Beware of Cruel Optimism and Hopium

People are often bifurcated as being either optimists or pessimists, but I have long tried to be neither. Rather I have tried to be a realist. Recently, though, in an article by Chris Smith, I came across a new term (to me), “cruel optimism,” and that strengthened my stance against optimism.**  

“The Rise of Cruel Optimism” is the title of the eighth chapter of Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, a British journalist. Hari (b. 1979) in turn introduces Lauren Berlant’s book, Cruel Optimism, published in 2011 by Duke University Press.

Berlant (1957~2021) was an American scholar who was a professor of English at the University of Chicago from 1984 until the year of her death. In a July 2021 essay in The Nation magazine, she was deemed “one of the most esteemed and influential literary and cultural critics in the United States.”

Cruel Optimism was Berlant’s most influential book, and Hari states that in it she explains that cruel optimism “is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture like obesity or depression or addiction—and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic solution.

“It sounds optimistic,” he continues, “because you were telling them the problem can be solved and soon—but it is in fact cruel because the solution you’re offering is so limited and so blind to the deeper causes that for most people it will fail” (p. 150).

Consider a couple of examples of cruel optimism. Hari’s first example is stress. Self-help books often suggest that meditation and mindfulness are helpful ways to reduce stress. While it is true that they may help reduce the symptoms of stress, they do nothing to eliminate the stressors.

Hari goes on to say that it is cruel optimism to think that meditation and/or mindfulness can “cure” stress, for the stressors “are often socioeconomic in nature: low wages, poor working conditions, poor or nonexistent health insurance” and the like.

Chris Smith gives another good example: greenwashing. As I explained in a blog post in February 2024, greenwashing is “the act or practice of making a product, policy, activity, etc. appear to be more environmentally friendly or less environmentally damaging than it really is.”

Smith asserts, “Greenwashing aims to make the consumer feel good about themselves, while doing little or nothing to address the present climate change.” It is cruel optimism because it leads people to buy what they don’t need by mistakenly thinking they are helping the environment even though they aren’t.

Cruel optimism is an example of “hopium.” This latter term means holding on to false hopes that prevents us from accepting reality. Hopium differs from hope in that the optimism it fuels is unwarranted or irrational. Like opium, it may make one feel better temporarily but causes harm later on.

Just before the 2024 presidential election, Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, wrote (here), “...there’s a kind of ‘hope’ that is meant to numb us, to distract us from thinking about what could be a bleak future.”

Moore goes on to say that there is a deficient type of hope similar to the deficient type of grace that Bonhoeffer called cheap grace. Thus, “Cheap hope” is “actually not hope. It’s a hopioid.”

In his book God Can’t, Thomas Jay Oord writes about the danger of religious people praying with great hope for their sickness to be cured. In reality, though, Oord avers, “Instead of bringing hope, prayers for healing lead some to despair.”** Their hope becomes a type of hopium and cruel optimism.

In closing, I share a comment local Thinking Friend Anton Jacobs posted in response to my April 30 blog article. Anton, who admits to being pessimistic often, wrote, “…my main hope is that my sense of hopelessness is mistaken.”

I thought that was a helpful stance that is neither cruel optimism nor an example of hopium.

So, yes, let’s beware of the negative attitudes of cruel optimism and hopium. But for those of you who at times (or often) tend to be a victim of pessimism, I hope that you can embrace the hope that your sense of hopelessness is mistaken.

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** Chris Smith, the founding editor of Englewood Review of Books (ERB) introduced the term “cruel optimism” (which he said was new to him as it was to me) in an April 3 email sent to subscribers to the ERB online book review website, which he launched in 2008.

** The full title of Oord’s book is God Can't: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils (2019). I introduced Oord and his book in January (see here).