Quote of the Day: Half-Full, Half-Empty, or Not a Glass at All?

Posted by parceline on

Friday, September 7, 2018

“The Optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, the Pessimist fears it is true.”

I first saw this quote in a book of quotes in high school, attributed to J. Robert Oppenheimer. As I had written my high school paper on the nuclear bomb test at Trinity Site, and I revered explosive devices, this was a natural choice for my yearbook quote. It played into my natural cynicism as a teenager – the world was broken, and everyone was an idiot. (The level of cynicism displayed by most people in my high school had would make Fake John Galt blush)

Looking from twice that age, I can still value in it. People clearly see the world completely differently. People look at Trump and see completely different things. Some people see him as the best world leader of the last century, others see him as the source of all evil in the universe past, present, and future. Obama was even more famous for being something people projected their own worldview onto, seeing him the way they wanted to see him (Obviously I think my perspective is correct – if I thought it was wrong, I would change my perspective).

I have a good friend from Singapore who thinks democracy is insane and the only way forward is rule by a bureaucracy. Actually changing what the government is doing is impossible. I could only imagine how alien life would see the world.

Now, this is not the end of the story, since this quote was not made by Oppenheimer, but was instead by James Branch Cabell, a satirical fantasy author. His version of the quote was even better from the know-it-all, above-it-all adolescent:

Creeds matter very little… The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. So I elect for neither label.

How many times have you we heard people proclaim their transcendence of simple categories? Beyond left and right, they represent a higher plane than all of us grubby partisans. Almost without exception, this is a Trojan horse for their ideology, usually left-wing.

Now, Oppenheimer did have a fairly cynical view of the world, as the below quote demonstrates, but it was tempered by a certain conservative skepticism of magical solutions to all of our problems:

It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.

Published in Religion & Philosophy

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