War on Bullshit: Optimism

The debate with Rob Henderson on milforum continues and basically it's moved on to optimism vs pessimism. Refer back to this post to see where the discussion had actually come from.

Basically after trying to advocate that the richest people must be taxed even more than they are being taxed now and being convinced by a few others that complete and absolute global equity is impossible he had to throw one of these:

Posted by Rob Henderson

I know it won't happen... But call me crazy, I keep hoping for the best. This takes me back to the VERY FIRST PAGE of this thread... Fundamentally different outlooks on life. Optimism vs. Pessimism. I'm an optimist, I will hope for the best. Pessimists will try and use harsh reality checks to bring optimists down, but it ain't happenin' here.

So I had to reply with this:

You have no idea how dangerous blind optimism is. Basically that's what your optimism is. No, you're not crazy, you're just blind and a few other things. "Crazy" is often used as an excuse by people who know they're wrong but need a reason to be wrong and yet feel alright about themselves. After all, you can't really accuse a guy who is really "crazy" or "messed up" of anything.
Blind optimism got soldiers tied down in a confusing and unending conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Blind optimism is responsible for the financial melt down.
Blind optimism sent millions of troops "over the top" to get slaughtered by artillery and machine guns in World War I.
Blind optimism is the cause of countless structural failures of bridges, buildings etc.
Do you even know what real optimism is? It's the acknowledgement that things can get far worse. It's the realization that currently things aren't at a state where the only place to go is up. The understanding that our current situation is not as bad on the "good-bad" meter scale as we'd like to think.
Sure, overboard pessimsim leads to nowhere either, but in the real world usually pessimism ensures that security systems are redundant, elevators are designed to withstand three or four times the weight capacity as actually stated, etc.
Optimism is intellectual laziness at work.

Remember when the Germans voted in Hitler? For a while, they became optimists. They felt that their situation probably couldn't get any worse so they threw their chips in with Hitler and believed that he could bring them to glory unseen before.
Same goes with people in Communist countries. They often supported the Communists because for a while, the people became optimists and believed that there was very little room to go down and that these Communists could bring about miracles.

The pessimist will prepare for situations, first the ones likely to happen, then the ones not so likely but still possible. He'll also know that regardless of the countermeasures, bad things can still happen, so he'll be ready to tackle actual emergency situations as well. The optimist will close the book and go home, just to see his responsibility on the 9 O'clock news.

Pessimists who use pessimism to keep their drive to move forward in check (but not so much as to stifle any movement at all) are known as realists. Optimists hate realists because it means they have to do more work.

Optimism in action.