ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines two different, but related, discourses of well-being, namely, the 'optimism agenda' and the 'positivity agenda'. One of them is the possibility that the people will develop a resistance to antibiotics. There is another reason why this examination is important. This is that those responsible for constituting optimistic climate of thought are not neutral observers of the mood of society. Johan Harari has argued that, while the benefits of modernity have to be acknowledged, one of the problems with the progress/optimism agenda is that it fails to acknowledge how the 'unholy trinity of industrialism, capitalism and consumerism' has led to social disintegration and spiritual emptiness. In one of his ‘Prison Notebooks’, Gramsci wrote that ‘the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’.
