There’s a lot of it about, as my doctor used to tell me when I sought rescue from a deadly disease that turned out to be nothing more than a common flu bug.
This time around it’s optimism. Maybe not a lot, but more than you’d think. And it’s not all down to Discovery’s Adrian Gore bullying people into optimism by reminding us of all the progress we’ve made.
A week after Discovery’s high-profile leadership summit in Gauteng, the vast majority of attendees at a small gathering of investors in Cape Town put up their hands when asked if they were optimistic about the future of SA.
It was a surprising response. Surprising not because it was a sophisticated audience and it’s often considered sophisticated to be pessimistic and have gloomy expectations of the world, but because the same audience had just indicated it was not optimistic about the future of the world or of the financial sector. And yet it was enthusiastically optimistic about SA’s future.
This does indicate, as Gore suspects, that we are irrational when it comes to considering the future. It’s hard to imagine we’d do terribly well if the rest of the world and the financial markets were a shambles.
But it is all relative.
Of course it’s very likely that asked the same question 12 months ago the same audience would have been resolute in its pessimism about the financial sector, the world and SA. After all we were 10 years into former President Jacob Zuma’s terrifying reign and Cape Town was a few short months away from Day Zero, when water would no longer flow from taps.
My own bouts of pessimism are somehow connected to Gore’s seemingly eternal optimism
Thousands of South Africans emigrated because they assumed things would remain on a steeply downward trajectory. Tens of thousands more may have been on the verge of emigrating but are now determinedly optimistic — when they’re not being terrified and rendered borderline pessimistic by reports of a pushback from Zuma’s allies.
Perhaps other people’s pessimism makes us feel a little optimistic, and vice versa. For instance, I’m quite sure my own bouts of pessimism, triggered as they often are by consideration of soaring medical aid costs, are somehow connected to Gore’s seemingly eternal optimism.
As for the idea that we should all be happier and more optimistic because of the great progress humanity has made, well, that’s a bit problematic. Two hundred years ago about 95% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty and the remainder in ridiculous wealth; now just 10% are extremely poor. This sounds great until you consider that the absolute number hasn’t changed much. In 1820 95% of the world’s population amounted to about 1-billion people; in 2018, 10% of the world’s population amounts to just under 1-billion. And then there’s the few billion more living in common-or-garden poverty.
The assumption that we should be swayed towards optimism by satisfied contemplation of humanity’s great progress also overlooks a key human characteristic — our inability to feel satisfied for sustained periods.
Trying to feel satisfied is a key driver behind economic growth; the process might result in optimism for some and pessimism for others.
Gore’s humungous new Discovery cathedral in Sandton might have resulted in surges of optimism for him — but it may have added to the pessimism of others.
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