdened by his state of being, Candide is shocked by his lack of austerity given his state of being. Persistently and naively clinging onto his optimistic views, Pangloss insists that, again, “we live in the best of all worlds”.
If you were sitting on the side of the road with half of your nose missing and dying of syphilis would you believe that you live in the best of all possible worlds? Odds are, you probably wouldn’t. So why push this rhetoric? And why is it that negative emotions or reactions are so taboo in our society? The shift here is less having to do with religion, and more having to do with the pushback of negative emotion by society. One in which every action should be met with some sort of “toxic” optimism.
In Part II, we will explore the idea of optimism in society: how and why it came about, and how we can move forward to create a healthier view of negative thoughts and experiences./
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