On Speculative Thinking - Be Positive
While driving back from a sushi happy hour tonight, a friend of mine asked me if I thought a genocide similar to the Holocaust could ever happen again in a westernized country. My immediate, gut-level answer was “no,” but it was unjustified at the time. I’ve since had an opportunity to think about why I was so quick to answer “no,” though my reasons are still perhaps unjustified.
Speculative questions such as the one stated above are, well, speculative. There is no way we can provide answers to them; we can merely make guesses at them. No one can predict a mass genocide with 100% certainty, especially someone as poorly educated in history as me. I think the reason why I was so quick to answer “no” was because I’m very positive. I don’t know if a genocide can occur again, so I answer “no” because it’s a positive answer. Perhaps having a positive attitude is unrealistic, but hoping and dreaming is the first step to getting anywhere, right? Being positive will lead to more internal happiness, which will then rub off on other people. Especially for me, being around positive people like Jim, Eric, and others really gets me pumped and makes me feel good. As you become positive, your friends will become positive as well, making their friends positive, and the cycle will continue.
I think my claims here are very subjective, so perhaps many of you won’t agree with me. However, I will say that a world with 100% positive thoughts is better than a world with 100% negative thoughts, so I believe in working towards the 100% positive world, despite how unrealistic that might be. Someone might argue, “Well some people just aren’t naturally positive.” My response to that is that I will continue to be positive and try to have an optimistic view and a smile on my face as often as possible; I’ll have positive thoughts that I’ll rub off on them :).
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Yea dood, keep that glass half full.
I agree with you that spreading a positive attitude can have a tremendous amount of impact on the people around you, and thus hopefully spreads out to a greater community. The more people with a positive attitude the better society will function. However, I would suggest that positive attitudes are easier to maintain in a generally positive environment. As much as you can effect your environment, your environment can also effect you. I would think that for most people, if they lost their jobs and their homes it would be significantly more difficult for them to have a positive outlook. While I don’t anticipate a genocide like the WWII example (or any at all), I think it is important to recognize that since WWII western countries have had rising prosperity (with short exceptions) and have not experienced prolonged difficult times. One of the reasons why facism and then nazism succeeded can be associated with intense economic hardship, which definately altered the German environment. Although when Hitler was elected in 1933, and the consequent Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the entire German population could not have foreseen the Holocaust or WWII at that point. As the war begun and continued, most people allowed the ‘crimes against humanity’ to increase in severity and almost no one spoke up. It all occured virtually uncontested. Was German society that fundementally different than it is now, or American society, who knows? I sure don’t. But if anyone wishes to inquire how seemingly normal people can be lead to do terrible things, they should read The Lucifer Effect, by Philip Zimbardo. He describes the human tendencies towards evil and may even help one understand how one can overcome them should one ever be unfortunate enough to have the oppurtunity. I believe recognizing and embracing the flaws of humanity is the best way to overcome them, so when anyone comes to a crossroads they can take a step back and analyze the morality of their decision, or lack of decision to intervene. In short, I think if people forget, and become arrogant in thinking humankind is so much more liberal now than it was sixty years ago, then immoral decisions can be perpetuated in more subtle forms that are still harmful.
I have to disagree here. Now, like you say, there are social benefits to being positive, but there are also costs. Being unjustifiably positive about a lot of things can lead you and others to make mistakes in judgment. For example, if you are trying to make investment decisions, being unjustifiably positive is a bad idea because it is important to make a decision based on the most realistic information feasible. The places where we should be unrealistically positive are those places where either our decisions have little impact or our decisions are not heavily impacted by our forecast of the future (like whether we are positive or not).
Matt and jsalvati, you guys have great points. I geared this post towards speculative thinking, and I suppose I should have used a second adjective, though I’m not sure which.
I considered writing about the investment case, but I specifically didn’t because I didn’t want to fall into the trap of trying to define each case when you should be positive and each case when you shouldn’t be. Instead I made the general came that it’s better to be positive in speculative situations, which hopefully implies that there are cases when positive thinking isn’t the right thing to do.
Again, thanks for your feedback here.