"The kind of facile optimism that a figure such as Boris Johnson exudes is... a way of avoiding the issues, of pretending that we can resolve our problems by not thinking deeply about them, but by simply asserting “we can do it”. There is something equally objectionable about unthinking pessimism. About the insistence that a social problem is so beyond control that we cannot avoid catastrophe or so deeply rooted that it cannot be dug out... This, as much as climate change or racism, is an issue to confront. Otherwise, despair about challenging such problems will become a self-fulfilling prophecy."
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Kenan Malik Want to change the world? Then you’d better give up on self-defeating pessimism The Guardian (7 November 2021)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pessimism
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Pessimism
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