3 Comments

1. Bruce Charlton says:

   03/01/2011 at 9:27 am

   Let’s get this straight – you are optimistic because of all the bad stuff that is happening?

   Because – perhaps – you see the world as like a pendulum and the worse things get, the sooner the pendulum will swing the other way?

   BUT – suppose this bad stuff happening is not a pendulum but a trend, that all the bad things are just first steps on the way to badder things…

   Is this, in other words, a blip or a straw in the wind?

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   1. Brett Stevens says:

      03/01/2011 at 11:24 am

      Let’s get this straight – you are optimistic because of all the bad stuff that is happening?

      That would be amusingly counterintuitive! I am optimistic because I see the cycle ending. The world has had its six or eight centuries of wickedness, or focusing on the appearance and not the structure of underlying reality, and now people are tired of that and are beginning to work back toward constructive living. This is many factors at once, not just our financial or political failure. It’s a slow awakening. Until things hit rock bottom, no one had any ammunition against the progressives, liberals and leftists (or other reality-deniers, Crowdists, hipsters, egomaniacs, etc). Now we can point to their grand Utopia and say: it has failed. Like Communism, like National Socialism, like Anarchy. All failed. We must try something new even if that’s something old.

      Reply
2. crow says:

   03/01/2011 at 1:18 pm

   One is often able to learn more from the Comments than the Article itself.
   Bruce/Brett is Fascinating. Provocative. Eye-Opening.
   Apart from that: Optimism is its own reward.
   Nobody needs a reason for it.
   It is a survival trait.

   Reply