Saving Utopia | Optimal Powerlessness

About two years ago, a young Belgian man chatted himself to death. He wasn't chatting with a truly evil psycho-manipulator intent on driving others to despair out of sheer perfidy, but with an AI bot named Eliza, developed in 1966. Pierre, the family man's name, was becoming increasingly concerned about climate change and its consequences for human coexistence. He then sought advice from a neutral, omniscient machine. He fed it his fears, and it ultimately encouraged his suicidal thoughts.

This tragic case is a horrifying illustration of the disparity between technological optimism and anthropological pessimism in philosopher Guillaume Paoli 's slim new book. It is titled "Something Better Than Optimism" and attempts to shed light on the false notions, both potent and debilitating, that come with this oh-so-innocent "O" word. In a grinning society that uses "optimal" to obscure the true state of the world, the poverty and misery of the many, because one should not refute feelings with argument, but rather assume them from others. Paoli, in contrast, formulates a declaration of war: against faith in technology and the market, and against the ideology of the lesser of two evils.

"Optimism is a duty," Karl Popper demanded in the last century. He is considered a philosopher of neoliberalism, the ideology that emerged in the second half of the 20th century. But for his critique, Paoli goes back a few centuries further: to the Baroque period, to Leibniz . His theodicy states that we live in the best of all possible worlds, with God allowing evil and badness, but in the end, everything turns out well. This may have its theological appeal, but it also legitimizes blind and silent oppression.

Paoli deduces that the opposite of "optimism" is by no means the much-maligned "pessimism," but rather "maximalism" or "utopianism," approaches that are not satisfied with the given, but rather seek alternatives, a different world. In the history of philosophy, he finds the Jesuit Louis-Bernard Castel, who coined the term "optimism" in 1737—specifically as a critique of Leibniz's theory of a best world, which would render a morality grounded in God superfluous for our world. In the course of his critique of Leibniz, the polymath Castel coined another term, now very commonplace, namely "fatalism": We would ultimately succumb to this if we lived in the optimum. If we follow predetermined paths, there is no room for individual moral action, or rather, free will.

In today's Western world, however, God has become a non-negotiable argument. Theodicy has, in the words of Joseph Vogl, given rise to the secular "oikodice" (Joseph Vogl): the assumption that "the markets" will fix everything, as if they were created by God. What does Paoli do? He continues to search history for radical thinkers outside the box and encounters Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) and Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1752), both physicians.

Mandeville compares human society to the self-regulation of a bee colony and asserts that public prosperity is based on private vices. Greed, for example, is a bad virtue in individual cases, but it leads to the wealth of all. If the self-interested initiatives of individuals were suppressed, perhaps in the name of moral laws by the grace of God, everything would collapse and chaos would ensue. According to Paoli, Mandeville anticipates the fact that the prosperity of nations is based on the misery of the working class: "The entire neoliberal ideology is nothing more than a pseudo-scientific rip-off of the bee fable."

La Mettrie expressed the scandalous thesis that humans are machines. He did this before industrialization and pointed to the mechanisms of the body. However, this does not mean that the body should be turned into an instrument of exploitation. He equated thinking with brain activity and thus denied humans a soul – and got into serious trouble with the Church. Because of such views, he was forced to leave first France and then Holland. Without the promise of eternal salvation, suffering and oppression in this world lose their legitimacy.

Unfortunately, radical technological thinking didn't bring about a great liberation for all those suffering. Instead, people poured their—let's call it that—mental powers into machines. These machines were supposed to relieve them of tedious work. And so begins the "complete reversal of original and model": We explore how our brains work, then create computer automatons, and suddenly people call their brains "computers." They use models to explain how they "process information" with atrophied backs while doing computer click jobs. And then they let machines learn from machines, wanting to become midwives of a higher artificial intelligence that thinks—in other words, calculates—efficiently without headaches, hunger, or sadness. Anyone who thinks that's right is a fatalist.

But after a long period of feeding, the machine can only tell us what is and isn't true. It remains incapable of dealing with the impossible, the desirable. Its optimal results know no utopia that transcends the information counter. It breeds fatalists behind the screen. These suffer perhaps less from the abstract, great fear of the future, but rather from "dreamlessness and broken inner landscapes."

With regard to the modern warfare being used in Ukraine and the Middle East, Paoli concludes by dismantling the ideology of the "lesser evil": In order to combat evil, which is supposed to know only extermination and annihilation, the West defines itself as a fortress of supposed civilization, which it defends with increasingly efficient, optimized high-tech weapons. He understands this as the "lesser evil." A "normalization of terror" is emerging, AI war machines are being optimized, and ultimately, no military will feel responsible for deaths anymore.

With his slim volume, Paoli cleverly dismantles the idiocy of optimism. He shows how it legitimizes suffering, from Christian devotion and neoliberal market brutality to AI warmongering. The goal is to rob people of their courage to act and their curiosity about the truly unknown. An illuminating text in darkened times.

Guillaume Paoli: Something Better Than Optimism. Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 112 pp., paperback, €12.