Are zebras white with black stripes or black with white stripes? It’s a conundrum that has perplexed philosophers and biologists since the dawn of time. Many with a keener eye point out the white fur on the underbelly and conclude white with black stripes, while those who have seen a shaved zebra’s black skin often contend the opposite.
One thing we can all agree on is that zebras are black and white.
Life is full of good events and bad events. Happy times and sad times. Pleasure and pain. But is life pain with moments of respite or is it joy with moments of sorrow? For most of us, there is a lot of both and it can be hard to draw the line. But we each do, consciously or not, and this is the distinction between optimism and pessimism.
Have you ever read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”? It’s a fantastic book. And it’s changed the way Americans have looked at American history since it was published in 1980. And not for the better.
Howard Zinn was a very intelligent history professor and he noticed that history textbooks tend to focus on what makes the United States great. And why wouldn’t they? What kind of a government would want to inculcate their citizens with anything but the best possible opinions of said government? But that’s not the whole story, as Howard Zinn spends hundreds of pages illuminating.
First, Columbus started a series of events that wiped or nearly wiped hundreds of native American cultures off the face of the Earth. Then trans-Atlantic slave trade destroyed the lives of millions upon millions of Africans and their descendants. Like I said, there are hundreds of pages of details of this stuff if you’re interested. I have never read such a downer in my life. And the worst part is, it’s all true. It all really happened. And that whole book only covered 1492-1980 on the continent of North America.
Zinn’s point was that pro-America American history books aren’t telling the whole story. And it seems like, in pointing this out, he accidentally convinced a generation or two that genocide and slavery is the whole story. It’s not.
Have you ever read Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now”? It’s one of my all time favorite books. From beginning to end, it is nothing but statistics, facts, and graphs depicting the hundreds of thousands of ways in which human life is improving over time. War, disease, famine; there is not a single thing that humans have ever suffered from that is not better today than it was fifty years ago. And it’s just getting better from here.
Take car accident deaths for example. The first Ford Model T rolled off the assembly line in 1908. From then until 1940, car accident deaths skyrocketed. And ever since 1940, they’ve been going down proportional to population and since peaking in 1972, they’ve been going down in absolute number even as the population and number of cars on the road have gone up.
Or take death rates. For most of human history, approximately 54% of live born babies reached the age of 15. That was true until 1900. That means that approximately 46 billion people, or six times the current population of the Earth, died before reaching age 15. In 1950, 73% reached age 15. Today, 95% of babies born around the world live past age 15. Even someone born in sub-Saharan Africa today is probably not going to join that 46 billion people.
The stories we tell ourselves inside our own heads have incredible power. The narrative of all global events in human history is too complex for our minds to fully comprehend. Stories are what we get when we try to understand events: what happened, why, how, and what we can do to impact similar events in the future?
Say that you are meeting a new individual. If you have told yourself the story that people as a whole are nasty and selfish, you will subconsciously treat that person worse than if you have told yourself a story of universal love between all humans. And the way you treat that person has a massive impact on how that person will treat you.
People are nicer to optimists because optimists are nicer to people. And people interacting with people is what makes up most of life. Bosses tend to promote people they like. Mechanics tend to do better work for people they like. Friends tend to prefer to hang out with people they like. And people who are well liked tend to have less stress and better health as a result.
It is causal. The more optimistically you see the world, the better the world actually is. And the more pessimistically you see the world, the worse you make it.
So are zebras black or white? Ultimately, you get to choose. So choose carefully.
