Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Doug Willhite <drwillhite@earthlink.net>]

Paul,

If this isn't too far "off topic" will you please forward it to the  
listserve. It relates to the "when the body says no" thread we had  
going a week or so ago.
thanks,
doug

http://chihuahuavalley.net



Begin forwarded message:

From: Doug Willhite <drwillhite@earthlink.net>
Date: March 10, 2010 8:35:11 AM PST
Subject: Positive Thinking can be both bright & dark / good & bad...

Hello Friend & Fellow Positive Thinker ;)

Hope all is well.

We've experienced the benefits of developing a positive mental  
outlook firsthand and would never discourage maintaining a positive  
approach to daily life.

On the other hand, there is a dark side to the positive approach  
which is proving to be a kind of cultural trap for us -- preventing  
otherwise rational folks from responsibly and effectively dealing  
with real situations. (More on this below...)

It's good to be positive... just as it is good to be aware of "the  
shadow" of positive thinking.

(This will conclude my sermon for the day! ;^)

hug,
doug

PS  Read on if you dare... :)

________________________________________________________________________

Magical thinking
by Christine Patton
Peak Shrink has an interesting post on The Tyranny of Positive  
Thinking, a review of Barbara Ehrenreich's book Bright-sided: How the  
Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In  
it, she expresses the same frustration I've felt when dealing with  
our cult of positivity.

I believe that I can improve situations by the way that I think about  
them and how I interpret them. I believe that, by envisioning a  
positive future that INCLUDES the harsh facts about peak oil and  
climate change, I can work toward that future by coming to terms with  
the massive changes that will be occurring and taking steps to  
prepare for it. A positive vision helps keep me motivated.

However. There is a pathological brand of positive thinking that  
demands that we be happy at all times, that we neither admit nor  
experience pain, unhappiness or depression. In order to achieve this  
type of happiness, the high priests and priestesses of the cult of  
positive thinking make recommendations like "don't read the news" and  
"get rid of negative people."

In other words, deny reality, hide from reality, and don't let your  
friends and family experience any real emotions. You don't want to  
hear about their difficulties with cancer and death, financial  
troubles and lost jobs - it'll just bring you down. Without all that  
negativity, you can float about in a bubble of pretense, your life  
padded on all sides by smiles and affirmations.

That same cultish positivity goes a step further to promote the idea  
that "wishing makes it so." While research that I've read seems to  
back up the effects of positive goal-setting and mental envisioning,  
these people believe that you can magically conjure up riches and  
wealth just by imagining it - hard enough. Not imagining and then  
working towards it - but just by being positive and believing.

The dark side of this is that you can then blame people who are poor,  
unemployed, sick, injured, or diseased for their own misfortune.  
Nothing to do with the realities of the physical world, history,  
biology, or sociology. Nothing to do with the unjust and  
environmentally harmful systems that are built into our society. It's  
just that they must not be thinking the right thoughts! Those  
Negative Nellies are bringing all that cancer/genocide/war/ 
infertility/poverty on themselves! If they'd just get with the  
program, they'd be healthy, rich and happy.

I have one friend, for instance, who hates it when I talk about  
problems like oil depletion. "Enough of that doom and gloom!" she  
cries. "Let's talk about solutions!" Well, excuse me, but until you  
understand the depth, breadth and scope of the issue, you can't even  
begin to imagine the magnitude of the changes that are going to have  
to occur - and which we are going to have to work towards.

Someone who doesn't understand the fundamental facts around peak oil  
is likely to think that we can just slap a PV solar band-aid, or some  
electric car Neosporin, on the problem. Someone who does understand  
the problem knows that we've got serious gangrene in our system and  
we're looking at radical amputation of our car culture, entitlement  
thinking, and globalized industrial consumerism.

From what I've read about survival and trauma, one of the keys to  
dealing with a trauma appears to be avoiding the feeling of  
helplessness. In that case, in order to deal with the traumas we are  
experiencing now, and will experience in the near future, we have to  
believe that we can actually achieve good things by taking action. If  
positive thinking - looking on the bright side and finding the  
opportunities - helps you and those around you to prepare for the  
collapses we are facing - then look on the bright side. It helps me.

