What are the three types of pessimism?

Answer 1

MoralNarratives of decline can be identified in morality: Friedrich Nietzsche's amorality, Freud's description of co-operation as sublimation, Stanley Milgram shock experiments, the continued presence of war and genocide despite global interconnectedness, and the perceived exploitation of market fundamentalism or statism. IntellectualIn ~400 BCE, pre-socratic philosopher Gorgias argued in a lost work, On Nature or the Non-Existent:

1. Nothing exists;
2. Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and
3. Even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others.

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819), characterized rationalism, and in particular Immanuel Kant's "critical" philosophy in order to carry out a reductio ad absurdum according to which all rationalism (philosophy as criticism) reduces to nihilism, and thus it should be avoided and replaced with a return to some type of faith and revelation.

Richard Rorty, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein challenge the sense of questioning whether our particular concepts are related to the world in an appropriate way, whether we can justify our ways of describing the world as compared with other ways. In general, these philosophers argue that truth was not about getting it right or representing reality, but was part of a social practice and language was what served our purposes in a particular time; to this end Poststructuralism rejects any definitions that claim to have discovered absolute 'truths' or facts about the world.

PoliticalIt is not a trait of any political party to be pessimistic in and of itself. Conservative thinkers, especially social conservatives, often perceive politics in a generally pessimistic way. William F. Buckley famously remarked that he was "standing athwart history yelling 'stop!'" and Whittaker Chambers was convinced that capitalism was bound to fall to communism, though he was himself violently anti-communist. Social conservatives often see the West as a decadent and nihilistic civilization which has abandoned its roots in Christianity and/or Greek philosophy, leaving it doomed to fall into moral and political decay. Robert Bork's Slouching Toward Gommorah and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind are famous expressions of this point of view.

Many economic conservatives and right-libertarians believe that the expansion of the state and the role of government in society is inevitable, and they are at best fighting a holding action against it. They hold that the natural tendency of people is to be ruled and that freedom is an exceptional state of affairs which is now being abandoned in favor of social and economic security provided by the welfare state. Political pessimism has sometimes found expression in dystopian novels such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.[3] Political pessimism about one's country often correlates with a desire to emigrate.[4]

During the 2007-2012 global financial crisis in the United States, the neologism "pessimism porn" was coined to describe the alleged eschatological and survivalist thrill some people derive from predicting, reading and fantasizing about the collapse of civil society through the destruction of the world's economic system.[5][6][7][8]

EnvironmentalSome environmentalists believe that the ecology of the Earth has already been irretrievably damaged, and even an unrealistic shift in politics would not be enough to save it. According to this view, the mere existence of billions of humans overstresses the ecology of the planet, eventually leading to a Malthusian collapse. The collapse will reduce the ability of Earth to support large numbers of humans for a long time into the futur