Save utopia – optimal fainting

About two years ago, a young Belgian chatted to death. He had not written with a basic-evil psycho-manipulator, the other from Schieren Perfidie, but with a Ki-Bot called Eliza, developed in 1966. Pierre, according to the family’s name, was increasingly worried about climate change and the consequences for human coexistence. He then looked for advice from a neutral, omniscient machine. He fed her with his fears, ultimately encouraging him in his thoughts of suicide.

This tragic case is a diligent illustration for the mismatch of technical optimism and anthropological pessimism in the new narrow book of the philosopher Guillaume Paoli. It bears the title “Something better than optimism” and tries to clarify the false ideas, which, which is useful and disgusting, come with this oh so innocent O-word. In a grin baking company that “optimal” about the true location of the world, poverty and misery of the many, because you should not refute feelings argumentatively, but have to remove it to the other. In contrast, Paoli formulates a declaration of war: against technology and market belief and against the ideology of the smaller evil.

“Optimism is duty” demanded Karl Popper in the last century. He is considered a philosopher of neoliberalism, the ideology that came up in the second half of the 20th century. But for his criticism, Paoli goes back a few centuries: in the Baroque, to Leibniz. Its theodize determination states that we live in the best of all possible worlds, God allow evil and evil, but in the end everything goes out well. That may have his theological stimuli, but also legitimizes the blind and silent oppression.

Paoli deduces that the counter -term to “optimism” is by no means the “pessimism” frequently, but “maximalism” or “utopism”, that is, approaches that do not satisfy themselves with what is given, but for alternatives. In the history of philosophy, he finds the Jesuit Louis-Bernard Castel, who shaped the term “optimism” in 1737-as a criticism of Leibniz ‘best world theory, because this would make a morality justified with God for our world. The universal scholar Castel shapes another, now very common term, namely “fatalism” in the course of his Leibniz scolding: we would have to fall. If we go predetermined ways, there is no place for individual-moral action, or free will.

In today’s western world, however, God has had an argumentative day. In the words of Jospeh Vogl, the secular “oikodize” (Joseph Vogl) has become of the theodize: the assumption that “the markets” will already judge everything as if they had been created by God. What does Paoli do? He continues to look for radical thinkers out of line in history and meets Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) and Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709–1752), both by profession.

Mandeville compares human society with the self -regulation of a bee people and makes the claim to public prosperity on private loads. In individual cases, for example, greed is a bad virtue, but it leads to the wealth of everyone. If the individual initiatives were prevented, for example in the name of moral laws of God’s grace, everything fell apart, Chaos would come. Mandeville anticipates that the prosperity of the nations is based on the misery of the workers: “The whole neoliberal ideology is nothing more than a pseudo-scientific copy of the bee fable”.

La Mettrie expresses the scandalous thesis that man is a machine. He did this before industrialization and referred to the mechanisms of the body. But that does not mean that you should make the body an instrument of exploitation. He equated the thinking with brain activity and thus defeated people a soul – and got great difficulties with the church. Due to such views, he had to leave France and then Holland. Because without the promise of eternal salvation, suffering and oppression in this side lose their legitimation.

Unfortunately, the radical technology thinking did not start a great liberation of all tormented people. Instead, people stuck theirs, let’s call them like that, mental powers in the machines. As a machine, you should take annoying work. And so “the complete exchange of original and model” begins: We explore how our brain works, then create computer machines and at once people refer to their brain as “computer”. In models you explain how to “process information” with a stunted back on the computer-click job. And then they let machines learn from machines, obstetrics want to become a higher artificial intelligence that efficiently thinks without headache, hunger, sadness. Anyone who finds this right is a fatalist.

But after a long feeding, the machine can only say what is the case and what is not. She remains unable to do something with the impossible to do something desirable. Your optimal results do not know a utopia that points beyond the information counter state. She gives birth to fatalists behind the screen. They may suffer less from the abstract great fear of future, but from “dreamlessness and broken inner landscapes”.

With regard to the modern warfare, which is used in Ukraine and the Middle East, Paoli finally takes apart the ideology of the “smaller evil”: In order to combat evil, which should only know extermination and destruction, the West is defined as a fortress of alleged civilization, which he defends with increasingly efficient, optimized high-tech weapons. He sees this as a “smaller evil”. A “normalization of terror” is going on, AI war machines optimize, in the end no military feels responsible for dead.

With his narrow band, Paoli succeeds in a clever disassembly of optimism idiocy. It shows how it gives legitimacy from Christian devotion, neoliberal margins to AI war drivers. With the aim of taking their courage to act and curiosity in a really unknown manner. An illuminating text in darkened times.

Guillaume Paoli: Something better than optimism. Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 112 pages, Br., 12 €.