What Is a Definitive Optimist?

David Senra, reading Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, says a definitive optimist believes the future will be better than the present if that person plans and works to make it better. Thiel thought America was like that for several decades. Even the Great Depression failed to impede relentless progress in the United States, which he calls home to the world's most far-seeing definitive optimists.

The examples he gives, as Senra reads them, are buildings and programs that went up on a plan. The Empire State Building was started in 1929 and finished in 1931. The Golden Gate Bridge was started in 1933 and completed in 1937. The Manhattan Project was started in 1941 and had produced the world's first nuclear bomb by 1945. The Interstate Highway System began construction in 1956, and the first 20,000 miles of road were open by 1965. NASA's Apollo program began in 1961 and put 12 men on the moon before it finished in 1972.

Thiel's critique is that big plans for the future have become archaic curiosities.