Brexit has proved that life’s optimists always triumph
There were several mooted theories about what defined the two sides in the Brexit debate – David Goodhart’s Somewheres vs Anywheres, my Ponces vs Plebs (I’m a proud pleb, so it’s not an insult) – but as we come in sight of the finishing line, I believe that the best way to understand the rift is that this was a battle of optimists vs pessimists.
Brexiteers saw a glass half full of sparkling Somerset cider whereas Remainers saw a glass half empty of Malbec with no refills on the way. We wanted to hurtle gung-ho into an unknown adventure; they wanted to keep ahold of Mutti Merkel nurse for fear of finding something worse. We don’t think it’s a big cruel world out there – they do. Which makes Remainers, not us Brexiteers, the true misanthropes.
In the course of my long and louche life I’ve somehow mutated from being a right miserable little madam who wore only black from the age of 13 – quoting that drip from The Seagull who moaned “I am in mourning for my life” – to a sexagenarian Pollyanna who approaches life with all the coarse good humour of a Beryl Cook figure.
I was even the only person in the pro-Brexit/anti-Corbyn section of my friendship group to have total faith in the fact that the first would triumph and the second would fail. The result has not only been a lovely excuse to lord it over my antagonists, but also over my amigos; to tell a foe I-toldyou-so is silver, but to tell a friend the same is pure gold.
My optimism has often made me reckless; as I’m the opposite of Chicken Licken – if the sky ever did look in danger of falling in, I’d be out there taking stupid selfies till the end. But the risks that optimists take are probably made up for by our increased chances of good health, lower levels of stress and longer lives.
In the past, we were encouraged to put a) a brave face on it and b) best foot forward, but now that anxiety is worn as a badge of honour, you can claim to have PTSD after stubbing your toe and self-care is a holy grail, we live in a society obsessed with its own atomised angst. The whole Sussexes vs the Crown mess is a result of these two world views colliding.
Everything from scented candles to podcasts that would once have been marketed as jolly diversions are now touted as ways to soothe oneself in the face of the Here Be Dragonnes map beyond our fragile front door.
For Remainers, this allegedly scary hinterland was in fact just bizarre angst about “Too Much Democracy” – and there is no such thing as too much democracy. It’s a sad day for Western liberalism when fury over losing cheap wine gets more souls out on the streets than supporting the brave young people facing torture and execution due to their yearning for democracy, from Iran to Hong Kong.
The chances are that we’ll be perfectly fine after the monumentally optimistic leap of faith this week
– but I know that some poor saps need to believe that things are worse than they’ve ever been in order to give their little lives meaning. So they should relax
(or rather, they shouldn’t) because, luckily for them, this week the Doomsday Clock moved closer to midnight than it ever has in its
73-year history due to multiple “end of days” threats, including nuclear tensions, cyberwarfare and climate change.
Even at the height of the Cold War the clock stood at only seven minutes to midnight. Now it’s a mere 100 seconds from the big bong. So fill your boots, worrywarts – and if that doesn’t get your blood moving, there’s always the coronavirus coming around the corner wearing a scary mask.
I’d have more sympathy for pessimists if I didn’t believe that when individuals are drawn to catastrophising, a lot of it is about them being sad about their own lives and unfulfilled dreams. But paradoxically, though people may be keen to indulge in pessimism in the privacy of their own homes with fellow consenting moaners, they don’t like the look on their politicians. Hence the enthusiasm of our American friends for leaders as diverse as Obama and Trump – u united only by their can-do optimism – and the rejection of dour Corbyn f for bouncing Boris.
Pessimism, for all its dubious pleasures, is generally merely solipsism with a political spin.