Malta Ottimista: looks like the government is still stuck on The Secret (2006)

I think my readers will enjoy this piece by Bryan Appleyard in the New Statesman.

It’s about what he calls ‘neo-optimism’ or ‘idiot optimism’. It certainly expresses my own views precisely.

As a committed and lifelong realist in a culture where realism is increasingly confused with pessimism, the sound of people wittering away with their optimistic babble, in and out of politics, has invariably grated on my nerves.

Optimists, to my mind, are almost as bad as fatalists of the ‘God’s will’ variety, the difference being that the ‘God’s will’ brigade are actually offensive.

When your son has just died in a car crash, you will want to strike out at anyone who comes at you with that ‘God’s will’ rubbish. It’s an insult. You just know that if it happens to them, they won’t be saying the same thing. They’re saying it because they’re stupid and insensitive.

All my life I have associated optimism with stupidity or shallow thinking, without being able to explain why. Only really stupid people – daft people, the unaware, I have always thought, don’t understand how the very worst lies just around the corner, ready to knock everything for six in a heartbeat. You’re lucky if you escape.

This doesn’t mean you worry about it all the time. You just accept it as reality. The indisputable fact is that bad things strike out of the blue in a way that good things don’t. We are forever teetering on the edge of a precipice and failure to recognise this is not optimism but lack of insight.

As to mixing idiot-optimism or neo-optimism with politics, Appleyard writes: “Political quietism combined with a futile and febrile pursuit of material fulfilment is the result.”

That is what is happening in Malta.

“In politics,” he writes, “neo-optimism can be lethal … Yet dumb optimism is now the default mode in politics”. Malta Ottimista, indeed.