Cruel Optimism
A helpful phrase for understanding when we are offering individual solutions for what are systemic problems, thereby making systemic solutions less likely or apparent
Obesity is increasing - must be a failure of willpower and/or people getting too lazy. Addiction, attention issues, crime, diseases related to stress, depression, and anxiety - all these are treated by many as problems with solutions rooted in individual changes, as they are understood as individual failures to deal with life as it is. For years as a teacher of history, anthropology, and other social studies courses, I noticed that my students had a much tougher time understanding things from a systemic perspective than from an individualistic perspective, which impacted not only their understanding of what caused those problems, but the solutions that would come to mind as well. This isn’t all that surprising, given our society’s individualist orientation, which is fairly extreme even compared to other industrialized, western, and at least moderately individualistic societies.
I came across a useful phrase recently to understand, and perhaps help to change this narrow and unhelpful perspective: “cruel optimism”. This phrase was used in the book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again, by Johann Hari in reference to individualistic solutions being suggested to help people fight increasing distractedness caused by ever-increasing time on our screens and the addictive apps, videos, games, etc. that keep us ever-scrolling, among numerous other causes he documents in this well-worth reading book. I like the phrase because it so aptly captures the cruelty in the view that all it takes to deal with a social problem is for each of us individually to take some set of measures. Those measures often end up failing to work in the long-term, while also leaving the underlying social, economic, political - the systemic causes - completely unexamined, and therefore immune from critique and potential change; all while leaving the individual who has been failed feeling like a failure.
It isn’t difficult to come up with examples to demonstrate this. Obesity is one Hari began with in his explanation of the phrase. Statistics show very well that the problem is not about isolated individuals, as the percentages of people who are overweight has gone up at the very same time as our food system has changed, our development patterns and transportation have changed, our whole way of living has changed, with so many parts of that contributing to our diets moving more toward processed, high-sugar high-fat foods, and away from the foods our great-grandparents ate. We are in car-centric built environments, so far fewer people walk or bike to work, school, or for local errands (no corner stores are even legal to build in most suburban neighborhoods, for example), so exercise is an activity that needs to be planned for rather than built into our daily activities. It is crystal clear that the causes are systemic, as the places that have not undergone these changes have not had similar weight gains.
These and many other causes are part of a systemic understanding of the obesity epidemic. Yet the solutions most likely to be offered are cruelly optimistic ones. Eat better! Exercise more! They are optimistic, as they can be convincingly sold as part of a larger self-improvement package that we just need to follow with a few small changes a day and our problems will be solved (how many self-help books have a short number of steps to solving such problems?). But they are cruel solutions in that most people will not be able to swim against the fast-flowing river of our junk-food and convenience food heavy environment, the very busy days that leave little time for the average person to shop for and prepare healthy meals, or to do regular exercise. We know that only something like 5% if people who lose weight on diets end up keeping it off long term. This is NOT a personal failing (even though it will feel like one to those who attempt these cruelly optimistic solutions and fail) but a social failing, as in a healthy society eating healthily and exercising would be the default: one would get plenty of exercise and eat a healthy diet by just going along with the norms of daily life, built into the social structures, not by having to fight against them every step of the way.
Another example of cruel optimism is the way that meditation has been offered as a solution to the problem of ever-greater stress, and all the problems that stress causes, that average people are suffering in our society. It is clear why this is optimistic - meditation can really help, and isn’t a bad thing for people to do. Yet it is cruel because it will not help in any deep way for the underlying social problems that are causing the rise in levels of stress. Take, for example, the fact that something like 60% of Americans don’t have the money in savings to deal with a $500 emergency. Or that huge numbers of people have difficulty just paying for food and housing each month, or aren’t certain they can keep their jobs long term, or pay for needed medications, or for child care, etc. None of these huge stressors will go away through meditation, and so it’s cruel to treat it as a solution if it is a part of treating the status quo that causes the rising levels of stress as merely background, as taken for granted, as something we can or should do nothing about.
Another interesting little note about cruel optimism is that it is also cruel because it can work for some people - but is much more likely to do so for the privileged. Those with more resources - in money, time, and otherwise, are less affected by social structures than those with fewer resources. It’s fairly easy to see why people with more wealth and power would be able to more effectively remove themselves from the situations causing stress, or obesity, etc. so that they could take advantage of their positions to have the individualistic solutions work for them that might be much less likely to work for families stretched to their limit in money, time, and all other resources just to survive. This can have the impact of making privileged people more likely to advocate for cruelly optimistic solutions, if they fail to examine how their own better circumstances make such solutions significantly easier to implement than they would be for others, who then get blamed for failing to implement them successfully.
Already, since seeing “cruel optimism” in print recently, it has popped up in my thoughts numerous times as I have read about other social issues and the discourse around them. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, given that there is a whole industry (public relations, advertising, communications, etc.) that is very well funded to push the cruelly optimistic solutions as part of a larger campaign to individualize every problem, thereby immunizing the corporate interests causing those problems from the kinds of systemic solutions which might cut into their profits. It has been incredibly effective, as I find myself thinking about my carbon footprint - a phrase pushed by the fossil fuel industry to get us thinking that carbon emissions are my fault (even though I had no choice about the fossil-fuel dependent economy we are now in) and so it is my individual habits that are the solution. Likewise, when I am asked to donate to some well-meaning NGO working on helping individuals to improve their lives, it’s difficult to stop and think about whether they are getting at the systemic roots of the problem or perhaps helping keep the problem focused at the individual level, which in the long term may actually aid the status quo causing the problem to stay in place by averting our attention from the rood causes. Is my donation just part of more cruel optimism? This may be a difficult question to ask, and a potentially even harder one to answer definitively, but it seems like one I need to ask more often.