“I’ m a cheerleader for the country…I want to give people in this country hope,” said President Donald J. Trump in his March 31, 2020 White House briefing, upon being confronted with a series of past misleading statements about the Covid-19 pandemic being “under control.” But he was either overly optimistic or lying about the danger, and failed to mobilize the nation’s public health system in time. This was an historic blunder that killed countless Americans. When called to account for his failure, he affirmed “nobody could have predicted” the severity of the outbreak. Of course, everyone had predicted it, and had told him exactly what was going to happen — for months.
But the anatomy of this failure has everything to do with Trump’s toxic positivity, and constant focus on “winning.” Back in 2009, following America’s last great recession, author Barbara Ehrenreich published Bright-Sided, How Positive Thinking is Undermining America. From the book summary: “Ehrenreich exposes the downside of America’s penchant for positive thinking: On a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out “negative” thoughts. On a national level, it’s brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster.” And indeed, who was thinking in 2006 that mortgage-backed securities, credit-default swaps, and banks too-big-too-fail could have hurt us so badly?
The weakest link in the American project has always been our strange affection for hucksters peddling false promises. Whether it’s through religion, snake-oil cures, cancer glurge, or political demagogues, we Americans seem to constantly want to be told everything is better than it really is. We see ourselves as thinner, richer, younger, taller, healthier, and more attractive than we actually are. We see our nation as exceptional — better than every other nation in the world. So the market delivered us Spanx, interest-only mortgages, plastic surgery, elevator shoes, tanning salons (melanoma factories), and bargain fashion. And despite record national debt and declining prestige in the world, we elected a celebrity cheerleader for President who told us we didn’t have to sacrifice or make any hard choices. We only had to believe we were “great again.”
We also have so many positive and fun-loving people in our culture. Among this group, this also means: woe to bearers of bad news of any kind. Woe to the studious and the politically engaged — to whom everything isn’t always a joke or film or sports reference. Woe to the climate realist who doesn’t think your big truck and your gas-burning toys are cool at all. Woe to the earnest politician who wants to lean in and solve problems, when that might require raising taxes. Woe to the struggling, the homeless, the unemployed, the sick, the mentally ill, the downtrodden, the addict. Woe to anyone with the audacity to raise awareness of social issues in the workplace — say bringing up the plight of the uninsured who go without healthcare, or imprisoned immigrant children. Woe to anyone who would challenge a racist or sexist joke.
“Lighten up man, it’s funny. Cut the politics, can’t we talk about something more uplifting? We don’t need that kind of negativity.” Those are the voices of the status quo. You’ll also see “Coexist,” stickers which are the mantra of the toxic positives who are also passive and conflict-averse. “Go along to get along” is the program. Every social reformer who wants to fight injustice or remove obstacles to a better world needs a personal strategy to get past that reflexive shaming. “Why don’t you just live your life?” “Why do you get so worked up?” These are statements designed to shut you down, to make you give up.
And the reason people make those statements is something I really do understand. People who are basically satisfied with their lives, and who are uncommitted to reform, really don’t want to hear about those negative things every day, or maybe ever. They don’t want to engage with how seriously bad things actually are in the world. It’s depressing. It’s scary. “Couldn’t be that bad or someone would have already done something about it, right?” Your speaking out, and your criticism of the status quo makes them have to pause and reflect on their own role in the world’s dysfunction, and ain’t nobody got time for that!
So there’s also a certain internal resolve it takes to understand that when someone tells you to “lighten up,” it means you’ve touched a nerve, they feel the sting of what you said, and you might be close to a breakthrough. Back off for the moment, and reflect on what the reaction tells you about where that person is (or is not), on their journey to self-awareness.
The toxic positivity movement in the 20th century broke through with American minister Norman Vincent Peale who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, in 1952. Since then, there’s been an endless series of self-help books from authors like Napoleon Hill, Andrew Carnegie, and Tony Robbins. The self-help industry rakes in well over $10 billion per year. And it’s mostly rich cheerleaders getting richer by telling people to focus on the positive, on happiness, on gratitude, on finding purpose, or “reprogramming” their minds to stamp out every trace of “negativity.” In 2006, Australian Rhonda Byrne penned one of the industry’s bestsellers, The Secret, a book about the “Law of Attraction.” That book has almost become its entire own industry. One-sentence summary: thinking positive thoughts will attract wealth and good fortune. Which is both false and trite. I’ve criticized that book a great deal over the years. A reader of one of my critical articles once told me he thought I was too “angry” and “negative,” and sent me a book — unsolicited — called “Learned Optimism.”
I never read it.
What’s toxic about “positivity?” Well, in order to see it, you have to think about positivity in the negative space: If people who think positively are successful, then it also stands to reason that people who are not successful were not thinking positively. Which leads to victim-blaming, especially of people with physical ailments. Have cancer? You must have been a hateful person. Lost your job? Probably had a negative attitude about yourself. You see this victim-blaming absolutely everywhere. The Christian Science church founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879, went to the extreme of shunning doctors until as recently as 2010, and telling people they should heal themselves with positive thoughts and prayers. This made any victim of illness to blame for their own failure to recover. And it works for economics, too. If someone is homeless or buys groceries with an EBT card, many people tend to say to themselves, there must be something wrong with that person’s way of thinking, that caused their plight. All of which is a really convenient rationale for the healthy, the employed and comfortable, don’t you think?
