Bright-Sided (13 page)

In my own family, the great-grandmother who raised my mother had switched from Presbyterianism to Christian Science at some point in her life, and the transition was apparently seamless enough for my grandmother to later eulogize her in a letter simply as “a good Christian woman.” My own mother had no more interest in Christian Science than she did in Presbyterianism, but she hewed to one of its harsher doctrines—that, if illness was not entirely imaginary, it was something that happened to people weaker and more suggestible than ourselves. Menstrual cramps and indigestion were the fantasies of idle women; only a fever or vomiting merited a day off from school. In other words, illness was a personal failure, even a kind of sin. I remember the great trepidation with which I confessed to my mother that I was having trouble seeing the blackboard in school;
we
were not the sort of people who needed glasses.

But the most striking continuity between the old religion and the new positive thinking lies in their common insistence on
work—
the constant internal work of self-monitoring. The Calvinist monitored his or her thoughts and feelings for signs of laxness, sin, and self-indulgence, while the positive thinker is ever on the lookout for “negative thoughts” charged with anxiety or doubt. As sociologist Micki McGee writes of the positive-thinking self-help literature, using language that harks back to its religious antecedents, “continuous and never-ending work on the self is offered not only as a road to success but also to a kind of secular salvation.”
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The self becomes an antagonist with which one wrestles endlessly, the Calvinist attacking it for sinful inclinations, the positive thinker for “negativity.” This antagonism is made clear in the common advice that you can overcome negative thoughts by putting a rubberband on your wrist: “Every time you have a negative thought stretch it out and let it snap. Pow. That hurts. It may even leave a welt if your rubber band is too thick. Take
it easy, you aren’t trying to maim yourself, but you are trying to create a little bit of a pain avoidance reflex with the negative thoughts.”
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A curious self-alienation is required for this kind of effort: there is the self that must be worked on, and another self that does the work. Hence the ubiquitous “rules,” work sheets, self-evaluation forms, and exercises offered in the positive-thinking literature. These are the practical instructions for the work of conditioning or reprogramming that the self must accomplish on itself. In the twentieth century, when positive thinkers had largely abandoned health issues to the medical profession, the aim of all this work became wealth and success. The great positive-thinking text of the 1930s,
Think and Grow Rich!
by Napoleon Hill, set out the familiar New Thought metaphysics. “Thoughts are things”—in fact, they are things that attract their own realization. “ALL IMPULSES OF THOUGHT HAVE A TENDENCY TO CLOTHE THEMSELVES IN THEIR PHYSICAL EQUIVALENT.” Hill reassured his readers that the steps required to achieve this transformation of thoughts into reality would not amount to “hard labor,” but if any step was omitted, “
you will fail!
” Briefly put, the seeker of wealth had to draw up a statement including the exact sum of money he or she intended to gain and the date by which it should come, which statement was to be read “aloud, twice daily, once just before retiring at night and once after arising in the morning.” By strict adherence to this regimen, one could manipulate the “subconscious mind,” as Hill called the part of the self that required work, into a “white heat of DESIRE for money.” To further harness the subconscious mind to conscious greed, he advises at one point that one “READ THIS ENTIRE CHAPTER ALOUD ONCE EVERY NIGHT.”
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The book that introduced most twentieth-century Americans—as well as people worldwide—to the ceaseless work of positive
thinking was, of course, Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952
The Power of Positive Thinking.
Peale was a mainstream Protestant minister who had been attracted to New Thought early in his career, thanks, he later wrote, to a New Thought proponent named Ernest Holmes. “Only those who knew me as a boy,” he wrote, “can fully appreciate what Ernest Holmes did for me. Why, he made me a positive thinker.”
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If Peale saw any conflict between positive thinking and the teachings of the Calvinist-derived Dutch Reformed Church that he eventually adopted as his denomination, it did not perturb him. A mediocre student, he had come out of divinity school with a deep aversion to theological debates—and determined to make Christianity “practical” in solving people’s ordinary financial, marital, and business problems. Like the nineteenth-century New Thought leaders before him, he saw himself in part as a healer; only the twentieth-century illness was not neurasthenia but what Peale identified as an “inferiority complex,” something he had struggled with in his own life. In one of his books, written well after the publication of his perennial best seller,
The Power of Positive Thinking,
he wrote:

A man told me he was having a lot of trouble with himself. “You are not the only one,” I reflected, thinking of the many letters I receive from people who ask for help with problems. And also thinking of myself; for I must admit that the person who has caused me the most trouble over the years has been Norman Vincent Peale. . . . If we are our own chief problem, the basic reason must be found in the type of thoughts which habitually occupy and direct our minds.
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We have seen the enemy, in other words, and it is ourselves, or at least our thoughts. Fortunately though, thoughts can be
monitored and corrected until, to paraphrase historian Donald Meyer’s summary of Peale, positive thoughts became “automatic” and the individual became fully “conditioned.”
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Today we might call this the work of “reprogramming,” and since individuals easily lapse back into negativity—as Peale often noted with dismay—it had to be done again and again. In
The Power of Positive Thinking,
Peale offered “ten simple, workable rules,” or exercises, beginning with:

1. Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop this picture. . . .

