How Positive Thinking Ruins the World
17Dec. 09
About 2 months ago, BloggingHeads ran a fascinating 1 hr talk called The Perniciousness of Positive Thinking. Author Barbara Ehrenreich talked about her new book Bright Sided where she explores the negative consequences of the positive thinking fad.
When I was listening to it as soon as I heard the title of the talk I had an initial surprise at the topic’s seeming counter intuitiveness — followed very quickly with a realisation and a nodding of the head. Indeed, fetishising positive thinking is quite prevalent to the point of insanity. There are many belief systems where things can’t be bad almost by definition. The most obvious of these is the hokey New Agey we-can-all-control-our-destiny claptrap, which includes Deepak Chopra’s quantum physics misappropriation, Oprah, The Secret, as well as the usual epidemic of vacuous motivational speakers. Indeed these can reach quite surprising levels of respectability. I saw Anthony Robbins give a TED talk a few years ago which was very surprising. Click here if you want to chuckle at how someone can be saying absolutely nothing for so long whilst being so motivated and motivational. And this is from TED, who are usually quite good at being about substance!
The problem with positive thinking as a dogma is that it directly conflicts with a reality that sometimes really IS terrible. Of course it’s true that having a positive attitude is often beneficial. It can give you a disposition where you can achieve some things that you otherwise might not have been able to. And, even if you don’t do anything different, a positive attitude will probably make you more happier with the very same set of circumstances. But a positive attitude can’t get you to “achieve” stepping off a skyscraper and surviving.
Which is what a lot of these goo-peddlers are doing. According to The Secret, Deepak Chopra and a lot of alternative medicine, most or all of the bad things that happen to us (including specifically diseases) are a result of our negative thoughts vibrating through a circular route to somehow karmically bite us in the ass. Of course this belief is false. But it’s also positively harmful. It means that if you haven’t cured your cancer/financial problems/personal problems by positive thinking you’ve failed. The Secret is a victim-blaming worldview, in a very crude sense.
Which is exactly what triggered Ehrenreich to write the book. She got breast cancer and found the treatments to be inadequate and painful and her predicament generally sucky. And yet most of the online and offline support groups she saw argued against her view of her cancer, instead telling her she needed to be more positive, to “embrace” her cancer, to see it as a “blessing” and a way of spiritual development. No kidding.
The most disturbing aspect of this is the large-scale consequences. According to the book’s research, part of the GFC was caused by this curious fact. Many financial executives said to manangement “we’re doing something unsustainable and it’ll all come crashing down”. Instead of listening to the arguments they were often fired for spreading negative thinking and being a “downer”. From a recent interview with Ehrenreich:
I remember reading one of these crazy books on attraction — about how you can get what you want by wishing it. One of blurbs on the back was written by a guy who worked for the company that held my retirement funds. That scared me.
Are Deepak Chopra and The Secret responsible for GFC? Probably not but there are indirect connections. The corporate culture that can persist living in a ludicrous bubble and the new age culture of the Secret have this in common — being positive is seen as a virtue over and above being accurate about actual reality. Such rosy thinking (whether it’s manifested through vacuous newagism or corporate motivationalism) is just one of the cognitive biases that we all have. One that might just destroy humanity if something catastrophic comes up and we’re too rosy to take note. Yeah, IF…
December 17th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
A couple of years ago my girlfriend and I came up with our version of “The Secret”, the we wanted to create a pamphlet called “The Power Of Chance”. We started with sayings then chapter titles but never went through with the idea of the pamphelet but I still have the rough chapter titles:
- Chance is for Everyone
– Never Miss a Chance
– Think, Seek Wait and See
– Take a Chance
– The Negative Positive Effect
– Recognition of Chance
– A Chance is Better Than None
– Are You Unconciously Resisting Chance
– When Chance Let’s You Down
– There Is What Is (and Ther Maybe a Chance)
– What Are The Chances
– Is It Selfish to Want More Chance
– Chance is for Everyone
– Opening Others to Chance
– The Road to Chance
– There’s No Shortage of Chance
– You Can’t Stop the Chance
– The Harmony of Wait and See
– The Chance of Chance
– When You Don’t Have a Chance
– The Art of Wishful Thnking
– Whether You Believe or Not
As you can see we really went to town with or chapter list and this is just a sample of them. We spent the night rolling around the floor laughing. We still joke about it when someone says something like “I was thinking about so and so the other day and then they called” we look at each other laugh and say” ch-ch-ch-chance”, then the other person gets the shits with us.
But what can you do about chance?
shane
December 17th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Good article.
December 18th, 2009 at 10:07 am
Well said, Michael.
December 18th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
agreed michael. while ostensibly seeming a good thing, positive thinking and visualisation can have very negative outcomes. one study i read showed that programs where people visualise their achieving their goals by imagining themselves with said goal, actually had worse outcomes and demeanor than those who did not use the technique. but by getting people to visualise positive steps along the way, the process involved in achieving their goals, the participants had better outcomes and felt better when things went wrong, because they had a plan to get around these setbacks. those who only visualised the outcome were more likely to give up at a setback because they couldn’t see a step to get beyond the problem. realism works much better than irrational positivity.
