Why great thinkers balance optimism and pessimism | Big Think

MICHIO KAKU: Leadership is understanding the challenges of the future, to working on scenarios of the future. Now, President Eisenhower, when he was a general, he was asked about his attitude toward victory, toward fights, and toward war, and he basically said that pessimists never win wars, only optimists win wars.

And optimists, what separates them from the pessimists? You see, the optimists see the future, the bright side of the future, the future that has opportunities, not the pessimists who simply say, "Ah, I can't do it, not possible, end of story." That's it folks. So, you have to have not just optimism, but you have to have one eye on the future.

LAWRENCE KRAUSS: I'm a pessimist, but that's no reason to be gloomy. And that's become our mantra in some sense, and it seems perfectly appropriate when you think about the universe because the universe, first of all, isn't here to make us happy; it isn't here to please us, and it doesn't give a damn what happens to us. In the far future, the universe is likely to be miserable, as I talked about in my last book, and I point out in my new book could be even more miserable.

So, in a purposeless universe that may have a miserable future, you may wonder, well, how can I go about each day? And the answer is we make our own purpose. We make our own joy.

JASON SILVA: And I've fallen in love with this idea of feedback loops. One of the things that Rich Doyle, who wrote "Darwin's Pharmacy," talks about is finding ways to become aware, to learn to perceive the feedback loops between our creative and linguistic choices and our consciousness and our experience.

In other words, the extraordinary capacity that we have to sculpt and mold our lives. The spaces we inhabit, the people we surround ourselves with, by curating spaces, by curating circumstance, we essentially co-author our experience. A lot of people go through life thinking that they don't have any control, that life is just happening to them, but that's not true.

We have a lot more control than we realize, and this extraordinary control comes from the power of feedback loops. You literally can decide, can almost author an afternoon into being by planning to meet in a certain place with a certain person, listening to certain music, drinking a certain kind of wine.

I've decided that I'm going to see the world through rose-colored lenses; I'm going to be optimistic, I'm going to look for the beautiful in every possible experience. That intention, that agency coupled with action, with editorial discernment, and saying, "Okay, I'm going to do this, I'm going to hang out with this person," creates a self-amplifying feedback loop.

In other words, the intention to be optimistic makes me stumble upon all these things that make me feel more optimistic and so on and so forth.

KEVIN KELLY: Over almost 200 years, every year has gotten a little bit better when we look at the scientific evidence. And while it's possible that next year everything could change, everything could collapse and fall to the ground, statistically, probabilistically it won't; it will continue because 200 years have gone, and next year it probably will continue.

But if you look at the kind of current political regime around the world and the factors of pressures, environmental pressures, the pressures of distraction that we have from the new media, then I think you have to resort to hope. In the long term, optimists decide the future.

It's the optimists who create all of the things that are going to be most important in our life because it was the optimists who built and invented all the things that are now important in our current lives. And I think people behave better when they're optimistic.

There's absolutely a need to be critical and doubtful and skeptical, and even pessimistic, just like if you have a car, you have to have brakes; you can't have a car no matter where it is without brakes. But it's the engine, the optimistic engine that keeps going and going and refuses to stop and it's only concerned about going forward that really drives a car, but you certainly need brakes to ste...