2. Whenever a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind, deliberately voice a positive thought to cancel it out.

3. Do not build up obstacles in your imagination. Depreciate every so-called obstacle. Minimize them.
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Peale trusted the reader to come up with his or her own positive thoughts, but over time the preachers of positivity have found it more and more necessary to provide a kind of script in the form of “affirmations” or “declarations.” In
Secrets of the Millionaire Mind
, for example, T. Harv Eker offers the reader the following instructions in how to overcome any lingering resistance to the wealth he or she deserves:

Place your hand on your heart and say . . .

This work is never done. Setbacks can precipitate relapses into negativity, requiring what one contemporary guru, M. Scott Peck, calls “a continuing and never-ending process of self-monitoring.”
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Or, more positively, endless work may be necessitated by constantly raising your sights. If you are satisfied with what you have, you need to “sharpen the saw,” in self-help writer Stephen Covey’s words, and admit that what you have isn’t enough. As the famed motivator Tony Robbins puts it: “When you set a goal, you’ve committed to CANI [Constant, Never-Ending Improvement]! You’ve acknowledged the need that all human beings have for constant, never-ending improvement. There is a power in the pressure of dissatisfaction, in the tension of temporary discomfort. This is the kind of pain you
want
in your life.”
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There is no more exhausting account of the self-work required for positive thinking than motivational speaker Jeffrey Gitomer’s story of how he achieved and maintains his positive attitude. We last encountered Gitomer demanding a purge of “negative people” from one’s associates, much as an old-style Calvinist might have demanded an expulsion of sinners, but Gitomer had not always been so self-confidently positive. In the early 1970s, his business was enjoying only “moderate success,” his marriage was “bad,” and his wife was pregnant with twins. Then he fell in with a marketing company called Dare to Be Great, whose founder now claims to have anticipated the 2006 best seller
The Secret
by thirty-five years. Told by his new colleagues that “you’re going to get a positive attitude . . . and you’re going to make big money. Go, go, go!” he sold his business and plunged into the work of self-improvement. He watched the motivational film
Challenge to America
over five times a week and obsessively reread Napoleon Hill’s
Think and Grow Rich!
with his new colleagues: “Each person was responsible for writing and presenting a book report on one chapter each day. There were 16 chapters in the book, 10 people in the room, and we
did this for one year. You can do the math for how many times I have read the book.”
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At first the best he could do was fake a positive attitude: “Friends would ask me how I was doing, and I would extend my arms into the air and scream, ‘Great!’ Even though I was crappy.” Suddenly, “one day I woke up, and I had a positive attitude. . . . I GOT IT! I GOT IT!”
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Substitute the Bible for
Think and Grow Rich!
and you have a conversion tale every bit as dramatic as anything Christian lore has to offer. Like the hero of the great seventeenth-century Calvinist classic
The Pilgrim’s Progress,
Gitomer had found himself trapped by family and wallowing in his slough of despond—of mediocrity, rather than sin—and like Bunyan’s hero, Gitomer shook off his old business, and his first wife, in order to remake himself. Just as Calvinism demanded not only a brief experience of conversion but a lifetime of self-examination, Gitomer’s positive attitude requires constant “maintenance,” in the form of “reading something positive every morning, thinking positive thoughts every morning, . . . saying positive things every morning,” and so forth.
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This is work, and just to make that clear, Gitomer’s
Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude
offers a photograph of the author in a blue repairman’s shirt bearing the label “Positive Attitude Maintenance Department.”

Reciting affirmations, checking off work sheets, compulsively rereading get-rich-quick books: these are not what Emerson had in mind when he urged his countrymen to shake off the shackles of Calvinism and embrace a bounteous world filled with “new lands, new men, and new thoughts.” He was something of a mystic, given to moments of transcendent illumination: “I become a universal eyeball. I am nothing; I see all. . . . All mean egotismvanishes.”
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In such states, the self does not double into a worker and an object of work; it disappears. The universe cannot be “supply,” since such a perception requires a desiring, calculating ego,
and as soon as ego enters into the picture, the sense of Oneness is shattered. Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.

Still, surely it is better to obsess about one’s chances of success than about the likelihood of hell and damnation, to search one’s inner self for strengths rather than sins. The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?

From the mid-twentieth century on, there was an all too practical answer: more and more people were employed in occupations that seemed to require positive thinking and all the work of self-improvement and maintenance that went into it. Norman Vincent Peale grasped this as well as anyone: the work of Americans, and especially of its ever-growing white-collar proletariat, is in no small part work that is performed on the self in order to make that self more acceptable and even likeable to employers, clients, coworkers, and potential customers. Positive thinking had ceased to be just a balm for the anxious or a cure for the psychosomatically distressed. It was beginning to be an obligation imposed on all American adults.

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