Life is suffering.
Terrible things happen to great people. Everybody gets sick, and everybody dies. By all accounts, it looks like the game has been rigged against us.
And yet, look at what we've built.
Look at the buildings that fill our cities. Look at food that fills our supermarkets. Look at the children playing in our parks, and the artists filling our galleries, and the scientists pushing our frontiers forward.
Time and again, humanity has faced insurmountable challenges. And time and again, it has surmounted them.
Which begs the question: why?
If the cards are truly stacked against us, why bother?
Is there such thing as non-naive optimism?
This is the central question we're going to try and tackle with these principles.
But first, we need to flesh out an important concept.