''Optimism is not generally thought cool, and it is often thought foolish.
The optimistic philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in 1828, “I have
observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who
despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a
sage.” In the previous century, Voltaire’s “Candide” had attacked what
its author called “optimism”: the Leibnizian idea that all must be for
the best in this best of all possible worlds. After suffering through
one disaster after another, Candide decides that optimism is merely “a
mania for insisting that all is well when things are going badly.”
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