I'm in many respects liken to futurists, so my optimism for the world are largely planted in people who seeks to make progress in social, political and cultural areas. My heroes, at some extent because I generally don't have much of hero-worship in me because of my largely independent stance, include Jacque Fresco, Julian Assange, and variably people taking up important stances or cases and fighting for them. I also read Karl Marx at an early stage, and find him a good chap with important points, though I think communism and socialism and capitalism in general to be very retro and not properly progressive.
My optimism lay in seeing people trying, and people achieving. Including accidental things like technological improvements and so forth. I'm also very sceptical, but I remain one who pushes for success, not one calling defeat before the battle have been properly fought and the certainty of its outcome properly ascertained. Negativity exists, and for existing it should be fought, not complained about, mourned over, cried about, or otherwise letting oneself be caught in spiralling downward.
In our world today I rarely embrace anything wholeheartedly, because the world consists of so many things, and everything good has something bad in it, and vice versa. But out of the degrading of the past rises important new areas of influence and opportunity. Many of the coolest and most optimistic things happens in cyberspace these days, or relating to internet technology. The way I'm finding new things all the time empowering my life, the way things are so freely available, and the fact that more and more people get access to it. The fact that many wars are starting to settle in Africa and that we see the rise of the African Union and ECOWAS and other regional organizations as working co-operations and not just grand names created by people with more vision than willpower I find very interesting these days. The fact that many African economies are growing at rapid speeds (the economy of Ghana grew more than 20% in 2010 or 9 or 11 I think it was, one of those years anyways), the fact that new leaders with a more popular and more people-centred outlook start taking control I also like, that tells me of a brighter future ahead. The fact that Africa is a large soup of problems just shows that we are capable of spotting the problems. It's when there are no problems we should be worried, because then people won't try to solve them either. I like problem-solving, and I get optimistic when seeing problem-solvers
