RoR: Forum

"I'm optimistic that the sun will rise tomorrow." If I were conducting group therapy, I could go around the room and ask for spontaneous reactions to that statement, I guarantee you that there would be some in the group who would only agree in a very grudging fashion - reluctant to admit anything positive was coming. And there would be others who would use it as a spring board from which to leap to very improbable predictions of their lives becoming all they ever wished and more. False optimism and habitual pessimism are clearly psychological defense mechanisms.

A healthy optimism is totally different. I think that a healthy optimism is always made of three things.

1. It has a subject that is cast in the future or an assertion about the nature of something.
"I think I can start my own business." "I believe man will eventually live up to his potential."
2. It is a prediction or expression of a positive state of being for the subject. That a value is going to be achieved, or actually does exist. It is on the side of 'Good'.
3. It has a feeling that is almost always part of the package. Optimism motivates, and if we aren't dealing with pessimism as a defense, it feels good to be optimistic.

Someone might say, "But I'm talking only of a general attitude towards life, not some specific outcome or state." I would argue that such a thing will never come up, except as a feeling state. And that if it is the feeling state that comes up first, it will in effect define the direction the reasoning will take to explain why the person feels optimistic.

Example: John comments, "Hey Bob, you're looking happy." Bob replies, "I'm feeling good. Life is treating me well." "Aren't you worried about the company lay-offs?" asks John. Now at this point, Bob, will go inside his mind and find those facts that support not worrying about the lay-offs. This is a chicken and egg kind of thing where the feeling may be resolved into the facts or beliefs that support it, or the facts and beliefs will make judgments that are positive and create optimistic feelings.

So, I can see optimism as a feeling. I can see optimism as a habitual way of viewing things. I can see false optimism as a psychological defense - a self-made naivete where everything is always peaches and cream. I can see optimism as a component of ones personality. I can see a marked absence of optimism (being pessimistic) as a different kind of defensive stance.

But I'm not sure that I can see it as a virtue. What I can see is that a constellation of good mental habits regarding one's approach to life, would contain a number of virtues, like honesty, and they would result in feeling more optimistic than we would otherwise have felt - and that's a nice reward, but not a virtue.

Rand wrote: "�Value� is that which one acts to gain and keep, �virtue� is the action by which one gains and keeps it."
In that we can see that virtue is a kind of action - like making an honest statement. It is a voluntary action, and it is seeking value.

Children naturally take pride in their achievements and have to be taught, by soul-crushing altruists, to be humble and not to celebrate themselves. I think that optimism is also a child's natural state. That only those who have been made to feel insecure and frightened, don't feel optimistic.

I don't think we can choose to be optimistic in the same way we can choose to be honest. Honesty is always an element of an action. Optimism is a state and not one we can just choose. But we can choose to be more proactive in our thinking and reject self-critical thoughts, force ourselves to ask more penetrating questions - the kind that can open up possibilities. We can do things that make a better environment for a natural optimism to flourish.

Post 1

Friday, June 14, 2013 - 7:44pm

JR: " One way to do this is by taking chances and acting on your values, and learning what it takes to achieve them. Fear of the unknown can be a major source for believing a value is harder to achieve than it is."

For my senior seminar in criminology, I wrote about Ayn Rand's theory of evasion and the roots of crime. Contrasting that, in that same paper, I presented evidence of "successful crime." Understand that these are among the lowest rungs of society: young people, homeless, living a marginal existence through petty crime. And yet, the same virtues sustain the successful one as explain the success of Wall Street executives.

�When Crime Pays: Capital, Competence, and Criminal Success,� by Bill McCarthy and John Hagan (Social Forces, Vol. 79, No. 3, Mar., 2001, pp. 1035-1060) built on a broad range of previous works and presented new measures of criminal social capital. They found that success in criminal enterprise depended on specialization, cooperation tempered by autonomy, willingness and ability to work (called �planful competence�) and a basic desire to succeed. These traits combined to predict success at illegal drug sales, even among youths who were homeless.

In other words, relevant to this, their optimism opened the doors to success.

Post 2

Sunday, June 16, 2013 - 2:53am

Steve, I see a strong parallel between pride and optimism qua virtues. Everything you said about optimism being a state, or feeling, one could say about pride as well. But only if you view it as the end result. You can also understand pride as a virtue, and see it as a set of strategies or approaches to enhancing your life. The virtue of pride would be the conscious attempt to improve your character, to have confidence in your abilities and choices, and above all to really earn that confidence.

Optimism as a virtue is not saying that you should feel some way about the world, and if you feel it, you are virtuous. Like pride, it is a set of choices or approaches to seeking value. While pride sees your own self-evaluation as a critical component to pursuing values and understands that a lack of confidence in your self or your abilities can get in the way, optimism recognizes that you can not pursue values unless you are looking for them, and you can only act towards them if you think your actions can be successful.

I think this approach can be conscious and purposeful. One person I knew made a rule for himself to always agree to go out with friends if he was invited. This was in recognition that when he did go out, he enjoyed it, but beforehand he wouldn't anticipate that he would. A slight different approach would be to try to think of a reason to go before declining. If you aren't on the look out for values, you won't see their potential.

I think there are a lot of different methods that can be used, but they all fit within a common framework. They all act in recognition that the only values you can achieve are those you recognize and pursue.

And like pride, when you've really earned it, a positive, value-seeking perspective will become natural.

Post 3

Sunday, June 16, 2013 - 3:00am

Unrelated to the posts above, I've written elsewhere that Objectivists often view morality as a kind of sacrifice to prove moral worth. They view virtues in terms of costs. You prove how honest you are by telling the truth when it hurts. You prove how rational you are by refusing to evade no matter how painful it may be. I've argued against this approach, but it's a perspective of morality that is deep-rooted.

This article is kind of interesting because it presents a virtue of optimism that, properly understood, has not obvious costs. And I imagine when some people hear the idea, they can't quite see it because it doesn't fit into the idea of measuring moral worth by cost. If morality is about showing who is superior to others, calling something like this a virtue doesn't make any sense.

From that perspective, it makes more sense to interpret optimism as a kind of blindly positive view. At least that would incur obvious costs.

Post 4

Sunday, June 16, 2013 - 8:37am