Optimism is a dirty word on the British Right. With Toryism loosely defined as a political vehicle that resists needless change and longs for conservation, any hint of belief that things could improve is treated with disdain and refuted as a fanciful hope more befitting of a progressive.
Tories have traditionally opposed utopians, rightly noting that their dreams of paradise all too often end in the kind of misery, squalor and violence that would rival a Hobbesian state of nature. This gives rise to a reliance on pessimism, with the late Sir Roger Scruton writing a book titled The Uses of Pessimism in 2010, which uses the spirit of the conservative political tradition to take aim at the dangerous fallacies of false hope.
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