The dark side of positive thinking

By Neil Patrick

There’s power in positive thinking. But as dogma, it’s dangerous. It’s taken hold to such an extent that it risks blinding us to the reality of situations. Worse, when it becomes group think, that myopia becomes massively amplified. And the leveraging of delusion has created some catastrophic consequences.

In the world of work, positivity has become almost a mandatory pre-condition for employment.

It doesn’t matter how smart we are. How much experience we have. If we don’t fill the world with cheerfulness and positivity, employers don’t want us in their fold. The greatest virtue you can possess as an employee is the willingness to joyfully execute whatever task you are assigned.

The same mantra is provided to those looking for a job. Jobseekers are told that they must think positive. Their lack of a job is not a problem, it’s an opportunity. They should stride out into the world with a great big smile. True, but this is much easier said than done.

Freedom and blind enthusiasm cannot easily co-exist

This blind enthusiasm and mandatory cheerfulness is also a hallmark of the control systems of dictatorships. All that loving devotion to a leader and joyful exuberance at political rallies. We were mostly bewildered by the manipulated mourners at the funeral of Kim Jong-il in December 2011. But although more subtle, the same cult of positivity also underpins many codes of behavior in the west.

The statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il on Mansu Hill in Pyongyang

 CC BY-SA 3.0 J.A. de Roo

The financial collapse of 2008 was foreseen by plenty of people. The trouble is, they were isolated, shut up and drummed out of the party by the rest who were just having too much of a good time to countenance any cautionary advice.

Too much positivity is as dangerous if not more so than too little.

I think of it as a continuum. At one extreme is the viewpoint characterized by thinking such as the cult of the power of attraction. The idea that we can have anything we want if we just want it enough and imagine it enough. This idea is that by some as yet unknown force of nature, we can have anything we desire – we just have to want it enough.

The power of attraction has found a convenient alibi in quantum physics. All those phenomena that fly in the face of conventional scientific thinking. If normal science cannot explain everything, anything is possible right? Well, no actually it isn’t. There’s plenty of stuff we cannot explain, but that doesn’t automatically prove the correctness of any random idea that comes into our heads.

At the other extreme is the idea that we are all victims of an inevitability that we are really powerless to stop. Forces which are so much more powerful than we are, that we are all doomed. This ideology of fearfulness is characterized by the survivalists – those folk that have abandoned all hope in the world avoiding Armageddon and have decided to take to their bunkers to survive whatever horrors are about to descend.

Both extremes are wrong. We can change things and we have a lot more power than we often recognize. But the key isn’t blind cheerfulness and all charging together lemming-like over the cliff, or self-isolation and hunkering down to ensure our families can survive the unimaginable perils of the future.

The power to effect change is by developing our abilities to discriminate between right and wrong. To vigorously pursue our ambitions and to engage with others with whom we can share mutual support and help. And to have the courage to confront and challenge our leaders when they are at risk of getting it wrong.

Sure, doing it with a smile on your face and joy in your heart is no bad thing. Just don’t place too much faith in group think.

My thanks go to Barbara Ehrenreich, whose RSA video here inspired me to write this post.