December 25th, 2009 at 3:29 am
Outstanding article. Being unrealistically optimistic has been shown in military studies of survival to be equally as destructive as a defeatist attitude (“Survivor’s Club”, Ben Sherwood). If nothing else, building false expectations must surely start a cycle of disillusionment followed by more positive spinning on the bad situation to compensate for it. But the real crux of the problem is casting the universe as a human-focused entity; the universe is conspiring to bring each of us abundance and success. In that sense, the positive thinking new age movement is no different than organized religion, in my opinion. It just puts us back at the center of the universe again, when so much evidence has moved us away. There just can be nothing healthy in believing the entire universe is working for your benefit. In fact, this is one of the symptoms of individuals suffering from schizophrenia; a belief that large-scale events are either directed at them or caused by them. Clearly it is healthier and more practical to realize the world is mostly indifferent to you and to operate within that structure.
December 25th, 2009 at 4:18 am
To be totally honest I think it is really important not to allow yourself to be forced into false dichotomies by someone taking an extreme view. So of course the new age “you can do anything” movement is not positive or responsible — it is another charlatan industry that makes masses of money from telling people what they want to hear and not worrying about the consequences — the people who throw all of their hope for a cancer cure on a meditation CD, or whatever.
BUT, I did survive acute non-hodgkins lymphoma many years ago and I only just survived. My GP at that time said that the chemotherapy had kept me alive long enough for my determination to kick back in. He attributed my recovery very largely (80% he said) to a positive attitude — he also headed the psychiatry team at the practice. The way I dealt with it, other than by taking my chemotherapy and radium, was to live in almost total denial. No one around me was allowed to talk about it. The children on the cancer ward who felt sorry for themselves appeared to go downhill much faster than those few who managed to stay positive. Not absolutely, but enough for experienced medical practitioners to think that positivity made a significant difference.
One specific time I think positive thinking helped me, at least a little, was when I wanted to go home after being hospitalised for many months. I’d dropped down to 4 1/2 stone and had really wasted away, also having lost use of my legs. They’d already sent me home once, but I couldn’t walk for myself and had had an epileptic seizure upon trying to mount the first step of the stairs and had ended up back in hospital the same day. Distraught at being back in hospital I asked when I could go home and they replied when I was able to get up and walk out of there. I lay in bed for some 6 hours summoning up the determination and when the time came, I marched out of my room, walked over to the staff nurse’s chair, swung my legs round onto the desk and said “right — can I go home then?”
It still all proved too much for me in the end and I wound up back in hospital again very soon after. It took me weeks to learn how to walk unaided with fairly extensive physiotherapy, but I think it was significant that I managed to walk that day in spite of extensive muscle wastage. That’s it really — I know there is lots of room to be sceptical or disparaging about my experiences, but to state my point again, try not to let your hand be forced into taking an extreme view — either extreme is unrealistic. And whether it is warranted or not, positivity can be useful.
December 25th, 2009 at 5:36 am
Shane — I think you should make that at least as a pamphlet, it sounds like a lot of fun!
James — yes, I think I heard about those findings. The possible explanation might be that if you’re only visualising the goal you’re only helping with self-motivation whilst if you visualise the process you’re likely to come up with ways of doing things better in achieving the goal. Of course part of the problem is that I could take any study and in retrospect speculate on “why” it turned out that way! So the best I could say is that I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the mechanism, but I’m not sure.
Joanna — I don’t think anyone’s taking an extreme position. And for your case, at least at first glance, it looks like positive motivation played an essential role (of course there are the standard biases that come from self-reporting as you would know so there might be other more important factors that went unnoticed). Also it doesn’t seem that the doctor’s assessment that this was “80%” of your recovery is more than a guess. The main problem as it relates to the post would be if your doctors told you before the fact that 80% of your recovery depends on positive thinking and therefore you are mandated to think positively. I know in my case it would have just put pressure on me and this is what Ehrenreich mentions in her feeling pressure to be positive about her cancer. So I think positivity in medical situations is at its most beneficial when it’s seen as a tool but not a guarantee or a mandate.
Happy holidays everyone!
December 25th, 2009 at 7:52 am
I agree with the above posts expressing concern about the “positive thinking” movement, however I also agree with Joanna and Michael that the issue is more complex and needs discernment rather that blanket approval or condemnation.
I came across this New Scientist article http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227081.100-the-science-of-voodoo-when-mind-attacks-body.html?full=true
which shows how positive thinking can be a good antidote to superstition. A positive outlook can successfully disarm worries about Friday 13th, so-called curses and witchcraft, an inauspicious Tarot card like the Nine of Swords or an ominous planetary conjunction (though hopefully a more up-beat attitude to life would negate the need to resort to such practices).
December 25th, 2009 at 8:16 am
Michael — I agree that it would have been a lot of pressure if the doctors had placed the onus on my attitude at the time and I agree with your comments generally. As it was the doctors told me they thought they could cure me, though they gave my family a much more pessimistic prognosis.
I think the Ehrenreich case sounds totally ridiculous — I can’t imagine what good thinking positively about a tumour could possibly do. I used to visualise all out war against my cancer cells with flame-throwers when I wasn’t denying to myself that I had the disease at all.
Something else that may be of interest — I’ve had some run ins with CBT and CAT (cognitive behavioural therapy and cognitive analytical therapy) for treating depression and I find those approaches to be pretty appalling — they come from a very relativistic, Eastern / new agey perspective, placing the blame for how you cope with the world squarely on how you choose to perceive and label the events in it. I found those approaches didn’t allow at all for genuine bad experiences that need concrete physical solutions. Instead they focussed on telling you how your thinking was flawed, by being negatively affected, which in itself is not positive.
One of the charlatans I despise most is a guy called Mantak Chia — he manages to fuse all the qi / ch’i mumbo jumbo with the new age thinking and tantra and yoga and he’s turned it all into really big business by promising cancer and HIV / AIDS cures — anyway, I’d better not get started on an anti-qigong rant.
Hope everyone has a happy holiday season.