The Optimist's Trap: Voltaire and Marcus Aurelius Against Positive Thinking

There is a philosophy loose in the world that tells you the following: if you believe hard enough, set your goals clearly enough, and put your wishes out into the universe with enough enthusiasm, life will bend to your will. And if it doesn’t, if you get sick, lose your job, watch something you love fall apart, then the problem is you. You didn’t believe hard enough. Some failure of faith or effort is to blame. The suffering is yours to own. The idea is not new: it is one of the oldest mistakes in Western thought, and two books written sixteen centuries apart exist largely to demolish it.

Voltaire’s Candide was published in 1759, banned in five cities within weeks, and attributed to a fictional “Doctor Ralph,” because its author knew exactly how dangerous it was. Voltaire, already exiled from Paris and watched by the Church, wrote it in a matter of days, in white heat, after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed tens of thousands of faithful people on All Saints’ Day. The book is a comic novel (picaresque, savage, absurdist) that sends its naive hero Candide ricocheting through war, shipwreck, the Inquisition, and the slave fields of South America, accompanied at every step by his tutor Pangloss, who insists throughout that everything is for the best.

Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations in the 170s CE, by candlelight on a military campaign along the Danube. He was Emperor of Rome, the most powerful man in the world, and he wrote the book for nobody. It was a private notebook, never published, never titled, addressed to himself alone. Marcus was a Stoic, which meant he belonged to a philosophical tradition, founded in Greece around 300 BCE, that held a simple and demanding position: the only things within your power are your thoughts and your actions. Everything else (illness, loss, how others treat you, whether the world bends to your plans) falls outside your control and should be released. To read the Meditations with us, we went to Derren Brown (stage magician, former evangelical Christian, and the author of a book on Stoicism and happiness), who came to Marcus not through philosophy but through the slow collapse of his own faith, and who reads him with the eye of someone professionally trained to understand how people’s minds can be made to believe things that aren’t true.

The books could not look more different. But they are attacking the same enemy. And the enemy is optimism, not the ordinary kind, but the philosophical kind, the kind that turns your suffering into evidence of your own inadequacy.