We are not all “I this together.”

This morning I read what I think is a very good article from The Atlantic. The article, by Eric Liu, talks about how many people and institutions are saying “We’re all in this together”.

What we need is not for every community to suffer intensely, but for every community to commit to joint defense. It’s the NATO principle, brought home: an attack on one is an attack on all, and necessitates a response from all. That is true at every scale, from the neighborhood to the nation.¹

Dialectical Pessimism

Liu seems to be articulating a version of what I call dialectical pessimism in this article. It’s pessimistic because he his looking at the state of things and seeing how bad things really are. Then, rather than attempting to comfort himself with some sort of fake optimistic saying like “”We are all in this together” he is saying “Things are really broken.”

This is dialectical because it is only after we recognize how bad things are and integrate that badness into our subjectivity that we might become motivated to change things into something better.

In this sense: pessimism is the new optimism.