The gentrification of pessimism

When I was a teenager, the dynamics of my family shifted dramatically. After my grandfather's death, my grandmother, solo and aging, moved in with us. My parents were clear about it — they couldn't stand the thought of her alone. She was mentally sharp, and we bonded deeply. Yet, I remember this persistent shade of gloom in her views. Her partner of a lifetime was gone, a void hard to fill. Her tough times during WWII played a big role in this. At six, she witnessed something horrific: an allied plane bombed another carrying her family. She lost her father and sister in that tragedy. That kind of early-life horror leaves its mark. It shaped her worldview, and painted it a certain shade of dark. I guess it’s fair to say my grandma was a pessimist.

Matt Ridley, in "The Rational Optimist", throws an interesting curveball. He splits pessimism into two camps: personal and societal. We're often wired to be optimists in our own lives, yet we lean towards pessimism when thinking about the world at large. That makes sense, right? You've got the wheel when it comes to your life. You can steer, shift gears, and hit the gas. But the bigger picture? That's like being in the backseat of a cab with a dodgy driver. You might think the government's a mess, or that we're cooking the planet. In these realms, your hands aren't on the controls, which easily brews a sense of gloom. Ridley's point is about whether of not you feel to have direct agency over your life.

Well, this isn’t the case for Europeans. France and Italy show the largest shares of people who are pessimistic both about their future and the future of their country. A total of 61% of French people express a pessimistic outlook about their personal lives and 69% about their country’s future. Similarly, 56% of Italians evince pessimism about their personal lives, while 72% do so with respect to their country’s future. I hopped around Europe enough to confirm at least anecdotally that a consistent form of pessimism (both personal and social) does seem the prevalent attitude: Portuguese fado music captures the laments of a bygone era, Spain’s Don Quixote symbolizes the impractical pursuit of idealistic goals, and German philosophers describe the inner nature of the world as “aimless blind striving”. If you’re currently going through a rough patch, I do not recommend you pick up “The World as Will and Representation”.

Yet this is hardly news, especially for our American cousins.

All over Twitter/X, there is a constant, subterraneous mockery of European gloominess, enriched by the stark contrast with rah-rah American optimism. I believe this meme transcends economic comparisons and hits the cultural root of the ideological fabric of my region. Americans and their ice-maker refrigerators have much to be optimistic about, but – no matter what the memes say – it’s not that Europeans are still rubbing sticks to make fire. I don’t believe in the economic argument. Europeans are not pessimistic because of what they have, but because of who they are — or aspire to be.

In “Zero to One”, Peter Thiel says that every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age. It’s some sort of syndrome. And almost all people throughout history have been pessimists. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse. The indefinite pessimist can’t know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. And if you believe something for long enough — if you believe that the golden age of your people is long gone, that ends up being part of your culture, the water you swim into, and ultimately part of who you are.

There’s a subtle difference that Thiel doesn’t capture here.

In contrast to European indefinite pessimism, a definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps surprisingly, China is probably the most definitely pessimistic place in the world today. When Americans see the Chinese economy grow ferociously fast, they imagine a confident country mastering its future. But that’s because Americans are still optimists, and project our optimism onto China. From China’s viewpoint, economic growth cannot come fast enough. Every other country is afraid that China will take over the world. China is the only country afraid that it won’t.

European outlook on life is downstream of the philosophical contributions of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: Schopenhauer saw the world's troubles, like poverty and disasters, as contradicting the concept of a perfect world shaped by a higher power. He felt that the world's inherent suffering made optimism unrealistic. Nietzsche, on the other hand, had a contrasting view. While acknowledging life's difficulties and pains, he believed in the importance of embracing these challenges. For Nietzsche, the value of life came from confronting and overcoming difficulties, a perspective inspired by Greek tragedy. This approach to pessimism focuses on accepting and valuing life, not in spite of but because of its trials. It's about facing adversities head-on, not despairing over them. After all, it was Nietzsche who famously said, "Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger."

So why would anyone pick this type of pessimism, over a more action-oriented breed?

In Europe, if you say the world has been getting better you may get away with being called naïve and insensitive. If you say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad. If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a McArthur Genius Award or even the Nobel Peace Prize. Harvard professor Teresa Amabile shows that those publishing negative book reviews are seen as smarter and more competent than those giving positive reviews of the same book. "Only pessimism sounds profound. Optimism sounds superficial," she wrote. For Europeans, pessimism, the kind that lets you withdraw completely from the game of life, is an intellectual posture. In

Europe, pessimism isn’t a mood, it’s a badge of intellectual honor. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek turns gloomy introspection into high art, dissecting modern society with a scalpel forged from deep skepticism. Climate crusader Greta Thunberg, apocalyptic warnings echo through the halls of European discourse. These are not just voices in the wilderness. This European penchant for the pessimistic isn't just a cultural quirk. It's a deep-seated intellectual tradition. Where others might read despair, Europe sees elitist depth.

