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Issue 00419 |
May 13 - 19, 2006 |
issn 0856 - 9135 |
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Meditation |
| Bring forth what is within you From Martin LeFevre in California One of the most pernicious philosophies America has ever sold to the world is called "the power of positive thinking." Its basic premise is that if you "accentuate the positive" and downplay the negative, the negative will recede, and the positive will prevail. From a phenomenological point of view, it's fascinating how positive thinking has provided the soil for the darkest impulses in American society to grow. The culmination and chief exponent of this homegrown American philosophy is George W. Bush. Indeed, the Bush White House is conducting an unwitting experiment to see just how long obstinate optimism, coupled with expert marketing and media complicity, can hold sway over reality. The bloody laboratory is their "war of choice" in Iraq. The invasion was a triumph of pigheaded belief over historical awareness. When the conflict predictably degenerated into a bedlam of body parts, the White House, pursuing the logical end of positive thinking, began repeating ad nauseam how progress was being made. And why not, since one of the tenets of positive thinking is that when you believe what you want to believe strongly enough, and reiterate it often enough, your fantasy will become reality. The main progenitor of the theory of positive thinking, which has become an almost unassailable prescription for the ills of society, family, and the individual, was a preacher named Norman Vincent Peale. Born near the end of the 19th century and dying near the end of the 20th, Peale was a preacher for over 50 years in New York. He wrote the puddle-deep tract, famously (or infamously) entitled, "The Power of Positive Thinking." Of course the tendency to believe what one wants to believe is very human. But it was codified in America in the 19th century with the doctrine of "Manifest Destiny," which provided the rationalization for displacing and decimating Native Americans so the country could expand westward to the Pacific Ocean. When the wilderness was conquered and the country developed into an industrial and economic powerhouse, this new version of "might makes right" became a keystone of the national character. As an expression of 'Manifest Destiny,' 'positive thinking' is not merely the philosophical gloss for the American Empire, but an almost theological imperative of it. Positive thinking inevitably results in a 'see no evil hear no evil' attitude. It converts the proverb, "as one thinks in one's heart, so one is," into "as I want to think things are, they are." Positive thinking does not diminish individual and collective darkness, but rather it allows all manner of evils to increase. Indeed, positive thinking is the primary means by which North American culture became saturated with darkness, since it is a prescription for negligence. Collective darkness can only act through a person as long as one acts out of hidden regions that one refuses to own. Therefore willfully staying on the sunny side of life in a culture saturated with collective darkness insures that one becomes a conduit of darkness. Of course, this is not just an American problem. Collective darkness is the toxic byproduct of innumerable generations of non-self-knowing people, generating a growing subconscious substratum of fear, hate, and self-centered activity in human consciousness. To see human nature as essentially good, as New Agers do, is merely the flip side of seeing human nature as essentially evil, as conservative Christians do. The former mindset willfully ignores darkness, and thereby allows it to grow. The latter mind-set personifies it and projects evil outside, becoming self-fulfilling in its creation of enemies. As a saying attributed to Jesus goes: "Bring forth what is within you, and what you bring forth will save you; do not bring forth what is within you, and what you do not bring forth will destroy you." A person can be well educated and sophisticated, and still be willfully ignorant. In fact, many well-educated people are ignorant of themselves and the truth of things. People who believe they are good aren't. Good people consistently doubt (within limits) and question themselves. Such people are the future of humanity. To deny or ignore the darkness within and around one is not positive, and such forced optimism as we see in President Bush and his cabal has led to great despair. To be truly positive means to see and tell things as they are. In negating the false, the true is. The author welcomes comments.
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