Bright-Sided (26 page)

One obvious price of this lifestyle is extreme isolation—what Dezenhall calls “bubble-itis.” Subordinates suffer from “the galloping desire to bring good news” rather than honest reports, leading one billionaire CEO to complain to Dezenhall that “I’m the most lied-to man in the world.” Dezenhall can’t offer examples from among his own clients, of course, but he points to the film
Michael Clayton
, in which Tilda Swinton’s character arranges to have a whistle-blower murdered rather than confront her boss with the
developing mess. Again, the defunct Lehman Brothers provides a case study. According to
New York
, by the summer of 2008:

There was a disconnect to the outside world, and the risk was substantial. “The environment had become so insular,” said one former executive. Fuld okayed decisions, but [Joe] Gregory packaged material so that the choice was obvious. And the executive committee offered no counterweight. . . . In truth, the relentless optimism, both inside and out [of the company], was probably doing as much harm as good.
32

Then there is the effect of being walled inside a world of unstinting luxury. Fuld had his five homes; Gregory commuted to work by helicopter from one of his “sprawling Long Island homes.”
33
“The problem with this,” Dezenhall and his coauthor write in a book on crisis management, “is that when a subject goes from a Gulfstream V airplane to a limousine to a catered meeting to a four-star hotel, he lives in an artificial bubble of constant, uncritical reinforcement. He becomes a demigod who is a consumer of reassuring clichés, not of life’s friction.”
34
And of course one thing that would be invisible from 30,000 feet up in a Gulfstream jet was the kind of everyday emergency that was derailing so many mortgage holders—a child’s illness leading to medical bills and days lost from work, a costly car breakdown, a surprise layoff.

Steve Eisman is far harsher about the executive mind-set that led to the market crack-up. He calls it “hedge fund disease” and says “it should be in the DSM-V [the latest manual of psychiatric disorders, currently in preparation]. It used to be suffered only by kings and dictators. The symptoms are megalomania, plus narcissism, plus solipsism.” If you’re worth $500 million, he asks, “how
could you be wrong about anything? To think something is to make it happen. You’re God.” This is the state of mind promoted by every positive thinker from Mary Baker Eddy to Joel Osteen, from Norman Vincent Peale to Rhonda Byrne. Corporate chiefs had, perhaps somewhat cynically, long recommended it to their underlings. They had distributed motivational books and brought in motivational speakers to inspire people to visualize success, to work harder and complain less. The problem is that they came to believe it themselves, with the eventual result that, in a short period of time, about $3 trillion worth of pension funds, retirement accounts, and life savings evaporated into the same ether that had absorbed all our positive thoughts.

“Where were the grown-ups?” asked the commentators as the economy unraveled in 2008. Where were the regulators, the watch-dogs, the rating agencies, like Moody’s, that were supposed to make careful assessments of investment risks? Well, the rating agencies, as we have learned, were in the pocket of the very companies they were supposed to be judging—were even paid by them, perversely enough.
35
As for the public and quasi-public sector, it was in the grip of its own optimistic faith—market fundamentalism, or the idea that markets are self-correcting and in no need of burdensome regulation. One true believer was Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve until 2006, who had crowed in 2005 that “the impressive performance of the U.S. economy over the past couple of decades offers clear evidence of the benefits of increased market flexibility,” with “flexibility” meaning freedom from regulation and burdensome trade unions. Three years later he was eating crow, famously admitting to a congressional committee that “those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
36

And what was market fundamentalism other than runaway positive thinking? In the ideology that prevailed in the Bush administration and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the Clinton administration before it, there was no need for vigilance or anxiety about America’s financial institutions, because “the market” would take care of everything. It achieved the status of a deity, this market, closely related to Mary Baker Eddy’s benevolent, ever-nurturing, and all-supplying universe. Why worry, when Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” would straighten everything out?

The purveyors of positive thinking did not slink off into the night like foreclosed-upon homeowners when the prospects for instant wealth tanked in the late years of the decade. Not at all. In fact, they seemed to redouble their efforts. Positive thinking has always thrived in adversity, with the Great Depression bringing forth such classics of self-delusion as Napoleon Hill’s
Think and Grow Rich!
In late 2008, as the financial meltdown touched off general economic decline and widespread unemployment, as the commentators increasingly questioned the durability of capitalism itself, attendance was soaring at evangelical churches, including those offering the prosperity gospel.
37
Joel and Victoria Osteen took to the national media with their message of victory and faith, telling Larry King that their advice to people who had lost their jobs, their homes, and their health insurance was to avoid seeing themselves “as victims”: “You’ve got to know that God still has a plan and that even if you lost your job, even if one door closes, God can open up another door.” A new series of “Get Motivated!” seminars was announced, featuring Rudolph Giuliani, Robert Schuller, and veteran motivator Zig Ziglar. A speakers agency reported that requests from mortgage companies for motivational speakers rose 20 percent as the mortgage industry declined in 2007.
38