Europe could overcome the many economic, social, and political issues if people were dedicated and committed to facing adversities and working hard at them. But we can’t have that. We can’t have that because Europeans are obsessively fixated on an ideology of class and hierarchy, a structural order of things that is predicated on the law of the social milieu: those who do the work, those who nurture an optimistic perspective on the future because they get their hands dirty and mold the landscape around them, well those are the low class. In the same way before the 1920s having tanned skin was associated with the lower classes because they worked outdoors and were exposed to sunlight, being “close to the metal” and “rolling up your sleeves” is stuff for the peasants — or at best for those cowboy cousins.

If you were born in early medieval Europe and were not the child of a great landowner, your prospects would have been rather bleak. There were few ways to have an impact beyond the village in which you were born. Literacy was the great “technology of ambition” of the pre-modern period. If you could write down instructions and some people could read them, you could administrate at scale, and trade the plow for the pen. Fast forward a few generations and the ranks of European elites are filled with lawyers, bankers, consultants, and pen-wielding referees of all sorts. The same process of gentrification that appropriated existential detachment and idleness then overtook pessimism.

In Europe, pessimism isn’t just a sideline philosophy. It’s a core tenet of an elite class draped in the robes of a hypocritical socialism – the 'do as I say, not as I do' brigade. This isn’t your rugged, bootstrap-pulling ethos of the Far West. Instead, it breeds a cultural framework where the intellectuals and the high-flyers, those that shape the discourse, are steeped in a sense of helplessness, a belief in the futility of personal agency. It’s a world where changing your circumstances is a myth, where the future is something that happens to you, not something you mold.

Europe has taught their children for decades that access is more important than output to navigate a rigid system of castes, and that linear outcomes are better than asymmetric bets because they are safer. Europeans are more averse to risk because risk-taking is the hallmark of the misfits and those who have nothing to lose — exactly the kind of people Europeans look down upon. Risk-taking tells much about who you are, and in a game of status, you want to be careful about the signals you send. In a mudded world of builders, intellectuals have become USB-C linesmen.

To be completely frank, it’s not that delusional optimism is somewhat morally superior. Technical and moral progress have always been equated in the American philosophy, but you have to see evidence around yourself of actual mess in order not to be an optimist. Somehow you have to square up the potential outcome of crypto, of VR, or AI with the fact that the refrigerator dispenses ice. Maybe there is a long, indirect consequence that ties these two outcomes together, but most likely these two things aren’t related. In pure Pareto-principle fashion, a ton of great outcomes derive from a small basket of technologies. The consequence of an oil discovery is that six people can stick a pipe in the ground and produce the nation’s entire GDP. The result is that there is nothing for anyone else to do for the rest, but to pander.

On the oldest side of the Atlantic, it’s almost a national sport to mock the cowboy-esque attitude of Americans, their bald eagle-loving, gun-worshipping unshakeable confidence of being Number One for the times ahead. It’s so comically bombastic it’s almost adorable. But it’s worth noting that in many ways, the sanest people on Earth enjoy some level of delusion (“God has chosen me”, “I am serving my country”, …) to instill some level of direction — a form of compass.

European elites have promoted the reckless transition from the economic means of subsistence, producing stuff that other people need, to the political means—refereeing stuff that other people make, or have. But human beings who are bored, incapable of productive work, and only know how to eat by taking, are the most dangerous force in the universe. This is how civilizations end.

All over Twitter/X, there is a constant, subterraneous mockery of European gloominess, enriched by the stark contrast with rah-rah American optimism. I believe this meme transcends economic comparisons and hits the cultural root of the ideological fabric of my region. Americans and their ice-maker refrigerators have much to be optimistic about, but – no matter what the memes say – it’s not that Europeans are still rubbing sticks to make fire. I don’t believe in the economic argument. Europeans are not pessimistic because of what they have, but because of who they are — or aspire to be.

Well, this isn’t the case for Europeans. France and Italy show the largest shares of people who are pessimistic both about their future and the future of their country. A total of 61% of French people express a pessimistic outlook about their personal lives and 69% about their country’s future. Similarly, 56% of Italians evince pessimism about their personal lives, while 72% do so with respect to their country’s future. I hopped around Europe enough to confirm at least anecdotally that a consistent form of pessimism (both personal and social) does seem the prevalent attitude: Portuguese fado music captures the laments of a bygone era, Spain’s Don Quixote symbolizes the impractical pursuit of idealistic goals, and German philosophers describe the inner nature of the world as “aimless blind striving”. If you’re currently going through a rough patch, I do not recommend you pick up “The World as Will and Representation”.

Tragedy is typically a reliable predictor of a pessimistic outlook on a personal future. But does it describe concerns over the future of society, too?