Don’t even get me started on that cesspool of toxic positivity known as “gratitude.” Prosperity requires work, yes, and luck, and help. But it is largely a function of one’s genetics combined with one’s level of class privilege at birth. Social mobility in the United States is low. You’re likely to remain in the economic quintile you were born into. So being “grateful” for your circumstances which you had no control over, seems pointless — and even a little superstitious. (If you’re not grateful, you might lose what you have). If you did manage to greatly improve your circumstances with a lifetime of hard work and dedication, it would seem that pride, not gratitude, would be in order, unless you’re thanking specific people who helped you (and you should).
That’s not what most people are doing when they say “I’m grateful.”
Publicly expressing gratitude on social media has become a form of I’ve-got-mine-ism disguised as humblebragging.
“I’m so blessed!”
Aside from being smarmy, the word blessed conflates material wealth with divine favor, which is the basis of prosperity theology. This toxic stew of ideas somehow turns the humble figure of Jesus from an itinerant preacher who healed the sick, and fed the poor — into Republican Jesus. And tell me how people who call themselves “Christians” can favor cutting benefits for the poor, letting the sick die, and deporting the stranger (immigrant)? All of that is exactly the opposite of what Jesus stood for. Among those Republican Jesus worshipers, you’re also extremely likely to see a lot of “live, laugh, love” type of motivational t-shirts and posters. Do they need a constant reminder not to die, cry, or hate?
Let’s really examine what is meant by positivity, and how it becomes toxic. Let’s take a spectrum of events you could experience, with neutral being zero. Neutral would be something containing both a cost and a benefit, say, making a pot of soup. The cost is you have to clean up the kitchen, the benefit is you get to eat the soup.
Minus 10 would be something like, finding out you had Stage IV cancer and had 2 weeks to live. Plus 10 would be graduating from a Ph.D. program or marrying the love of your life.
First let’s take the cancer diagnosis. Fortunately many cancers are caught early, and there are many treatment options available. So an early cancer diagnosis in Stage I, might be a minus 7 on the scale. Certainly very negative information. But you can have surgery, maybe a little chemo, and pull out of it just fine. However, get that same diagnosis, without health insurance, and without the funds for treatment, and you will end up here, at a minus 10. And there’s no sugar coating that:
It turns out there are many dreary offices like this in the world, where you go to be told terrible news, and someone will smile at you and tell you to “Have a blessed day!” And they will expect you to greet the news of your impending death, job loss, bankruptcy, or family separation with a “positive mental attitude.”
This is pure cruelty. What doesn’t kill you often makes you weaker. And it might take a long time for you to recover from the blow, if you ever do.
We must all accept that no matter what we do, the human condition includes a tremendous amount of loss and heartbreak. In the end, we will all lose everything we ever had. This is the only adult perspective. This is why we must hold space for people to experience and process their negative feelings — and to grieve. What we must do instead of trying to “cheer up” that person, is to show empathy, and offer support. Saying “cheer up” takes two seconds and does nothing. Instead, if you want to really help, spend two hours or two days with that person, cooking for them, cleaning for them, or just bringing them what they need to get through it. And if you go to their house, the first thing to do, is rip the “Live, Laugh, Love” artwork off the wall. Because that’s just offensive when someone’s suffering.
Now let’s take the positive case. You married the love of your life. You got your Ph.D. after years of hard work. You turned a profit on your business for the first time. So that’s a positive 10 on the scale. This is a time — probably the only time — when positivity is not toxic. I’m not saying you have to be at a plus 10 to feel joy. Just that joy should be a real reward, not an empty psych-out covering for fear, anxiety or depression.
And you don’t have to achieve some major life goal to feel positivity and joy. A small thing, like an “I love you” text from your partner is all the positivity you need to keep you going through the worst day. And if you don’t have a partner, a glance from that interesting person you met last week might make you just as hopeful.
So give a smile to a stranger. Feel the warmth and wave back when a neighbor you don’t know waves as you drive by. Eat a good meal, drink a glass of scotch, enjoy a satisfying workout, read a book, take a walk. All of those things can also make you feel a real spontaneous and unbidden sense of gratitude, one that you don’t need to post about on Facebook. True gratitude is deeply felt, not broadcast.
Even during peaks of joy, in the midst of things going well, it’s still important to remember and prepare yourself for the inevitable downturns. This does not mean you need to be a killjoy, but getting too carried away with your good fortune can lead to overconfidence, and the inability to recognize danger ahead.
The key to overcoming any lingering urge toward chasing toxic positivity, is to understand the paradoxical nature of any extreme emotion that is untethered to your real circumstances. Stay centered. Euphoria contains the seeds of your next defeat, and suffering contains the seeds of your next triumph.