Employers turned to the motivation industry for the usual
reason—to maintain discipline within a demoralized workforce. The pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, for example, bought up seven hundred “Positive Power” CDs from motivational speaker Ed Blunt, hoping they would serve as “a catalyst for employee productivity.”
39
A late November 2008 conference on “Happiness and Its Causes” attracted, among hundreds of others, a senior vice president of a large mortgage company. As the
New York Times
reported, she said that “she had laid off more than 500 people in the last six months, and was there to learn how to boost the morale of employees working weekends and holidays and making do with bonuses cut in half, . . . adding that companies like hers were not totally at fault for the mortgage crisis.”
40
The message to downcast employees could be fluffily optimistic, like Osteen’s, or downright harsh, like that of the motivational speaker who told a St. Petersburg, Florida, business conference that when people write to her saying “they can’t pretend to be upbeat at work when they feel so miserable,” she tells them to “fake it.” As for workplace “change,” generally meaning layoffs, her advice is, “Deal with it, you big babies.”
41

With real jobs disappearing, the positive thinkers counseled people to work ever harder on themselves—monitoring their thoughts, adjusting their emotions, focusing more intently on their desires. All the usual nostrums were invoked: Banish negative people and steer clear of “office water-cooler whinefests.”
42
Limit your consumption of negative news. Even on the liberal news site the
Huffington Post
, a blogger advised, “Studies show that you will sleep better with less news intake late at night. Focus your mind on what is upbeat and positive.”
43
Above all, it was important to be vigilant and learn how “to spot when negativity is sneaking up on you personally,” according to an advertisement for a positive-thinking seminar directed both at managers and at “individuals who are experiencing a personal loss of drive and feeling of futility.”
Bear in mind that even in the worst catastrophe someone usually comes out on top, Tony Robbins assured viewers of the
Today
show, citing Sir John Templeton, “the greatest investor of all time,” who “made most of his money when markets were crashing.”
44
If just one person can get rich during a crash or economic downturn, then no one has an excuse for whining.

Some recommended positive thinking as a cure not only for the individual’s plight but for the entire economic mess. What is a recession, anyway, but a mass outbreak of pessimism? An op-ed in the
Chicago Tribune
asserted that “the constant bad-mouthing, beyond what reality requires, got us to where we are now, turning a limp economy into a poor one, threatening to turn a recession into a depression.” The solution? “Knock off the bad-mouthing. Brush off the accusations of being Pollyannaish, naive, or worse. . . . Exult in the prospects, understand that we can pour whatever trillions we can get our hands on into the economy, but it won’t do any good unless we, ourselves, look forward with trust and confidence.”
45
Similarly, the broker who handles my dwindling retirement account suggested wistfully that “if only people would get out and buy things again . . .” But at the time of this writing, Adam Smith’s idea that the self-seeking behavior of individuals would add up to the general welfare of all no longer seems to apply. As individuals, we know that it would be suicidal to get deeper in debt to indulge our acquisitiveness, even if doing so could jump-start the economy, so we each hunker down and try to make do with less. The easy credit is gone; the reckless spending looks more self-destructive by the moment. Besides, we already tried all that.

EIGHT

W
hat can we be if not positive? “I do believe in the power of positive thinking,” veteran newspaper editor Ben Bradlee wrote recently. “I don’t know any other way to live.”
1
We’ve gone so far down this yellow brick road that “positive” seems to us not only normal but normative—the way you
should
be. A restaurant not far from where I live calls itself the “Positive Pizza and Pasta Place,” apparently distinguishing itself from the many sullen and negative Italian dining options. A veteran human resources executive, baffled by my questions about positive thinking in the workplace, ventured hesitantly, “But isn’t positive . . .
good
?” He was right: we have come to use the words “positive” and “good” almost interchangeably. In this moral system, either you look on the bright side, constantly adjusting your attitude and revising your perceptions—or you go over to the dark side.

The alternative to positive thinking is not, however, despair. In fact, negative thinking can be just as delusional as the positive
kind. Depressed people project their misery onto the world, imagining worst outcomes from every endeavor and then feeding their misery on these distorted expectations. In both cases, there is an inability to separate emotion from perception, a willingness to accept illusion for reality, either because it “feels good” or, in the depressive’s case, because it reinforces familiar, downwardly spiraling neural pathways. The alternative to both is to try to get outside of ourselves and see things “as they are,” or as uncolored as possible by our own feelings and fantasies, to understand that the world is full of both danger and opportunity—the chance of great happiness as well as the certainty of death.

This is not easy. Our moods affect our perceptions, as do the moods of others around us, and there will always be questions about the reliability of the evidence. Generally it helps to recruit the observations of others, since our individual perceptions could be erroneous, and whether the issue has to do with the approach of a marauding leopard or the possibility of a financial downturn, the more information we can gather the better off we are. This is the project of science: to pool the rigorous observations of many people into a tentative accounting of the world, which will of course always be subject to revisions arising from fresh observations.