But if positive thinking causes you to shun all news and discussion  
about peak oil, unemployment, bank failures, and environmental  
catastrophe, then you are only setting yourself up for failure. If  
positive thinking causes you to avoid your friends and family who  
want to discuss and prepare for these "depressing" issues, you've  
shot yourself in the foot. And if positive thinking causes you to  
think that these problems are all going to go away without any  
investment or energy on YOUR part, then you really are doomed.

Sticking your head in a hole, no matter how bright and shiny, isn't a  
long term success strategy. Short term happiness (from oblivious  
ignorance or denial) is no substitute for long-term happiness  
(survival, healthy relationships, and peace of mind knowing you have  
helped preserve our future and a future for our children). Choose  
wisely.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Original article available here: http://peakoilhausfrau.blogspot.com/ 
2010/03/magical-thinking.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Tyranny of Positive Thinking
by Kathy McMahon
Abstract:

Could it be that “thinking positively” is contributing to our  
blindness and inaction around energy issues, environmental  
degradation and economic devastation? I’ve hammered this point home  
in a number of posts, the most widely read being “Do You Have a  
Panglossian Disorder?.” Now, a trenchant social observer provides a  
clear outline of how that may well be so, elaborating on the ‘dangers  
of positive thinking.’



“Americans are “positive” people.”

So goes the first line of Barbara Ehrenreich’s most recent book  
“Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has  
Undermined America”

(Metropolitan Books, 2009). This book points out the dark side of  
optimism. While Americans have crafted and embraced “happiness”  
ideology, arguing that a positive outlook can lengthen lives and  
improve health, Ehrenreich examines this “research” and finds its  
evidence flimsy and motivated more by financial success than  
scholarly rigor. What function does the evolution of “positive  
ideology” play in a nation that, even in prosperous times, ranks 23rd  
in self-reported worldwide happiness? Why do we embrace the ‘happy  
face’ while swallowing two-thirds of the global market’s supply of  
antidepressants, making them the most widely prescribed drug in the  
United States? Are we depressed because we aren’t happy or does the  
constant demand for happiness lead to depression? To address these  
questions, the author begins by defining her terms:


Elements of Positive Thinking

While we American citizens believe that an optimistic “can do”  
attitude is part of our national character, Ehrenreich concludes that  
being “positive” and maintaining a “positive outlook” is an  
ideological mandate. She defines “positive thinking” as having two  
elements:

“One is the generic content of positive thinking—that is, the  
positive thought itself—which can be summarized as: Things are pretty  
good right now, at least if you are willing to see silver linings,  
make lemonade out of lemons, etc., and things are going to get a  
whole lot better.” While often confused with hope, optimism is a  
cognitive stance, a conscious expectation, which presumably anyone  
can develop through practice, while hope is an emotion, a yearning,  
and not entirely within our control.

The second meaning of “positive thinking” is the practice, or  
discipline of trying to think in a positive way. The author points  
out that researchers on positive thinking aren’t content to argue  
that positive thoughts lead to happy feelings. Why isn’t it enough to  
simply “feel happy?” No, the act of “accentuating the positive” must  
actually lead to happy outcomes. Optimism promises to improve health,  
heighten personal efficacy, boost confidence, and intensify  
resilience, making it easier for us to accomplish our goals. If you  
expect things to get better, the argument goes, they will.

While psychologists have attempted to prove this is so, through  
research, a far less rational theory also runs rampant in American  
ideology—the idea that our thoughts can, in some mysterious way,  
directly affect the physical world. Negative thoughts somehow produce  
negative outcomes, while positive thoughts realize themselves in the  
form of health, prosperity, and success. The explanations may vary,  
but the message is the same: whether by “reading the relevant books,  
attending seminars and speeches that offer the appropriate training  
or just doing the solitary work of concentrating on desired outcomes— 
a better job, an attractive mate, or world peace” can be ours if we  
put the effort into learning how to think positively.



A History of Positive Thinking and Modern Links to Consumer Capitalism

Ehrenreich traces the history of positive thinking, from the  
mavericks that inspired Mary Baker Eddy onto modern day ‘mega-church’  
preachers. Dale Carnegie published the first great text on how to act  
in a positive way in his book “How to Win Friends and Influence  
People, published in 1936, and still in print. Born “Carnagey” he  
changed his name to “Carnegie,” apparently to match that of the  
industrialist Andrew Carnegie.

