Well this is a bummer. Apparently I've been training the past couple of years to become a cynical, ruthless tool of the corporate oligarchy.
At least that's the way noted lefty author Chris Hedges paints it in "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle," a curious amalgam of alarm-raising that includes an attack on the positive psychology movement even more barbed (albeit more creative) than Barbara Ehrenreich's.
The premise of Hedge's book is compelling, and no doubt there's much to be said about America's overall dumbing-down and cultural preference for spectacle over substance. (Indeed, much of it already said more cogently in Susan Jacoby's piercing "The Age of American Unreason.")
Hedges, however, doesn't seem all that interested in sticking with that premise and quickly veers from intellectual critique to moral and political sermonizing. His swing at positive psychology falls under the moral heading, improbably sandwiched between a brutal vision of the pornography industry and excoriation of Wall Street.
Hedges' central premise is that positive psychology is part of a vast corporate conspiracy to keep the American worker docile by encouraging positive thinking over substantive changes in work conditions. Here's Hedges' over-the-top introduction to the subject, which, if nothing else, at least shows the right doesn't have a monopoly on spurious Hitler syllogisms:
Positive psychology is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis. Positive psychology -- at least, as applied so broadly and unquestioningly to corporate relations -- is quack science. It throws a smokescreen over corporate domination, abuse and greed. Those who preach it serve the corporate leviathan....They strangle creativity and moral autonomy. They seek to mold and shape individual human beings into a compliant collective. The primary teaching...is that fulfillment is to be found in complete and total social conformity.
OK, a couple of problems here. First off, positive psychology has nothing to do with encouraging passivity. Quite the opposite. The aim is to guide one's thinking and attitudes in a direction that will allow him to be as effective and dynamic as possible in achieving self-defined goals. The point of learning how to limit negative self-talk and cultivate optimism isn't to become a smiling lump -- it's to position the individual to take more control of her life.
Secondly, while Hedges prominently mentions leading academic minds behind positive psychology, including Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, he makes no effort to separate their work from that of corporate consultants, "Laws of Attraction" junk dealers and "prosperity gospel" preachers.
What else? Well, the chapter seems to be based solely on a cursory, selective and slanted review of literature and attendance (by a research assistant, no less) at a single semi-academic conference. It treats psychology as a whole as a giant mind-control scheme. It falsely equates irritability with activism, despair with morality.
On a personal note, I've amassed 18 units in UCSF's coaching/positive psych program now, and obedience to corporate authority has not been even a minute part of the curriculum. Maybe that's covered in the final class I start in a few weeks.
Is hoarding a type of positive-leaning mood disorder?
That's one of the tantalizing prospects raised by Randy Frost, one of the first behavioral health researchers to treat hoarding as a serious and distinct dysfunction, and colleague Gail Steketee in their enlightening and perversely entertaining look at the condition.
Through their extensive work with hoarders, the researchers have found as a common thread an inability to anticipate the potential negative consequences of acquiring an object. Hoarders can only imagine the pleasure they'll derive from having the thing, being essentially blind to any concerns about clutter, relationship impacts or other liabilities.
In fact, hoarders are so out of touch with negative feelings that they also vastly overestimate how bad it will feel to get rid of an object once they acquire it. They go to extraordinary lengths to avoid the anticipated distress. Smash 'em together, and you have a perfect recipe for accumulating ever-growing piles of stuff.
Other insights from the book:
- Hoarders have remarkable ability to visually acclimate themselves to their chaotic environments. They only notice the mess when they see others struggling with it, which is part of the reason they seldom invite people in their homes.
- There often are profound social deficits underlying hoarding. Ask a hoarder why they're saving something, and more often than not they'll cite it's imagined use to someone else. (Even though such things seldom if ever get to that person.) Limited in their ability to communicate emotions directly, the thinking goes, hoarders rely on objects as emotional intermediaries.
- If you're running a support group for hoarders, do not have literature to hand out
OK, it took me a while to get around to this 1990s bestseller. And one wonders how relevant portions of the text are, given the major changes over the past decade in the types of psychoactive medications available and especially in the way they're prescribed.
Certainly, the book's central question about the mutability of personality, particularly via chemical adjustment, no longer seems all that compelling or questionable. Of course the personality is malleable, though use of any number of tools. In the case of Phineas Gage, it was an iron rod through the skull that turned him into someone else. Nowadays, a prescription allows for more precision in personality-sculpting. Morality doesn't really seem like a valid concern as much as efficacy -- does it help the individual?
What was more interesting to me in this idea-dense tome was the notion -- and one that largely remains true through the present day, I think -- that psychiatric diagnosis is largely a matter of reverse engineering. You have a drug that relieves symptoms of a certain condition. If the patient responds to the drug, he probably has that condition. If not, look for something else.
Seems like a remarkably crude way to diagnose anything. Imagine if any other part of medicine worked that way. The opthamologist does a little slicing, you can see better afterward, so you must have had a cataract. A surgeon removes your appendix, your abdominal pain fails to subside, so he has to dig around for something else.
How long will it be before a doctor can take a blood draw, make a precise analysis of the person's neurochemical soup and prescribe accordingly?
