Pessimism

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But better health must be small consolation to optimists when, throughout their lives, they are always suffering from disappointments and let-downs. Whereas for a pessimist, if a nice thing happens, it is a glorious surprise.

Pessimists are realists. They have more understanding about the world and its contradictions. They refuse to be up in the clouds.

It is for this reason I can't abide rubbish bestsellers such as Learned Optimism: How To Change Your Mind And Your Life and Authentic Happiness: Using The New Positive Psychology To Realise Your Potential For Lasting Fulfilment.

I take one look at the graphs, charts, questionnaires and classroom exercises, with which the author, one Martin E. P. Seligman PhD, claims he can coach pessimists to become optimists, and I want to run a mile.

Yet Seligman's is the stuff peddled by psychologists and imparted by trendy educationalists, who are instilling youngsters with lies and deceptions about thinking positively.

Indeed, people are bullied today into having to feel positive - avoiding disputes, curbing cynicism, eradicating irony or a satirical edge.

Even top-drawer moll Lady Antonia Fraser is caught up with the cult of positive thinking.

'Be calm, have a calm centre, turn towards the calm centre and inspect it, contemplate my soul,' she apparently intones every night in a far-away manner. No wonder Harold Pinter was such a bad-tempered old codger.

People are made to feel guilty if they are not measuring up and feeling optimistic the whole time, and so go on anti-depressant drugs. If you are not an optimist, you are more or less a traitor.

Seligman, in particular, is against individualism. He wants to merge people into a mass or group. He thinks optimists are those who focus on activities 'devoted to the well-being of others or of the community at large'. Trotsky, Mao, any totalitarian you can name, advocated the same.

Me, I'm an enemy of the people. It's precisely when I attempt to leave the privacy of my study and my books and venture into 'the community at large' that things go wrong. Hell is other people, as Jean-Paul Sartre said.

It always annoys me when book reviewers and interviewers describe me as a bile-filled old curmudgeon, a Mr Grumpy who is as approachable as a cactus.

I like to think of myself as very sweetly forbearing, particularly when faced with life's petty and not so petty trials.

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