Carnegie’s book did not assume that his readers would feel happy if  
they took his advice, but that they could manipulate others to their  
own advantage by putting on a successful happy act. It was no  
accident that books like “How to Win Friends” and Napoleon Hill’s  
book, “Think and Grow Rich” were written and heavily promoted during  
the last Great Depression, because there was a lot of propaganda  
about the importance of having a “positive attitude,” a “pleasing  
personality.” The “right attitude” could overcome the massive  
structural and economic problems the USA was facing. Then, like now,  
what’s now thought of as “consumer confidence” would pull the country  
out of its morass once people “believed” that “prosperity was right  
around the corner.” We now call the anticipation of this prosperity  
“green shoots.”

While the early “positive thinkers” were reacting to the harsh  
judgementalism of Calvinist thought about sin and damnation, modern  
day “positive thought police” maintain many of these same rigid  
features. Ehrenreich still sees the preservation of Calvinism’s more  
“toxic features—the same harsh judgmentalism, echoing the old  
religion’s condemnation of sin, and an insistence on the constant  
interior labor of self-examination.

The American alternative to Calvinism was not to be hedonism or even  
just an emphasis on emotional spontaneity. To achieve positive  
thinking, emotions must remain suspect, and one’s inner life subject  
to relentless monitoring. While the Calvinist searched for signs of  
laxness, sin and self-indulgence…the positive thinker is ever on the  
lookout for “negative thoughts” charged with anxiety or doubt.” Such  
efforts are, according to Ehrenreich, “a form of ‘secular salvation.’”

It is no surprise that “think and grow rich” should blend the notion  
of positive thought with the accumulation of material wealth.  
Hundreds of self-help books since the start of positive thinking have  
talked about how the right thoughts can “attract” money. They’ve also  
framed practical problems such as world-wide unemployment, low wages,  
or medical bills as “excuses.” If you can free your mind of the  
“real” obstacle to wealth—such as the harboring subconscious  
revulsion for “filthy lucre” or deep resentment/jealousy of the rich,  
you can have it all. It is not social class or larger institutional  
structures that limit the average person’s success but “negative self- 
talk” that impede your progress toward wealth accumulation.

Consumer capitalism is, according to Ehrenreich, “congenial to  
positive thinking.” It promises that we deserve more, and can have  
it, if we really want it, and if we are only willing to make the  
effort to get it. While she agrees that the notion of perpetual  
growth is absurd, a belief in positive thinking makes ‘having it all’  
seem, “possible, if not ordained.” p.8. Think –the right way–and  
growing rich is yours.



Play-Acting Happiness to Happiness as a Predisposition

Happy shoppers, according to Les Slater, spend up to 20% more, and  
therefore one avenue to making customer’s happy is to have happy  
salespeople.

During the last Great Depression, workers were expected to ‘fake it  
‘til they make it.’ Today, it is no longer enough to simply act  
happy. Employers now expect their workers to be happy. A reader of  
Ehrenreich’s work wrote to her about her experience working at a call  
center for Home Depot:

“I worked there for about a month when my boss pulled me into a small  
room and told me I “obviously wasn’t happy enough to be there.” Sure,  
I was sleep deprived from working five other jobs to pay for private  
health insurance that topped $300 a month and student loans that  
kicked in at $410 a month, but I can’t recall saying anything to  
anyone outside the line of “I’m happy to have a job.” Plus, I didn’t  
realize anyone had to be happy to work in a call center. My friend… 
refers to [simulating happiness] as the kind of feeling you might get  
from getting a hand job when your soul is dying.” p. 54.

Happiness: From State to Trait

“You can’t hire someone who can make sandwiches and teach them to be  
happy,” says Jay, “So we hire happy people and teach them to make  
sandwiches.”

“GET RID OF NEGATIVE PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE. Negative People SUCK! Avoid  
them at all cost. If you have to cut ties with people you’ve known  
for a long time because they’re actually a negative drain on you,  
then so be it. Trust me, you’re better off without them…”

The message is clear: go with the flow, or prepare to be ostracized  
or fired.”

Read this advice from a ‘management expert:’

“We knew what to do about increasing sales and cutting losses, but  
the morale problem had us stumped. We decided we really didn’t know  
what “morale” meant, or why the employees seemed down in the dumps.  
In true Machiavellian fashion, we had made the needed personnel cuts  
early and all at once. The deadwood was gone. The people remaining  
were the survivors, in for the long haul. They knew that. They should  
have been happy they still had jobs. Not everyone was unhappy,  
though. There was a solid core group of people who were up-beat and  
supportive. … [so] we decided to watch those positive, upbeat  
individuals more closely to see if we could get a handle on what made  
them that way.

After a couple of weeks… the answer hit us: The individuals in our  
upbeat group were just plain happy people, on or off the job. They  
had stable, fulfilling family lives, they had interests outside of  
work, they were confident in their abilities. Ups and downs were a  
part of their lives too, but in general they liked themselves. It was  
just that simple. [W]e had a disproportionately large share of  
basically unhappy people who were dragging the company down. Morale,  
being a group dynamic, was low because of all those unhappy people… 
Our solution was to hire happy people…

The [previous research study’s] assumption was that morale is  
determined by the conditions of the workplace–the “work environment”  
The reports of such studies routinely and dutifully concluded with  
suggestions to employers about what they could change in the  
workplace to increase the general level of job satisfaction. Implicit  
in such admonitions was, first of all, that job satisfaction actually  
needed changing, and second, that making the specified changes would  
indeed have the effect of raising morale. We now have reason to  
believe that, for any given person, job satisfaction is …accounted  
for by what is in, as opposed to what is around, the  
person.”(emphasis added)

\

In other words, people are not made happy by decent working  
conditions, fair wages, or good benefits. Happy people are hired.  
Happy people are happy regardless of how miserable their jobs are,  
and as early as the teen years, “cheerful” adolescents, as rated by  
their guidance counselors, have job satisfaction 30 years later,  
regardless of their type of work.

The message is clear: ‘hire the happy’ and rid your company (and your  
life) of “negative people.”

But what about that “downer” auto executive who questions the  
company’s overinvestment in SUV’s and trucks? Or that worry-wart  
financial officer who says the bank is overexposed in subprime  
mortgages? Get rid of them! In a world of positive thinking, “if you  
cannot bring good news than don’t bring any.” Reality checks or  
negative predictions of any kind become evidence that someone is  
‘unwilling’ to be nourishing, full of praise, or affirming and  
therefore is a downer and must go.



The Business of Being Happy

Clearly if the reader walks away with one unfaltering message from  
Ehrenreich’s book, it is that positive thinking is big business.  
After laying off “deadwood,” most large companies are still faced  
with the task of shaping the thoughts of its remaining workers in a  
positive direction. In 1994, the same day that AT&T announced it  
would lay off fifteen thousand workers, it sent its San Francisco  
staff to a big-tent motivational lecture by Zig Ziglar who told the  
crowd:

“It’s your own fault, don’t blame the system; don’t blame the boss— 
work harder and pray more” p. 115.

Businesses were willing to pay big bucks to the “power of positive  
thinking professionals” who promised to emotionally prepare the  
remaining workers who were facing increased pay cuts, fewer benefits,  
longer work hours, heightened work loads, and decreasing job  
security. Corporations could boost a book to the best-seller list by  
purchasing tens of thousands of copies to be distributed to their  
remaining workforce.

This “happiness” industry produces an “endless flow” of books, DVDs,  
and other products and provides corporate employers with tens of  
thousands of “life coaches,” “executive coaches,” and motivational  
speakers” as well as the cadre of psychology profession willing to  
train them.

Quantum Flapdoodle

Positive thinking had now become so ubiquitous and virtually  
unchallenged, that it became the stuff of runaway best sellers like  
the 2006 book The Secret. What’s the secret? It has an unmistakable  
resemblance to traditional folk magic—that like attract like. Like a  
fetish or a talisman, the ‘thought’ brings about some desired  
outcome. But no one in this industry would be happy to be linked with  
the word “magic.” They prefer to link their efforts to “real” science  
such as quantum physics. In Bright-sided, Ehrenreich goes on to list  
a series of assertions about how this “scientific” principle works;  
theories Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann calls “quantum flapdoodle.”

