Pop Pessimism Quotes

“(...) Is not true optimism to consider the world a fundamentally negative event, with many happy exceptions? By contrast, does not true pessimism consist in viewing the world as fundamentally good, leaving the slightest accident to make us despair of that vision? An ideal universe at the mercy of the slightest reverse and doomed, in any case, to death? And does not true superstition consist in regarding evil as an exception which ought to disappear?
We judge everything today in terms of a real and rational sequence of events. But we could equally fully and reasonably view those events as part of an irrational sequence – we simply have to reverse the perspective and take a maleficent transcendence rather than a providential force as our reference. We would be less despairing if we regarded every misfortune as justified by a transcendent order of evil.
Such is the rule of a radical optimism. We must make evil the basic rule. Then, the fortunate occurrence becomes the exception. Then, it is joy we would be fated to meet with. At any rate, in relation to an impossible truth, the two hypotheses are equally (im)plausible. But the hypothesis of evil has the advantage of restoring to the world its illegal character. Moreover, it lends a new prestige to good and happiness, the prestige of a miraculous exception.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments