How do you connect these dots -- Rene Descartes, Dales Carnegie and Barbara Ehrenreich? Here's a clue -- they're each what you see in your morning mirror...!
Descartes penned the famous "Cogito ergo sum" (I think therefore I am). Carnegie wrote "How To Win Friends & Influence People." And now Ehrenreich has come out with "How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America." Each in their own way is telling us how we think helps explain who we are.
Americans, ever since pioneer days, have been deeply and unchangeably convinced we each hold the reins of our destiny in our own hands. It's all those If-You-Can-Dream-It-You-Can-Do-It mantras we hear from all those How To books on the shelves and all those motivational speakers at the sales meetings. I speak with modest authority, having scanned some of those books and written many of those speeches. Frankly, neither ever helped me close a sale or a wound.
Ehrenreich reports, this "mystical positivity" is not only used to pump up eager sales forces, it even translates into the current "gospel of wealth" in our mega-churches. She insists it's good to feel self-reliant, but where is the courage to withstand the" inevitable defeats in life and the Christian call for humility and sacrificial love for others?"
Ronald Reagan will be remembered in our history books, but perhaps even more so in our popular culture. That's because of his 1941 portrayal of the Notre Dame football player Gipper in the enormously popular movie "Knute Rockne." It helped forever embed in our psyches the conviction that coaches can win teams and teams games with the right dose of get-one-for-the-Gipper thinking.
When you're 25, positive thinking makes enormous good sense...when you're 45, it can be confusing to learn it can't stave off the defeats and disease of life...when you're 65, you're compelled to try reconciling the positives with the negatives in your life. Still, it can be done. Probably by remembering that the Gipper was gifted with better legs than most, but he still needed 10 less gifted human beings to score.
Being less gifted and less positive is no reason to be less hopeful....
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I like your last line about staying hopeful. I am going to try and remember that, as I must admit, I'm more a "half-empty" less positive person. But maybe I can keep "hoping" to change!
ReplyDeleteRight -- hope, we're told, is the very last virtue we can afford to lose in this life. Lot of other things may slip through our fingers, but as long as there's a pulse there's a hope!!
ReplyDeleteSometimes these think-positive folks are only thinking positive because everything right now is going positively. What happens when a smile won't solve the problem...?
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