Yeah, I have a soft spot for this kind of thinking but it always goes off the rails. It either gets unhinged and culty or flips and goes hard-reactionary or even luddite.
I think the fallacy might be a little too much "magic happens here." Yes you can be optimistic about the future, but a good future is not automatically guaranteed. It requires very hard work and constant vigilance. It's not just a matter of having faith and waiting for the messiah.
Both blind optimism and blind pessimism are easy when you're not the one doing the work. Those doing the work tend toward realism.
It’s romanticism that’s afraid to admit it and dresses itself up in dubious “reason” and “rationality”, which is why it always ends up seeming confused and self-contradictory and to be relying on a lot of magic to fill in the gaps.
This piece is better than some in that it at least makes the romanticism explicit near the end, but it’s burdened with the same self-conscious need to try to “prove” it’ll also make everything better in any terms one might choose, which is why these are all silly: they want to make believe that there aren’t meaningful costs or trade-offs for their romantic ideal. Nuance and shades of truth can’t be allowed, because they threaten the fake-reasoned rationalization for the romanticism, which romanticism is the point of the whole exercise, so cannot be threatened or alloyed, else they’d lose interest in it.
I think the fallacy might be a little too much "magic happens here." Yes you can be optimistic about the future, but a good future is not automatically guaranteed. It requires very hard work and constant vigilance. It's not just a matter of having faith and waiting for the messiah.
Both blind optimism and blind pessimism are easy when you're not the one doing the work. Those doing the work tend toward realism.