20.01.2021

Lauren Berlant’s term cruel optimism is possibly the best way to describe the current state we exist in, every time we brush aside the anxiety caused by the pandemic and its inevitable economic, social and political repercussions by uttering the words “when things go back to normal”. This is spoken by people from all walks of life for different reasons – freelancers who want their job opportunities back, parents, partners and children who haven’t been able to see or say goodbye to their loved ones or people working from home who simply miss their Sunday roasts and pints. 

I’ve equally found myself guilty of throwing the words into conversation, as a way to alleviate the discomfort of the present moment. Those whose circumstances were abysmal and have only been worsened by the crisis are unlikely to agree with the sentiment, but their voices are rarely heard. The coveting of the “normal”, as if the crisis and the way it has unfolded is not itself symptomatic of that very normal (normal that we’ve put out of our minds being democratic institutions on the verge of collapse or the planet facing its sixth mass extinction), achieves the opposite of what it aims for, which is a stable existence – yet we seem to grow no wiser. 

What is meant by cruel optimism is that an individual desires an object (in this case “the normal”) despite it being harmful to them; the idea of being given the opportunity to work hard in order to consume an increasing amount of goods, which preoccupies the majority of modern life is an unsustainable one, yet there is no “opting out”. In Cruel Optimism, Berlant explains it as follows:

“What is cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x [normal] in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being; because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and looking forward to being in the world.”

In more simple terms, our love-affair with “normal” is our attachment to continuity, which often translates to security in so far as for us, “normal” provides a fantasy of how things ought to turn out if we play by the rules. 

“Normal” does not account for disability, disease, catastrophe or death, and relies on an individual’s ability to alter their circumstance. The alternative to the fantasy, something akin to the pandemic that has inspired such a fondness toward the “normal”, robs the majority of us of our imagined mobility, upwards or otherwise. In the face of this, rather than admit our limitedness and codependency, we cling onto the optimism that despite all evidence, pursuing our own individual interest is the best option – not least because it presents itself to be the only option. A gradual decline in our security, as has happened with the precarity of work and privatization of healthcare, is an acceptable adjustment to the fantasy because it does not remove the possibility of winning big, if one plays the game and hustles hard. It is the alternative, which is being stuck exactly where one finds oneself that is too much for most to bear. 

The relief brought on by news of the vaccine cannot be underplayed, but nothing has laid bare so painstakingly the conditions that our so-called liberal democracy produces than the priorities that have emerged from this pandemic. The situation we found ourselves in, in the midst of the pandemic, was that the economy depends on the workforce that is endangered by going back to work, and therefore carries both the risk of going to work and not going to work – disease and death on one hand, the collapse of the economy that results in unemployment on the other – yet does not yield the real profits it accumulates. This is a rather astonishing reality to inhabit, but the context of the pandemic casts it as exceptional, not normal. 

What upholds the cruel optimism is that the glitching of the system can always be blamed on an external factor and never needs to bring into question its internal architecture. The reason it is a particularly useful of a term, is because the entirety of our financial system depends on it. The marker for a healthy economy is the optimism its consumers have in the future. This sentence alone should ring alarm bells; if our well-being depends on us being consumers, then as it were in the pandemic so it will be with the impending environmental crisis. Our responsibility, as the masses, will both be to work and consume to keep the economy going, as well as shoulder the environmental impact of the same consumption. To work in order to consume is at once our duty and our privilege. Through the mechanisms of the market, our short-term benefit is at odds with our long-term well-being, and therefore we are guaranteed a vested interest in our own demise. If cruel optimism is the mechanism by which we destroy ourselves through our desire toward the thing that causes us harm, what better example of it than this

This is bound to result in a system where crises are legitimated by their impact on our ability to consume, rather than their toll on well-being. If the paradox of consuming in order to maintain the basic function of economy was not the root of the crises, this might be a justifiable in the context of a state of exception. However, in an economy where crises are managed by increasing debt in order for the consumption to keep the wheels turning, with the idea that the money will be reinvested back into the economy (rather than stashed away at off-shore accounts for example), whilst the working people are being asked to shoulder the burden of “rebuilding the economy” once again, the question is what happens when crisis becomes the norm, not the exception? Will we finally accept that the institutions that are meant to mitigate the crisis may very well be aggravating it? 

What is most peculiar about the reliance of our financial system on cruel optimism is that it is exactly the necessity of optimism in the system that causes the issue. The system is by its design unable to take stock of its own failings or adjust accordingly, because the financial system that lubricates capitalism and allocates its surplus is a house of cards built upon this speculative faith. Any sign of doubt in the ability of the economy (which directly translates into the ability of individuals to produce) to keep calm and carry on will burst the bubble of optimism and send the economy into a downward spiral. 

Due to the inflexibility of structures that necessitates such cruel optimism, the shedding of it can lead to what has been described as depressive realism; a level-headed assessment of one’s circumstance, i.e. abilities to alter said circumstance and the limitations one faces. A positive definition of this would be “the healthy suspicion that modern life has no meaning and that modern society is absurd and alienating” (). The acknowledgment that a life could be lived differently does not equate to nihilism; it is simply a coming-to-terms with how one might live one’s life if one is to believe one’s own very eyes as to what is taking place. In realistic terms, the institutions that govern the world economy are not cut out to handle the aftermath of the pandemic in a way that doesn’t take its toll on the average person nor have they even a rudimental grip on how to approach the environmental crisis that will unfold in our lifetime. More importantly, it is not their function to do so; their architecture is designed to allow rationally governed self-interest to realize its full potential, come hell or high water – and both will come.   

Optimism is not a virtue, when it is not warranted; it tips over to the side of delusion. There has been very little time taken to slow down the pace and assess the best way forward from the pandemic, because our sense of security has been so shook that we once again reach for the “normal” as the lesser of two evils. This isn’t to say that factions of the society have not always been alert to the cruelty of our optimism, or simply not been privileged enough to lull themselves into such a false sense of security, as “normal” has been violent and deadly for them all along. The pandemic, if anything, ought to have revealed to us that optimism does not shield us from reality; at the very least, a nostalgia for the previous year rather than decade (as seen in the form of memes that lament and we thought 2019 would be bad) should be a sign that our collective state of crisis is accelerating with no evacuation plan in sight. To have hopelessness for a future where things remain unchanged is however not the same as having hopelessness for the future as a whole – in fact it is a beginning of a new hope, where one can understand what limitations must be overcome in order for change to occur.