Chuck Bryan

I read that Voltaire wrote Candide to mock Leibniz and his idea of the optimized universe because he thought it was so preposterous.

Interesting.

But you hit on something here, like the entire concept of optimism and pessimism is rooted in philosophy, not psychology.

And pessimism kind of went on to have its own career.

Aside from optimism, Schopenhauer came up with philosophical pessimism, which is the basis of all life is suffering.

Everybody's heard that one and or experienced it.

And then there are a couple other versions of philosophical pessimism that I thought were pretty interesting.

The one that grabbed me the most is this idea that there's more evil in the world than good.

So evil exists in greater quantities, but it's also of greater quality too.

So a small amount of evil can spoil a very large amount of good.

Oh, I agree with that, I think.

I do, too.

I thought of a good example is, let's say you have an executive who works at a charity and they get caught stealing money from that charity.

Yeah.

Well, when word gets out, a lot of people probably are going to stop giving to that charity.

And then the good that charity was doing for other people is going to dry up all because of the one act of that one person.

Yeah.

Or let's say you throw a birthday party for your kid and the whole whole day goes great.

And at the end, some some little jerk kid spoils it all by doing just this one thing like smashes your kid's face in the cake or something.

Oh, man.