08.06.12
Internal philosophy
The power of negative thinking, from the New York Times:
Or take affirmations, those cheery slogans intended to lift the user’s mood by repeating them: “I am a lovable person!??? “My life is filled with joy!??? Psychologists at the University of Waterloo concluded that such statements make people with low self-esteem feel worse — not least because telling yourself you’re lovable is liable to provoke the grouchy internal counterargument that, really, you’re not ..
From this perspective, the relentless cheer of positive thinking begins to seem less like an expression of joy and more like a stressful effort to stamp out any trace of negativity. Mr. Robbins’s trademark smile starts to resemble a rictus. A positive thinker can never relax, lest an awareness of sadness or failure creep in. And telling yourself that everything must work out is poor preparation for those times when they don’t. You can try, if you insist, to follow the famous self-help advice to eliminate the word “failure??? from your vocabulary — but then you’ll just have an inadequate vocabulary when failure strikes …
The social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has persuasively argued that the all-positive approach, with its rejection of the possibility of failure, helped bring on our present financial crises.
I got over not being lovable and embraced the inner fail a long, long time ago. I have a hard time even being in the same room with armchair Dale Carnegies and Norman Vincent Peales.
DD blog wrote about Ehrenreich’s book, “Bright-Sided.” and its dissection of the Culture of Lickspittle, back in 2010 here.
[Slowness in the 2010 census] was cause for the delivery of an inspirational speech, the kind used at mass corporate rallies in the US where people pay to be told, by important figures and celebrities, that the only thing standing in the way of success is their bad attitude. If we were not to run with wolves but soar like eagles, we were told, we should separate ourselves from the drag of the complainers and critics.
About a day later, the census began firing what it thought were the complainers and critics, all the non-performers … Intelligence-insulting shit, it had nothing to do with the work of being a census enumerator, which was a solitary business.
