Raphael Less Pessimistic

I loved, just loved Ricardo Raphael’s column about Mexico’s pervasive pessimism today. Some relevant passages:

Without even being conscious of how it happened, this year in Mexico the cult of the most unpleasant aspects of our social existence took hold. The collective intelligence has remained trapped by the emphasis on the negative, on the most disreputable of the possible points of view.

I confess: if I make myself choose between the horrendous and the valuable I lean more energetically toward the first and I disdain the second. My attention is piqued more by the executions in Ciudad Juárez, the abominable kidnappings and murders, the treason of soldiers and police commanders, the hefty stream of youths into drug trafficking, the massive firings in auto-parts factories or the stinginess of the Deputies when, in a time of crisis, they give themselves ostentatious Christmas bonuses.

In contrast, my neurons barely stop working when they bump against facts or lives that contradict this with their brightness. I know almost nothing of the general that called the president of the republic to tell him that he would continue confronting organized crime in the military zone under his responsibility, the day after the mafias kidnapped and murdered his son.

[Later]

You shouldn’t take as corniness or naivety the desire to combat the exaltation of the awful. It’s in reality a powerful survival instinct that human beings --even the Mexicans-- carry as an internal device, which once in a while we should take out for a walk.

In times of abundance and security, pessimism is a tolerable social attitude that because it fosters questioning and self-criticism. But in moments of great seriousness, like those through which we are presently suffering, the cult of negativity is an unpardonable frivolity.

Stuff like this is hard for me write because I don’t want to be an American making sweeping generalizations about what I perceive as flaws or even salient attributes about the whole of Mexican society. That doesn’t, however, stop me from agreeing with Raphael.

The weird thing is how, on some level, Mexicans’ pessimism is superficial. Despite what Raphael refers to, the Pew Global Attitudes Survey always shows Mexicans as among the most optimistic of the countries surveyed. For instance, 77 percent of Mexicans told Pew that they think their personal economic situation will remain the same or get better; only seven of the 24 nations show higher levels of optimism. Sixty percent of Mexicans qualify their personal economic situation as good (pages 17 and 18). To take a more recent example, to the Imagan online/radio question, “Will 2009 be a better year for you?,” more than three quarters responded in the affirmative.