6/6/12
Do you know anything about optimistic auto-suggestions? If not, I think they were maybe propounded by someone (a psychologist) called Emile Coué, although I could be wrong. These were mantras that were to be repeated roughly twenty times a day in order to effect “positive” change. Here’s an example: “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”
Excuse me. But which part of you has to die before an optimistic auto-suggestion may pass through your system unchallenged? I just don’t get how people trick themselves into believing this stuff. I think I would simply laugh (or cry) if I tried saying these things to myself, I don’t know about you? (And no, this isn’t to say it doesn’t work for some people – of course it does. But really.)
It all seems a precariously short step away from some wheezing malcontent telling the mirror that he's a Tiger, a god damn Tiger. A winner. A winning Tiger. A God damn Tiger who wins. And this in itself, of course, is an even shorter step away from some greaseball with a mullet signing up to a sex site and giving himself an unreasonably tough-sounding name - like The Throbbing Sword of Destiny, say, or The Imperial Thruster. The kind of name, anyway, which might always reasonably be translated as meaning "my home has wheels".
Anyway, there’s a good book you might like to read (if you haven’t done so already). It’s written by Barbara Ehrenreich and it’s called Smile Or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & The World.
I felt relieved when I read it, finding it to be one of the most brutally scathing and articulate attacks on the near psychosis of American positive thinking and the dangerous places this may lead (including, amongst other things, economic collapse and the misery heaped on cancer patients who fail to remain positive throughout their illness). The trite vacuity of an imprecation to “think positively” has always left me reeling. Americans seem to love it, though.
Does my head in.
