The blindness of those who fight each other

Naive optimism isn’t just believing that things will work out. It’s believing that simple things will work out because they’re simple, that clean ideas like “innocent until proven guilty” or “privatization brings freedom” will produce justice or prosperity if only everyone would just follow them. But that belief only holds up in theory. In utopias that don’t exist.

I have a friend who thinks that it was unfair for the brazilian League of Legends player, 4Lan, to be convited of sexual just because there was no hard proof. His argument leans on the legal principle of innocence until proven guilty, as if people and the court should withhold judgment entirely without evidence. But in the real world, especially in cases of harassment, evidence often doesn’t exist in the form people expect. That principle, when applied rigidly, ends up silencing victims and protecting abusers. It only functions cleanly in a world where systems are fair and readily available, and power is evenly distributed, which is a fantasy.

Another friend I have is convinced that mass privatization is the path to a freer, more efficient economy. But he ignores the reality that in many contexts, privatization just shifts power from public institutions to corporate monopolies. Without counterbalance, that only deepens inequality and consolidates control in the hands of the few. Again, the idea sounds elegant on paper, but it assumes conditions that don’t exist, like ethical corporations, transparent governance, and an informed public. It's optimism disguised as realism.

Believing in purity of principle often comes from a strangely hopeful place. There’s ignorance, sure, but more deeply, there’s this optimism that the world can be run by simple rules. That we can find the one framework that unlocks the rest. That there is a clean answer.

And this becomes especially dangerous when people start crusading for their worldview. Whether it’s about free markets, due process, anti-censorship, or any ideological stance, when someone starts pushing a narrative hard, they often stop looking at the complexities. They start defending the principle instead of questioning how it plays out. They become more interested in winning the argument than in protecting people.

That’s how naive optimism becomes dogma and generates enemies. It’s how well-meaning ideas get weaponized. People on crusades stop asking: Who gets hurt if this idea is applied blindly? What systems are we pretending are fair when they’re not? Who benefits from me sticking to this narrative?

In the end, every “simple solution” requires constant, messy judgment. There are no plug-and-play ethics. No slogan fixes injustice. No ideology survives contact with the world unchanged.

If you’re not willing to adapt your beliefs when they cause harm in practice, then you’re not really defending justice, you’re only defending your own narrative. That’s not optimism. That’s blindness dressed as virtue.

image https://pixabay.com/pt/illustrations/ai-gerado-cavaleiro-guerra-medieval-8945654/