THE MAN OF HOPE; THE MAN OF DESPAIR; AND THE MAN OF “DON’T CARE”
Optimism, Pessimism, Indifference
The people of the earth are made up generally of three classes: optimists, pessimists, indifferents.
The radical optimist floats in a balmy spring air on a rosy cloud, stringing his banjo and singing lullabies to the gorgeously feathered songsters that surround him.
The pessimist is like a fly with its wings stuck on fly paper, and bemoans his fate as that of every other fly.
The indifferent is a devil-may-care sort of a person who does not care whether the sun shines, or whether it rains.
The extreme optimist is too happy to be of any use on earth; the pessimist sends us all to perdition and is afraid to walk under a ladder lest it fall on him, while the indifferent is of no use because he does not take any interest in the things around him. He is usually a tramp, or a free lunch fiend. He will offer to shovel the snow from your walks in July, and gladly offer his services as a harvest hand in January.
Apart from indifference, which is the offspring of the other two, optimism and pessimism, though extremes, meet among men, but possess different working machinery. One is really the aid of the other.
The earth was created in an optimistic spirit. Of that there can be no doubt in the mind of any man who believes in creation at all. But by the extraordinary conduct of our first parents in the Garden of Eden, this creation by the supreme Optimist, was changed into the most radical of pessimistic ventures—judged from the human standpoint, of course. We hear it from the most pious divines and it is probably correct.
A large gulf was dug in the original optimism and filled with the darkness of pessimism, where, floundering in it, man looks back to the joys lost to him forever by another’s folly, and then forward to the forbidding cliffs that bar his entrance to the joys to come, unless he engage in a mighty struggle and a hand-to-hand conflict with his animal nature. He may and must scale the cliffs.
It is quite certain that the evils said to be afflicting the people of the earth can never be cured by optimistic fancies, no more than can the racking pains and galling sores of the bedridden be healed by their concealment, or by covering them with a blanket of joy.
Financially, the man pressed by dire want, fancies the earth is ready to come to an end, whereas, the man with substantial wealth treads in a garden of flowers. The pangs of hunger find a lodging place in the stomach of a pessimist, while a royal good dinner is the joy of an optimist. The man in jail looks through a darkened glass, but his jailer sees all things bright and clear.
Optimism is a comparative virtue; pessimism a relative vice. Love is the destroyer of pessimism, while bankruptcy withers optimism at a touch. The contest between the two is like a perpetual game of tenpins, in which the pins are constantly overthrown to be as constantly re-set, and the score of the game is always a tie.
Our modern extreme optimists bewilder us with vain ideals. They flatter themselves with high sounding words and vague and dreamy utterances that entangle many, but which mitigate no evils, redress no wrongs, soothe no pain, cure no wounds.
“I am so sorry,” said a gentle optimist over a man who had just been run over by an automobile and both legs broken, and she wrung her hands in pity.
“I am sorry five dollars worth,” said a rough old heathen pessimist in the crowd as he passed his hat for money to relieve the poor man’s family.
Whenever a human wrong has been righted, an enslaved nation freed, a sinner brought to salvation, there has always been a pessimist at the beginning of the work, while the optimist came in later and realized the profits from the work.
There is a philosophy practiced by the optimist to be found in the lines of a great poet:
A philosophy that plunges men down into a gulf of despair, without hope of relief, without power to defend himself and his against oppression and injustice. It is a philosophy which, carried to its ultimate optimistic length, leads to the depths in which are sunk all those who bear upon their banner the legend:
There is less hope for those who climb to dizzy heights of optimistic congratulation, than for those plunged in the dark gulf of pessimistic woe, for to the latter there shall come a new heaven and a new earth, and former things shall pass away. But the former have forestalled their future abiding place by a creation out of their own presumption.
Here we have it—“presumption.” This is a worse condition than the despair of the pessimist, for the latter is constantly striving to get out of the slough of Despond, whereas the former is so puffed up with pride at his own achievements, that he is hidebound in the thralls of his own goodness and perfection.
The great fear of the extremes of optimism and pessimism is the danger of falling into indifference. When a man refuses to take advantage of the opportunities presented him, and says: “What’s the use?” his life is ended so far as any activity is concerned, and he is a useless member of society.
Be neither extreme, and remember that while there is life there is hope. The quality of optimism must be strained through the sieve of common sense.