“Wishful thinking—the longing to bend the present world into a different and better future—is often mocked, but the plain fact is that it is a regular feature of the human condition.* Whenever we refer to the world around us in language, we habitually allude to thing that are absent. We conjecture, we say things that miss the mark, or that express yearnings for things to be other than they are. We live by our illusions. The language through which we speak is an unending sort of short little dreams in the course of which we sometimes fashion new ways of seeing things, using words that are remarkably apposite and strangely inspiring to others. The feminine dēmokratia was one of those tiny terms that sprang from a little dream, with grand effect. It was to rouse millions of people in all four corners of the world—and give them a grip on their world by changing it in ways so profound they remain undervalued and misunderstood. [….]
The roots of the family of terms that make up the language of democracy, and exactly where and when the word was first used, remain a mystery. Democracy carefully guards her secrets. Through the fog of the past only random clues appear, in the guise of wild-looking ungroomed figures bearing suggestive names like Demonax of Mantinea, the bearded, robed, sandal-shod lawmaker who was summoned (around 550 BCE) by the women of the Oracle of Delphi to grant the people of Cyrene, a Greek-speaking farming town on the Libyan coast, the right to resist the tyranny of the limping, stuttering King Battus III, and the right to gather in their own assembly to govern themselves under their own laws. Demonax may have been among the first public figures to describe himself as a friend of democracy, but we cannot be sure. None of his writings or speeches or laws has survived. That makes him a fitting symbol of the way democracy carefully guards her own mysteries against those who think they know her every way. The subject of democracy is full of enigmas, confusions, things that are supposed to be true. It harbors not a few surprises, including the certainty … that it was not a Greek invention. The belief that democracy is or could be a universal Western value, a gift of Europe to the world, dies hard. [….] The claim put forward within most Greek plays, poems and philosophical tracts, that fifth century Athens wins the prize for creating both the idea and the practice of democracy, seemed plausible to contemporaries. It continues until this day to be repeated by most observers. But it is false.” — John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (W.W. Norton & Co., 2009)
* Keane describes here but one species of such thinking, a benign or beneficial sort, rather different from the deleterious or pernicious form that is clearly contrary to our (well-considered) self-interests and capacity for acting rationally. The kind of wishful thinking Keane is referring to is in the spirit of utopian imagination and occasionally acts on the order of a self-fulfilling prophecy, while the harmful variety, as Jon Elster explains, involves “the shaping of belief by wants, making us think the world in fact is how we want it to be.” Adaptive preference formation is in some respects the converse of benign or beneficial wishful thinking, for it adjusts our wants to possibilities. G.A. Cohen explains it like this:
“The agent’s assessment ordering bends round to favour what (he thinks) is in the feasible set.” Cohen admits some possible good effects from this response (e.g., ‘it may prevent fruitless lamentation and wasted effort’), but generally speaking, “Adaptive Preference also has great destructive potential, since it means losing standards that may be needed to guide criticism of the status quo, and it dissolves the faith to which a future with ampler possibilities may yet be hospitable. If you cannot bear to remember the goodness of the goal that you sought and which is not now attainable, you may fail to pursue it should it come within reach, and you will not try to bring it within reach. When the fox succeeds in convincing himself that the grapes are sour, he does not build the ladder that might enable him to get at them.”
Elster adds that “[b]ehind this adaptation there is the drive to reduce the tension or frustration one feels in having wants that one cannot possibly satisfy.” Elster claims a similar hedonic effect with wishful thinking generally, in which case it may not matter if the kind in question is construed as baneful or beneficial (the latter roughly in Keane’s sense above).
And thus one kind of wishful thinking, the harmful sort, makes for sour grapes syndrome. Yet when not baneful or against our true self-interests, wishful thinking can or might have, in spite of its distance from the real world (from facts or what is ‘true’), and as a by-product, side-effect, or spillover effect, what have you, a mysterious role in motivating us to struggle in concert with others, in steeling our resolve, in giving us courage, in fortifying our commitments to and for “the Good.” A caveat, however: it seems we cannot (consciously) will ourselves into wishful thinking, for it operates, as we say, behind our backs, as a sub-conscious or unconscious cognitive and psychological phenomenon that serves to irrationally resolve conflicts between beliefs and desires. Nonetheless, some psychologists believe, along the lines suggested above, that wishful thinking can “positively influence behavior and so bring about … results” that otherwise are unobtainable. “This is called the ‘Pygmalion effect.’” I therefore leave you with the lyrics to this song:
Wishing (Will Make It So)
Wishing will make it so
Just keep on wishing and care will go
Dreamers tell us dreams come true
It’s no mistake
And wishes are the dreams we dream
When we’re awake
The curtain of night will part
If you are certain within your heart
So if you wish long enough wish strong enough
You will come to know
Wishing will make it so
Sung by Frank Sinatra (among others)
Songwriter: Jeff Lynne
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