The perils of positive thinking (1)

Self-help philosophies are big business. The amount of shelf space devoted in bookshops to titles expounding the power of positive thinking is quite astonishing. You all know the kinds of book I have in mind. It is a genre which spans new age and traditional spirituality, applied psychology and business. Alongside the authors are the coaches and therapists, all of whom make a living from doling out lifestyle advice and running therapy sessions and workshops based on the same principles.

On-line the situation is no different. Indeed, many phenomena of this kind have really been boosted by the power of viral marketing. Let us take just one example which is probably familiar to many – “The Secret”, a self-help film produced in 2006 by one Rhonda Byrne. The wikipedia article is here. The central message is that believing in yourself sets in motion a positive dynamic which becomes self-reinforcing, leading to happiness and success – a cosmic law dubbed the “Law of Attraction”. Another classic of this genre is Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, an all-time bestseller, published, astonishingly, in 1937 and still hugely influential today.

I first encountered this phenomenon within what was then called the “house church movement” in the 1980’s. This neo-Pentecostal movement was in its origins quite ascetic, but became increasingly, and to my horror, pervaded by quite different notions coming from the American “TV evangelists”. God wanted you to be rich and successful and, if you weren’t, it was only that your faith was insufficient for the task. (This doctrine never sat well with the evangelical precept of saving grace, but seemed subjectively appealing to many because it chimed with their self-doubt and perception that there had to be a “quantitative” element to salvation, a notion of course familiar to Catholics and Orthodox).

In its secular form of the Law of Attraction, I believe it expresses, albeit very crudely, something quite true, but at the same time it misses something equally fundamental.

What is true is expressed in the popular adage “success breeds success” and has been identified by many teachers. Jesus is reported, somewhere in the gospels, as saying “to he who has, more shall be given; but to he who has not, even what he has shall be taken away from him”.

Funnily enough, though, few if any of the real spiritual teachers I can think of ever ended their days in wealth and comfort; and Jesus himself was crucified. So what’s going on? Was Jesus just talking of “spiritual wealth”, perhaps, something quite different from, and perhaps opposed to, worldly riches?

Of course Jesus did indeed call on people to forego worldly riches on occasion, though only when an obstacle to spiritual growth. Still, I do not think that spiritualizing perfectly down-to-earth utterances is a proper hermeneutic. Rather, the “Law of Attraction” itself implies a duality of destinies, paths either up or down, virtuous or vicious circles. Not only does success breed success, but failure begets failure. This duality is found back, equally, in the salvation doctrines of probably all world religions (though it may be a somewhat simplistic framework within which to interpret the soteriology of Buddhism or some nature-religions, paganism, Shamanism and so forth, which also suggests it may have a lot to do with the role of institutionalized religions in legitimizing the established social order).

This “either-or” of destiny implies that there are two communities and two poles to which individuals gravitate – a pole of success and a pole of failure. Strictly speaking, there is a “Law of Attraction” at work at both ends; and the closer you are to one, the more difficult to break out of its gravitational field into that of the other. Between the two, though, there is also a “Law of Repulsion”. Individuals gravitating towards the upper pole find themselves spending more time with others who are on the same path, and separate out from them by a process of reverse osmosis. This process is analogous to the processes of self-organization giving rise to order in the cosmos notwithstanding the tendency to entropy expressed by the second law of thermodynamics. On the side of those to whom fate has been less lucky, who are in the vast majority, envy and anger develop and are directed towards those more fortunate. For this reason, prophets, even if they seed a new level of consciousness in the human spirit, are almost always martyrs.

So much for the Law of Attraction as a law. As a self-help program, however, there is much more to be said; I will return to this in my next post.