A case for defensive pessimism during COVID-19

Defensive pessimism involves imagining negative outcomes to events as a form of prefactual thinking that may be useful in negotiating COVID-19 realities

Times of crises invariably witness a surge in optimistic messaging, with leaders and public figures exhorting our “faith”, “belief”, “hope”, and other convenient abstracts to rally opinion and boost morale. The health emergency on account of COVID-19 has been no exception in this regard, as evident from the invocation of the Blitz spirit in the United Kingdom to Donald Trump’s prophecies about the miraculous disappearance of the virus in America to the Panglossian predictions of NITI Aayog member, VK Paul, who forecasted no new cases of coronavirus after May 16 in India.

While optimism, supported by facts or rhetoric alone, can be crucial to the collective spirit of cheer called upon during the pandemic, it needs tempering with an approach that is more humble, heuristic, and potentially, more helpful. This approach is the idea of defensive pessimism, formally identified as a cognitive strategy by American academic Nancy Cantor and her students in the mid-1980s.

Defensive pessimism involves imagining negative outcomes to events as a form of prefactual thinking. Such negative thoughts lower a person’s expectations significantly with respect to an event and how they aim to profit from it. Defensive pessimists soften the blow of failure by expecting to fail from the start, and thus, do not suffer from the disillusionment of success before or during an action or sink into great levels of despair and disappointment when lofty promises or ambitions do not come to pass.

Thinking like a defensive pessimist

A key difference between defensive pessimism and mere pessimism (which can, in some cases, morph into depression and hopelessness) is the presence of reasonable motivation in the former. Defensive pessimists will not imagine the utterly baffling – like the sky collapsing upon their heads – or the incredibly improbable – like a truck running them over – as they plan to head out once social distancing measures are relaxed. However, they will exhaustively go through the checklist of feasible concerns – infection from not wearing masks or gloves, exchanges with asymptomatic carriers while socialising, presence of the virus on outdoor surfaces - and take active precautions against them. The danger is attuned as a default setting for a defensive pessimist in the midst of a global pandemic.

While a skeptic may question before acting, an alarmist and deluded optimist may act before questioning (for opposite reasons), and a cynic only questions and never act, a defensive pessimist will act as if the answer were negative to all pertinent questions. The government said that the COVID-19 curve is flattening, does that mean I can meet my friends and brace for outings in a few weeks’ time? Since the local grocery is now open 24*7, surely it must be safe to go out and shop regularly instead of binge shopping for days at a time? The virus disproportionately affects the old, so as a youngster, I shouldn’t be concerned, right? For defensive pessimists, the answer to all such queries is a resounding no.

Defensive pessimism does not suspend logic, it simply creates a paradigm where one grows oblivious to the apparent advantages of a scenario, focusing solely on the costs. Whether such a focus is accurate or merited becomes immaterial, as to be proved wrong is to benefit and to be proved right is to be protected. A useful analogy to defensive pessimism can be found in clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson’s take on God: “I don’t know if God exists, but I behave as if he does.” Similarly, defensive pessimists cannot be logically convinced about the worst eventuality that they conjure up in their heads, but they prepare as if the worst will transpire. Thus, defensive pessimists engage in a curious form of cognitive dissonance that separates theoretical opinion from practical belief.

Defensive pessimism is a fundamentally compulsive mechanism, urging the actor to take measures to mitigate potential damage. The agency plays a vital role as defensive pessimism allows one to be in control of the small factors that often come together to deliver a large consequence. Defensive pessimists do not sit back and leave things to chance, for they take chance to be inherently capricious and conniving. Throwing caution to the wind is, therefore, not their modus operandi, which comprises meticulous, and at times strenuous, assessments of situations before participating in them.

Not a solution for all

Defensive pessimism during COVID-19, of course, is not for everyone. Those vulnerable to acute and frequent bouts of anxiety must not look for recourse in negative thinking as it can lead to self-handicapping or psychological masochism, whereas inveterate optimists cannot be converted to a polar opposite school of thought in a matter of months. But, for a large number of us who keep swinging between radically contrasting versions of “nothing is impossible”, defensive pessimism provides a path that challenges pivotal facets of the prevalent herd mentality that falsely equates negative cognition with personality weakness or mental disorder, championing positivity for the sheer sake of it.

As the world begins to recover from COVID-19 and the virus gradually recedes to bring the horizon of normality into sharper focus, gung-ho attitudes can only serve to exacerbate our peril. What we need during our collective convalescence is not a swift leap to what we used to be, but slow and measured steps to getting life back on track.

Defensive pessimism allows for such a transition to take place because it does not harbour a rosy vision of the future. It sees a post-pandemic planet not as a return to paradise but as a place that is still prone to pitfalls and prejudices, and thus warrants strict caution. By making us aware that things can go wrong at every turn, defensive pessimism is the perfect antidote for today’s times, when a large part of our misery is a direct product of an anthropocentric hubris that could only consider how things would always go right.

(Priyam Marik is a freelance journalist writing on politics, culture, and sport. He is also a published poet who can be found sampling new cuisines, debating and cheering for FC Barcelona when he's not writing)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.