| | This all reminds me of what Peikoff wrote, in OPAR, about the "benevolent universe" premise vs. the "Pollyanna" approach.
Pg. 340:
The ability to achieve values, I must add, is useless if one is stopped from exercising that ability—e.g., if an individual is caught in a dictatorship; or is suffering from a terminal illness; or loses an irreplaceable person essential to his very existence as a valuer, as may occur in the death of a beloved wife or husband. In such situations,suffering (or stoicism) is all that is possible. Morality is a means to action in the world;the soul by itself is not an entity, an end, or a fulfillment. Character alone, therefore,deprived of the necessary existential context, will not produce happiness, not even metaphysical pleasure. There is no joy in being alive if one cannot live.
Virtue does ensure happiness, at least in the metaphysical sense—except when life itself becomes impossible to a man, because, for some reason, the pursuit of values becomes impossible.
And pg. 343:
The question is not 'What's the use?" but "What can I do?"
"We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster [explains a character in ATLAS SHRUGGED.] We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it-and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural."
This view of the world becomes in due course self-fulfilling prophecy (as does its opposite). The man who refuses to blame his problems on reality thereby keeps alive his only means of solving them.
The benevolent-universe premise has nothing to do with "optimism," if this means Leibniz's idea that "all is for the best." A great many things are clearly for the worst. Nor does the premise mean that "the truth will prevail," unless one adds the critical word "ultimately." Nor is benevolence the attitude of a Pollyanna; it is not the pretense that there is always a chance of success, even in those situations where there isn't any. The corrective to all these errors, however, is not "pessimism," which is merely another form of pretense.
The corrective is realism, i.e., the recognition of reality, along with the knowledge of life that this brings: the knowledge that happiness, though scarce, is no miracle.
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