In praise of pessimism
"How, the optimist argues, can you be bothered to struggle for a state of affairs that you regard as at best unlikely, and quite possibly altogether unattainable? The answer lies in the appreciation that the political and the personal are linked not instrumentally, but existentially. Subscribing to an ideology, whether it bases its appeal in the reasonable prolegomena of a Rousseau-inflected state-of-nature, or one of the instinctive and Hobbesian variety, nonetheless involves the individual in an act of deferral of the form: not now, but given such-and-such, then.
It is this “such-and-such” that forms the basis of all institutionalised appeals to political action: the communist utopia is forestalled quite as much as the thousand-year Reich; both retreat in advance of the measured tramping of the mobilised masses. At a less dramatic level, politicians in our highly imperfect (but still vaguely operable) representative democracies exhort us with their manifesto promises of jam tomorrow and seek to remind us of the jam we spread on yesterday’s bread. It’s no wonder that electorates that are gummed up within the mechanisms of internet commerce find such appeals increasingly difficult to hear above the whine of their computers. After all, this is the most compelling contemporary paradigm of gratification: push the button to receive jam by express 24-hour delivery; and if you sign up for repeat deliveries, you can indeed have tomorrow’s jam today.
It is this consumerist ethic – if it can be so glorified – that has eaten away at any remaining semblance of altruism, its chomping in synchrony with the optimistic belief in the power of the market to unite mouths efficiently with jam. And this also explains why all political parties and charitable organisations now aspire to the form of commercial enterprises, complete with marketing departments and tax breaks for donations. Implicit in all of these activities, whether ostensibly dedicated to social welfare or to capital aggregation, is a utilitarian calculus. The nature of the good – or goods – may be disputed, but the conviction remains that it can be factually accounted for and numerically arrived at."
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