What’s shocking is that when asked to make predictions, depressed people are more accurate than optimists. It’s called “depressive realism.” The world can be a harsh place. Optimists lie to themselves. But if we all stop believing anything can change, nothing ever will. We need a bit of fantasy to keep us going.
Let's lie together in death as we did in life.
The Nazis taught us how effective a Big Lie could be. They shouted their propaganda so loudly and so often that we in the "civilized world" accepted their crimes until the brutal truth slapped us in the face. Today pimple-faced neo-Fascists scream there was no Holocaust and a lot of well-meaning people give them an audience.
At the same time, a much smoother type, the "success evangelists," are infiltrating the country, filling conference rooms and convention centers, and feeding desperate audiences the Big Lie about personal success. (…) It all sounds familiar because you grew up listening to the same conventional wisdom these guys did! Now they're making money selling you the stuff you've heard all your life.
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When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.
Distant galaxies now visible in the night sky will ultimately disappear beyond an unreachable horizon, receding from us faster than the speed of light. In a trillion or so years, anyone alive in our own galaxy may know nothing of other galaxies. Our observable universe will merely comprise a system of nearby, long-lived stars within the Milky Way. And beyond this starry night will lie an endless void—darkness in the face of the deep.
Mainlander’s pessimism divides him utterly from the neo-Hegelians. He finds their optimism naive. For him the chief sources of suffering lie in existence itself; even in the best state, and even with the greatest progress of the sciences, the main forms of suffering will remain. There will always be the traumas and troubles of birth, sickness, age and death (206-7).
