Revisited: The Future is Unknowably Good
It's time to accept reality. ✅
In the next few weeks, leading up to profound changes around here (👀), I’ll be reposting some of my favorite thoughts from the past few years. Most of these have been lost to the sands of the Net, and as an amateur digital archaeologist we cannot have that. Hopefully you will be edified.
What better time than the turn of a new year to pen a witty deconstruction of our culture's entire ritual of resolutions, hopes, and dreams for the upcoming three hundred sixty-five days. How silly of them all. If only they knew what us intelligent cynics know, that it's foolish to try because everything, clearly, is hopelessly stacked against them. Write, send, bask in the superiority.
What foolishness.
This smug attitude is so thoroughly rewarded in some circles that it has taken on an air of morality. Hope in the future is treated as not only silly but prideful, as if anyone believing in the potential for good has risen above their station and needs to be drug back down into the muck where they belong. Everywhere pessimism takes on a sheen of prudence, wisdom and safety. The fact that risk exists is trotted out as certain proof of imminent disaster, and those who dare cling to hope are bludgeoned into submission by hypothetical dooms. "Abandon hope, all ye who enter" has been metaphorically peeled from its place atop Dante's gate to hell and emblazoned instead in the halls of the elite, then slapped as an unquestioned slogan on the foreheads of the faithful.
I'll take my stand against this spirit, and name it devilish. This is not a label I use flippantly. Optimism and pessimism aren't equal poles balanced against one another, or personality traits responding to differing views of identical circumstances. One ought to be the response of weak humans to the future path of the universe. The other is a temptation, whispers that ascend from the abyss. Our decision as we consider this forking path will change the course of our lives.
Let's start with investment, as it's only slightly less inflammatory and vehemently debated on Twitter than Christianity. We've discussed elsewhere the stubborn fact that simplistic optimism stubbornly maintained is a massive source of free alpha. This is not an innovation of the crypto market, either. It's long been an axiom of the wisest of investment guides that flawed humans should simply attach their finances to a broad-based, low fee instrument that captures the upside of a broad portion of the global market, and then just walk away. Time, the productivity of human capital, and patience create returns over broad time horizons. This is a statistical fact that can be backtested and understood historically. At this point the doom-prophets of every stripe are already salivating, but I simply don't care. They cry aloud month after month in the financial press and on Fintwit (there's an apt name) with monotonous despondency. The crash is coming, just you wait. And about once a decade, they're finally right for a couple of months or maybe even a year. That's not wisdom, or prophecy.
It is in fact, hubris. It's the product of inflated ego and false intellectualism, writ large. Set against the plain evidence, and the experience of the past, they claim special knowledge that this time is different. This is the big one, Bitcoin is finally going to zero, bet you wish you had followed my advice and (insert patently terrible advice here). But this advice is, 9 times out of 10, plainly a coping mechanism meant to explain the supposed guru's exalted wisdom in sidestepping both risk and the attendant gains. Sure, you're profiting from your willingness to take a step of faith, but you'll be sorry! The name for this attitude is rightfully envy, not wisdom.
And the same outlook of envy and anger permeates other areas as well. Even within the Christian church are many who seem to insist that the correct and holy attitude to take is deeply pessimistic. The world is bad, the people in it are doomed, and the Church is failing. The government is out to get us (no matter who won the last election, and never mind the fact that no government in history has successfully "gotten" us yet). When someone comes along and questions this pessimism, they are labelled as naïve and shirking their duty, usually with a few Bible verses about being a "watchman on the wall" pulled out of context and thrown in for good measure. This is no more accurate an outlook on the world when it comes from within the Church than when it is found in the investing world or anywhere else. In fact, I believe it is shameful for someone who claims to believe in an all-powerful and all-good God to think like this. Throughout scripture the attitude is stark: either this revelation is true, and thus the most enduringly hopeful news possible, or it is untrue, in which case those who believe it are laughably and completely not going to make it. This is all that matters. Governments, viruses, and the moral decay of society bow the knee to the dominion of Christ in the end and presently. Death itself is ashamed. What are you afraid of?
We all live in a radically connected world, and must choose what to do with the information we can access. And I have seen the fruit of pessimistically trusting in disaster rather than exercising faith and putting your hand to the plow again. I reject it as faithlessness, not strength. I say that our cultural obsession with the apocalypse is a telling admission that we prefer the radical lack of responsibility it would entail. We would rather throw our hands up and despair than face the ambiguity and suffering of plodding forward. We fear the responsibility of conditions where our choice and action and faith are important, and so we grasp at any circumstance that seems to rule those conditions out. Anything rather than face our fears and step out hopefully, knowing the path will be hard and confusing but believing that the destination is worth the journey.
Against the gravitational weight of the will of God bending time and space, I refuse to even weigh my own silly excuses anymore. If the sting of death has been drawn, what more proof do I need to believe and act? What if, suffering and all, the future was already declared to be full of joy? How much longer will I keep the capital of my life hoarded in safety when my future is already known? The fact that I don't know it myself isn't sufficient reason for indecision. In fact, the cloud before my eyes should be reason enough for hope. I cannot foretell disaster, I have no sure knowledge that doom is coming. It wasn't better in the bygone past, and the passing years haven't brought any innovation of evil to challenge the will of Reality Himself. The only Person I know who can see time’s end has instructed me to hope with reckless abandon.
Look up. Take heart. Get back to work.
WGMI 😎
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. ~ C.S. Lewis
When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: "Death is swallowed up in victory." ~ 1 Corinthians 15:54
Amen! Preach it!!
Edifying indeed. Please resurface more good posts.