Positive schmositive!
A while ago it was discovered that to sell to the average aspirant after wealth and happiness, you first had to make them unhappy with what they already have. A whole industry was created on the basis that buyers were stupid enough to believe that they were doing it all wrong! (Oh - but it wasn't their fault! Ha bloody ha!)
The most successful of these products is the insanely destructive "positive mental attitude". PMA has probably sold more books, videos and training courses and destroyed the self confidence of more people than anything else.
What does a positive mental attitude involve?
First and foremost, it involves - no, DEMANDS - that you lie to yourself. No matter what reality afflicts you with, no matter how many problems you have, PMA requires that you see only a beneficial situation. You have to subvert your rational appreciation of a crappy situation and substitute a totally irrational observation that "all is well with the world". You are required to lie to yourself and promulgate those lies to others who may care for you and see the reality that you are denying.
One of the most purile tests for PMA is to say whether a glass is half full or half empty. It is taught that negative people see the glass as half empty because the word empty has negative connotations.
As a realist in control of your own powers of observation, you would have to say that the glass is neither half full nor half empty - IT IS BRIM FULL!
In the same way, a realist will see that a problem has arisen and solve it while a PMA advocate will be still trying to convince himself that there is no problem.
You can lie to yourself all that you want to, that is your priviledge, but please, please, please do not let the writers of pulp fiction tell you that what you know is not correct.
Sometimes life is not fair but lying to yourself won't make it fair.
My cancer won't go away because I lie and say it does not exist and neither will my blindness BUT my realistic outlook on life allows me to deal with what is, change what I can change (if it needs changing) and prepare for what is to come.
I am not a positive person, nor am I a negative person, I AM COMFORTABLE WITH REALITY. I am contemptuous of anybody who does not know anything about me thinking that I am stupid enough to buy a "one size fits all" book and change my reality for their money making theory.
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Comments (25)
Arthur Webster7
Just plain honesty
61 page views and only one comment. THAT says it all!
Cheryl Baumgartner12
Medical Billing/Coding/Insurance
Well you know Arthur a stupid population is a controllable population. They never think for themselves or see reality for what it is. Guess that's why 5%of the population control the masses through distraction, slight of hand and amusement. That's all atrophied intellects can handle.
Arthur Webster7
Just plain honesty
Hi, Cheryl, old Don was possibly one of the first people to be afflicted with PMA. It did not matter to him that the windmills would not die - somehow he had convinced himself that they could die and that he could kill them. This is the basic failure of PMA - it ignores reality. The apalling education of our children is the result of massive social engineering attempting to bridge the gap created by the massive exodus of the best teachers when education became a political football. We now live i
Cheryl Baumgartner12
Medical Billing/Coding/Insurance
And when Johny Becomes an adult he thinks the real world is all roses and has no skills to cope with reality. Maybe that is the problem, People are growing up with no skills to cope so they try to twist reality to fit them. And they get nowhere buying into the positivity crap and then instead of facing reality and tackling the problem they through more positivity at it. I call it Don Quixote syndrome. And we all know that no matter how hard old Don tried, he never killed a windmill.
Cheryl Baumgartner12
Medical Billing/Coding/Insurance
Arthur unfortunately people are being conditioned from youngest childhood to this positivity crap. Take any public school in the US. When I was in school we had "Learning Disabled" classes, Gifted Classes and the regular classes. All classes were designed to allow students to learn at their own pace. Then came 'mainstreaming" lumping all students together in one class. Who cares if the LD kids cannot grasp the basics and hold back everyone else, we don't want them to think that they are stu