Optimism is passive. Hope is active.
And thoughts about Star Wars.
Last month, I was able to attend a Principles First event in Chicago. I’ve been watching recordings of these panels for the last two years, and was very happy to finally have one take place in my area.
Ostensibly, the theme of the evening was about “Free Trade and American Enterprise” - a clear reference to the attack on our prosperity coming from Trump’s tariffs and the antagonizing of our trade partners. And there was a lot of talk about that, but much of it ultimately ended up circling back to a theme of what can be done about our slide into an idiocratic illiberal state.
At one point in the evening, Charlie Sykes, who was wearing all black for the event, said something to the effect of “I’m wearing all black this evening to remind people that I’m not optimistic about things. But I am hopeful.”
While the line was delivered with Charlie’s dry sense of dark humor, I did find the message of it striking. After the panel concluded, I was able to chat with him about the concept of those two words a bit more.
Approaching Charlie, I said to him:
“I really liked what you said about optimism versus hope. Because there is a difference between those two words. Optimism is telling people that everything is just going to be alright. But it isn’t. Hope is taking action to make things right.”
He agreed with that assessment, and went on to talk about how he doesn’t like to give his readers a false narrative of positivity, when he’s actually very fearful of what happens next and does not think the trends are heading in a good direction. He believes in the importance of being level with his audience about the negative things, even if they don’t want to hear them, because they need to hear them. Otherwise, you’re basically just giving people an emotional drug that allows them to tune things out and go on thinking that time will sort everything and it will be fine.
Thinking about it more as we talked, I realized that what he and I were saying could be more simply stated as:
Optimism is passive. Hope is active.
That’s not necessarily to say that being optimistic is being lazy. I know plenty of people who are quite optimistic in the pursuit of their endeavors. And good for them. We need these rays of sunshine pushing forward in the arts and culture and business to create a more vibrant society.
But the difference between the definitions of the two words can be found in their underlying attitudes. A person who is optimistic is confident that their efforts will succeed, even if the evidence suggests that they might not. A person who has hope is uncertain of the outcome, but does the work regardless, often in the face of obstacles which they are very well aware of.
Optimism is easily crushed once the confidence is taken away. We talk here a lot about the tools of the authoritarian, but most of them are the ones that the authorities in power exercise themselves. One of the most useful tools, though, is the one the people use unwittingly against themselves.
Being optimistic about the future of the country says “If we can just weather this out, then things will go back to being okay in a few years.” We’ve seen a lot of business leaders take this attitude. How’s that been working out for them?
And for the average citizen, optimism is the belief that the guardrails will more or less protect them from the worst outcomes. Or the idea that America could become a truly autocratic state like Hungary - that’s just a thought that never occurs to them. They are optimistic that the United States will still more or less continue to be the United States as they know it, because they have too much confidence that America can’t be anything other than what it has been for their whole lives. This allows the guardrails to be eroded without enough of a sufficient outcry to stop it, and by the time the country has noticeably changed, it will have changed to such a degree that looking around will destroy that sense of optimism. Because now their confidence will be in the idea that all has been lost, and nothing can be done. Once lost, the eternal optimist becomes the eternal pessimist. And it is the pessimism that things cannot be changed that allows the power of the authoritarian to be complete.
Hope is more resilient. It knows how to take a beating and keep going, because it kind of knows that’s part of the journey. Hope looks the danger straight in the eye, and says, I’m going to do it anyway. Not because I know things are going to turn out well, but because I know that trying is the only way that they maybe do.
Yesterday, May the 4th, I got the chance to celebrate Star Wars Day at Galaxy’s Edge in Disney World. A great time to be certain, for the message of Star Wars is not to be forgotten in this time. It is not for nothing that the first movie of the original trilogy, the great struggle of a rebellion against an overwhelming authoritarian state, is called “A New Hope.”
TV Show Recommendation of the Week
Since we’re talking about Star Wars, I can’t enough recommend the show ANDOR on Disney+ as a perfect (fictional) depiction of what resistance movements actually look like - both at the ground level lives of sabotage operatives and normal people who get drawn into the abuses of the state as well as the higher up political figures. If the sequel trilogy movies (particularly Last Jedi) do the treatment of optimism as the motivating emotion to “The Resistance” in a way that’s reminiscent of the late-2010’s slacktivism which personified the online “Resistance” to Trump in his first term, then perhaps Andor is the Star Wars answer for us in the 2020’s for a more realistic take on what it means to do the offline hard work and sacrifice that our time might call for.
I can’t stop thinking about how much the prison story arc in the show is the perfect analogy for the CECOT prison in El Salvador. It’s worth watching for that alone.