Happiness Academy

Fortunately, for this industry, the lure of lucre has motivated even  
the crabby halls of mainstream academia, to entered the fray, with  
courses in “positive psychology” designed to help students “pump up  
their optimism and nurture their positive feelings”–no doubt as an  
antidote to their soon-to-be-faced dismal job prospects and  
inescapable student loan debts.

Ehrenreich is perhaps, particularly hard on my own profession,  
psychology, because she sees it as having sold out true research in  
favor of fad and fashion. Arguing that while insurance companies have  
gutted incomes for clinical psychologists, the corporate role of  
“positive thought coach” and “trainer” offers a new avenue to  
financial stability.

She quotes from a 2007 article in the New York Times, describing the  
course “Happiness 101.” It has “the sect-like feel of positive  
psychology” and suggests that “the publicity about the field has  
gotten ahead of the science, which may be no good [science] anyway.”  
“Poor science” worries its leading advocate, Martin Seligman, also,  
according to this same article: “I have the same worry they do,”  
states Seligman. “That’s what I do at 4 in the morning.”

Ehenreich continues her brutal critique:

“At a late afternoon plenary session on “The Future of Positive  
Psychology,” featuring the patriarchs of the discipline, Martin  
Seligman and Ed Diener, Seligman got the audience’s attention by  
starting off with the statement “I’ve decided my theory of positive  
psychology is completely wrong.” Why? Because it’s about happiness,  
which is “scientifically unwieldy.” Somehow, this problem could be  
corrected by throwing in the notions of “success” and  
“accomplishment”—which I couldn’t help noting would put the positive  
psychologists on the same terrain as Norman Vincent Peale and any  
number of success gurus.”

Seligman suggested a new name, –“positive social science” capturing a  
‘plural theory’ embracing anthropology, political science, and  
economics,” but this statement “created understandable consternation  
within the audience of several hundred positive psychologists,  
graduate students and coaches.” Changing the name was a mistake,  
argued Diener, because “positive psychology is a brand.” Besides, he  
argued, he ‘hates’ the idea of ‘positive social science,’ since  
social science includes sociology and sociology is “weak” and  
notoriously underfunded.”

The gathering agreed that despite the fact that the science wasn’t  
“keeping up with the applied work like coaching,” it was “meeting a  
need.” “Application,” it was argued, “sometimes gets ahead of  
science, and science later follows.” Despite the weak research  
supporting the field, ‘people want happiness’ argued Seligman and  
Diener (and apparently ‘positive thinking psychologists want income…)

While attempting to differentiate themselves from the motivational  
industry, Ehrenreich argues that “positive psychologists” are still  
attempting to corner a market in the corporate world. “The subject  
[positive psychology] she argues ‘seemed to have veered away from  
science to naked opportunism…When one audience member proposed  
renaming positive psychology “applied behavioral economics,” because  
“it’s popular in business schools and goes with high salaries,”  
nobody laughed.”

Thinking Your Way to Health

Positive Thinking as the new American theology is also now a ‘medical  
prescription’ for life-threatening illness. It reframes what is life- 
threatening, as a “gift,” that clarifies priorities, strengthens  
family ties and heightens spiritual connection. What a positive way  
of framing a disease that has a lifetime prevalence of 1 in every 2  
men (killing 1 in 4) and 1 in every 3 women (killing 1 in 5).

As a result of treating her own breast cancer, Ehrenreich became  
intimately familiar with a culture that “had little tolerance for the  
expression of anger, discussion of environmental causes, or the fact  
that much of the immediate illness and pain was induced by the  
treatment.” She quotes Cindy Cherry in an article published in the  
Washington post who stated:

“If I had it to do over, would I want breast cancer? Absolutely. I’m  
not the same person I was, and I’m glad I’m not…”

“Cheerfulness is required, dissent a kind of treason” p. 31. “Never a  
complaint about lost time, shattered sexual confidence, or the long- 
term weakening of the arms caused by lymph nodes dissection and  
radiation. What does not destroy you, to paraphrase Nietzsche, makes  
you a spunkier, more evolved sort of person.” “If that’s not enough  
to make you want to go out and get an injection of live cancer cells.. 
[another cancer survivor insists] “

Cancer will lead you to God. Let me say it again. Cancer is your  
connection to the Divine” p. 28-29.

Positive thinking in cancer support groups were once thought to lead  
participants to cure, but this previous compelling evidence no longer  
stands up to scrutiny. In May 2007, in an issue of Psychology  
Bulletin, James Coyne and two coauthors systematically reviewed all  
the literature on the supposed effects of psychotherapy on cancer and  
found it full of “endemic problems.” A few months later, David  
Spiegel, an early researcher on support groups and cancer survival  
rates, reported in the journal Cancer that support groups conferred  
no survival advantages after all. “It might improve ones mood, but  
they did nothing to overcome cancer.” There are emotional and social  
benefits “but they should not seek such experiences solely on the  
expectation that they are extending their lives” p. 37.

Nevertheless the bias favoring a link between emotions and cancer  
survival persists. When asked why, Coyne believed that it was because  
cancer-related grants to behavioral scientists were riding on it.  
Skeptics, like himself, tended to be marginalized. “It’s much easier  
for me to get speaking gigs in Europe” he told Ehrenreich.

With regards to her own struggles with breast cancer, happening a  
decade before writing this book, Ehrenreich reflects:

“What [cancer] gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very  
personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American  
culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to  
deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame ourselves  
for our fate.”



“He didn’t like pessimism, hand-wringing or doubt.”

Some would argue that political and business leaders set the tone for  
what attitudes and beliefs are acceptable to hold. Among American  
Presidents, while it has always been “Morning in America,” this  
mantra reached a “manic crescendo” of optimism at the turn of the  
twenty-first century initiated by Bill Clinton, and later George W.  
Bush who “took his presidency as an opportunity to inspire  
confidence, dispel doubt and pump up the national spirit of self- 
congratulation.” For George W., the key adjective was “optimistic,”  
and this demand for positive thinking shaped his advisers profoundly.  
According to Condoleezza Rice “the president almost demanded  
optimism. He didn’t like pessimism, hand-wringing or doubt.”

Bosses Drank the Kool-Aid

This same “Yes we can!” attitude led to delusional optimism and a  
demand for “bright thinking” on the part of bankers and a large part  
of the investment industry. After demanding that their work force  
digest positive thinking, the CEO’s themselves “drank the Kool-Aid,”  
with disastrous economic consequences. The image of a CEO changed  
from being a capable administrator to a leader—a motivating,  
flamboyant leader”—very much like a motivational speaker, in fact.  
Many business leaders, “developed a monomaniacal conviction that  
there is one right way of doing things, and believe they possess an  
almost divine insight into reality…they are charismatic visionaries  
rather than people in suits.” “Corporations are full of mystics,” a  
1996 business self-help book declared. “If you want to find a genuine  
mystic, you are more likely to find one in a boardroom than in a  
monastery or cathedral” p. 112.

Both on a political and corporate level, this “reckless optimism”  
pervaded every aspect of American life, from the invasion of Iraq, to  
the mortgage and banking industry, as well as the delusional capacity  
to “dismiss disturbing news” about the levees breaking in New  
Orleans. While the tragedy of September 11 was blamed on a “failure  
of imagination,” Ehrenreich argues that there was, instead, plenty of  
imagination, but the type that imagined “an invulnerable nation and  
an ever-booming economy—there was simply no ability or inclination to  
image the worst.”

Avoiding the Misery

What’s the best trick to staying happy according to Happiness Gurus:  
don’t read or watch the news. Why is the news such a bummer?  
According to one theorist:

“The great majority of the population of this world does not live  
life from the space of a positive attitude. In fact, I believe the  
majority of the population of this world lives from a place of pain,  
and that people who live from pain only know how to spread more  
negativity and pain. For me, this explains many of the atrocities of  
our world and the reason why we are bombarded with negativity all the  
time.” p. 58-59

Starvation. It’s a bummer, man.

Ehrenreich argues that this fear of taking in bad news stems from a  
deep believe in one’s own helplessness, which she believes is at the  
core of this positive thinking: “It causes you sadness and you can’t  
do anything about it.”



Giving the Universe a Boost of Optimism

If things are truly always getting better, if we live in the best of  
all possible worlds and if the arc of the universe slants toward  
happiness and abundance, why are we required to put forth the effort  
to maintain a positive outlook? Because, apparently, we don’t believe  
that the universe can truly function on its own without our help. And  
this egocentric perspective leads us to believe that we are, truly,  
the center of the universe, G-d’s ‘special creatures’ and that  
therefore the universe, and the little planet we operate from, will  
remain a forever giving ‘Mother Earth,’ because of our positive  
thinking.

When we are confronted with so much contradictory evidence like the  
polar ice caps won’t stay frozen “because we say so,” or oil  
depletion continues unabated, our anxiety demands that we pump up our  
thinking. We run for the help of therapy, workshops, tapes and self- 
help books, given by the preachers, gurus and seminar leaders more  
skilled than we at “self-hypnosis,” “mind control,” and “thought  
control” who can instruct us. How else can we hope to maintain the  
constant effort required to repress or block out so many “unpleasant  
possibilities” and “negative” thoughts?

“Those who are truly self-confident, or those who have in some way  
made their peace with the world and their destiny within it, do not  
need to expend effort censoring or otherwise controlling their  
thoughts” she argues. “It has become an American obsession because we  
are a terribly insecure nation.”

Massive Empathy Deficit

And just as “purely positive thinking” can allow us to deny the  
environmental, economic, and energy calamity happening all around us,  
it encourages us to reject and distance from the very same people who  
are most likely to call our attention to the plight that befalls us.

“Negative people have to go, even, presumably, the ones that you live  
with: “Identify the situation or person who is a downer in your life.  
Remove yourself from that situation or association. If it’s family,  
choose to be around them less.”

Keep away from victims and “Debbie Downers!” Their fate will become  
yours, as if by magic, should you allow yourself to be influenced by  
them.

Those that cannot help but be impacted to the core by deep fears of  
rain forests destroyed, species extinctions, or the dramatic impact  
of a fossil fuel-free future feel the depression and despair. They  
panic or are filled with immobilizing anxiety. They refuse or are  
unable to “put on a happy face” and their sensitivity is rewarded by  
job rejection for not being optimistic.

By logical extension, why should we tolerate the “whiny toddler, the  
colicky infant, or the sullen teenager?” How could we put up with the  
depression of our unemployed husbands or the chronic pain vocalized  
by our dying parent? Rather than promote tolerance of the challenge,  
present in any family or group, to empathetically read and respond to  
the moods and messages of others, “accommodate to their insights and  
offer comfort when needed,” we are told to dump them and seek out the  
winners. Instead of becoming more closely connected to our bodies and  
to our emotions, we face the stress and emotional depletion when  
forced to remain ever cheerful and insensitive to the environment  
that surrounds us.



This is a horrible message for a difficult time.

But perhaps Ehrenreich gets at the heart of the matter when she says  
that:

“If the power of the mind were truly “infinite,” one would not have  
to eliminate negative people from one’s life; one could, for example,  
simply choose to interpret their behavior in a positive way—maybe  
he’s criticizing me for my own good, maybe she’s being sullen because  
she likes me so much and I haven’t been attentive, and so on. The  
advice you must change your environment—for example, by eliminating  
negative people and the news—in an admission that there may in fact  
be a “real world” out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes.  
In the face of this terrifying possibility, the only “positive”  
response is to withdraw into one’s own carefully constructed world of  
constant approval and affirmation, nice news, and smiling people” p. 59.

And so, as we achieve success at positive thinking, achieved through  
discipline, we tolerate no possibility for planetary collapse, job  
loss, energy depletion or business failure that we cannot control.  
Refuse to let in such negative thinking, or the failure will be your  
fault. You are the world, and your thoughts require you to take full  
personal responsibility and to exert the necessary power of will to  
not allow the possibility of failure. If you should fail, only the  
“whiners” or the “losers” are disappointed, resentful, or downcast.

“Winners” make cancer a gift and a dead ocean a “unique opportunity.”

She ends her introduction stating her wish for:

“more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness and better  
yet, joy…but we cannot levitate ourselves into that blessed condition  
by wishing it. We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against  
terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the  
natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass  
delusion that is positive thinking….Why should one be so inwardly  
preoccupied at all? Why not reach out to others in love and  
solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of  
understanding?…Why spend so much time working on oneself when there  
is so much real work to be done?”

Thank you, Barbara, for being MY Peak Shrink.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You can find out more about Brightsided on Barbara's blog.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Original article available here: http://www.peakoilblues.com/blog/? 
p=1989

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