Book report: "Empire of Illusion"

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.