#old lion

Photography Nisha Purushothaman

“King”

Photography David Lloyd

© Grimace in February 2015

This is Grimace. Here he's a bit more than ten years old, but looks older. He was the most recognisable and grizzled looking lion I ever met. Despite his battered appearance he was considered to be the toughest of the four Notch Boys, the boys of Notch, the legendary lion who ruled much of the Maasai Mara until 2013. In around mid July all four boys went to Tanzania but only three returned, all bearing evidence of a fight with other lions. At the same time the body of one with a broken leg was found at around the place where they'd just returned from. So it seems unlikely we'll see Grimace again. Given that we've not seen him for some ten weeks now, the wide consensus is that he is now gone, and that the story of Grimace has concluded. That's the way it is though, by design. Ten glorious years of dignity, followed by a short and not-so-dignified end.

Pesimistic All-Or-Nothing Rule

Banning pessimism works exactly like banning moderate pleasure or moderate discharge. Pessimism is middle-range negativity. It is a way for a system to register limits, loss, disappointment, entropy, and finitude without collapsing or exploding. When pessimism is forbidden, framed as weakness, toxicity, lack of faith, lack of gratitude, or “bad attitude”, the system loses its negative regulation valve. What replaces it is not optimism. What replaces it is repressed negativity.

When pessimism is banned, people are not allowed to say: “This may fail,” “This hurts,” “This is worse than expected,” “I don’t see a solution,” “Things decay.” Those signals don’t disappear. They go underground. And underground negativity does not stay mild. It mutates into resentment, cynicism, hatred, sarcasm, cruelty, or sudden collapse. That’s why forced positivity cultures are often emotionally violent beneath the surface.

Pessimism, in its healthy form, is not despair. It is realistic negativity. It acknowledges friction, limits, entropy, and disappointment without demanding catastrophe. It is the psychological equivalent of braking, not crashing. When you remove that function, the system has only two options left, manic optimism or corrosive hatred.

This is why banning pessimism produces moral aggression. People who are not allowed to express doubt or weariness often turn hostile toward those who do. The hatred is displaced self-hatred. They are defending the ban because admitting pessimism would release something they are no longer allowed to metabolize safely.

My tribute to Kivú, the last lion from Costa Rica and also one with a pretty tragic life. Kivú and his sister Kariba were a gift from a cuban circus to the Simón Bolívar Zoological and Botanical Garden in 1998. He had a pretty depresing lifestyle since he lived in a small concrete enclousure with metal bars and was fed 8 kilograms of meat per week through most of his life. In fact, it’s thought that due to that lifestyle his sister Kariba died of depression. Of course all this triggered animal activists to no end so they battled their asses off so the goverment could build him a bigger cage until on last year’s February it decided to confiscate Kivú from the zoo and transport it to ZooAve, an animal rescue sanctuary where they made him a spacious enclousure with actual greenery separate from the public until he passed away of a renal malfunction and old age. His body was cremated, his ashes were buried under a tree and ZooAve even built a bronxe statue on his honour.