Local optimism

This is what is called indifference

Recently, a friend of mine, who is a novelist and screenwriter, justified his lack of interest in Palestinian genocide, our so-called progressive Italian government and its laws against civil rights, and some wars that you can name for yourself, by saying that he is too scared and worried to face the abyss, being a father, a husband, and a son. He prefers to sleep at night, perhaps thinking that everything will be alright, one way or another.

This attitude is what I call "local optimism": when someone, despite a world that seems to be a disaster and an idiocracy, claims to believe there will be a happy ending or adjustment, and that any situation is not so bad after all, as someone will fix it. Not the local optimist, of course—not them. But someone else will. This optimism is 'local' because of the progressive narrowing of what 'everything' means, the ongoing reduction of the happy ending, so that, in the end, what cannot go wrong has the same boundaries as the optimist's house. Things under our control, our house, our courtyard maybe, our place—these can't go wrong. As for the others… well, there will be an arrangement: wars cannot last forever. Genocide can't be eternal, once any civilian has been killed. It is always possible to move on, to forget, and forgetting entails forgiving.

Consequently, if you are asking yourself why people have become more and more individualistic and indifferent to others' fates, the reasons are many, but the root cause is their local optimism. The problem is that you can't trust local optimists. They lie to themselves: that's why they seek constant entertainment. They are doers, they produce, they work, they talk about the obvious. Their productivity is a path to illusion, a damaged 'dasein.' If they stopped and let themselves think, they would probably realize that control is a joke: they can't control planet Earth, so they can't control their own homes. But this understanding is the last thing local optimists want to confront. They never have time to reflect, so they prefer to become more and more unrealistic. Maybe even Heidegger had become a local optimist. And if you know, you know.