Logic would tell you that you can never trust a mob to do anything but riot and that only one person (or at most two) can fly a plane at the same time. You certainly wouldn’t assemble 5,000 novice pilots on the flight deck of a 747 and ask them to make decisions about which controls to pull to take off and land.
Weirdly, though, experiments have shown that human beings possess the same uncanny sense that enables birds to fly in neat formations without hitting each other and fish to swim at incredible speed in shoals that move as if one mind were controlling them. If you crudely connect an audience of people to a video game, or even a flight simulator, their decisions even out and produce a coherent result which strongly points to the existence of what is called ‘collective’ or ‘symbiotic intelligence’ or a ‘hive’ or ‘group mind’.
In Out of Control, Kevin Kelly describes a demonstration of co-operative flying by Loren Carpenter, one of the graphics wizards behind Pixar Animation Studios. The members of the audience are asked to land a simulated plane by voting on each movement of the pitch and roll controls with either a red or green wand:
“There is something both delicious and ludicrous about the notion of having the passengers of a plane collectively fly it. The brute democratic sense of it all is very appealing. As a passenger you get to vote for everything; not only where the group is
headed, but when to trim the flaps… Nobody decided whether to turn left or right, or even to turn at all. Nobody was in charge… The conferees did what birds do: they flocked. But they flocked self-consciously. They responded to an overview of themselves.”
This suggests that democracy may not be such a daft way of running a country and that we can trust humanity to make decisions in its own best long-term interests. We may seem bent on division and destruction but when we want to we’re also capable of acting with telepathic will.
Sources
Hope
Hope and optimism go together but they are not quite the same thing. Václav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, explores the difference between them in his book Disturbing the Peace (1990). Hope, he says, is:
“A state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good
works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from ‘elsewhere’ it is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”
Hope in Christian theology is a virtue, a gift of grace from God, and while the word is rarely used in its religious sense, this does at least indicate that it is a much older, more primal force than optimism.
It is also, as Havel suggests, more enduring because it is a inseparable part of us. No one can force it from you on the rack and you can’t leave it by accident on the 10.11 into Waterloo.
Hope is essentially an emotion, not a feeling derived from reason, and it cannot be activated or reactivated by will. It’s not interested in received wisdom, realism, statistical proof or argument. It is bravery and foolishness combined, which persists in face of contrary evidence; the motivator behind what seems like a futile effort against the odds; an inner conviction that there is only one way to go whatever the obstacles. It also lies behind the impulse of the artistic creator who is convinced that the world will one day recognise his gifts, who keeps on sending
“Hope is an ability to work for something because
it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”
out his manuscripts despite the discouraging feedback he gets.
It trusts in human nature and the human spirit and often implies a belief in, if not a benign god, then at least a sense of purpose and progress to the universe. “We need to remind ourselves more and more often that hope is not a temperament but a virtue, and act hopefully even if we don’t feel hopeful,” the author Philip Pulman told
Prospect magazine in 2007.
Optimism is not a virtue or an emotion but a mental calculation; a decision of the mind; a conclusion arrived at entirely by sifting though evidence and experience and applying reason. Whereas hope can be thrown out as a personal belief without justification you need communicable reasons for optimism and these are open to challenge and debate.
Optimism could be said to lie on a continuum of feelings between confidence or expectation and hope. Like hope it trusts in human nature but only through observation of human behaviour.
Whereas hope is more non-committal and vague, leaving the outcome to fate, optimism is more practical in its outlook. Compare “I hope you get better” to “I know/I’m sure you’ll get better” or “you are getting better”. It could be said that there’s something desperate and imploring about hope whereas optimism is more centred, balanced, equanimical. In daily life the two words are often used as if they were interchangeable but it adds richness to the language if we can maintain the distinctions between them.