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. 

 

Book report: "Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things"

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

Book report: "Listening to Prozac"

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?

Becoming you

I just finished a class on lifespan development, and one of the most interesting bits for me (aside from more gruesome details on aging, just the thing to perk up a 50-year-old) was a previously unfamiliar model for how adolescents/young adults go through the process of separating from their parents and forming their own identity.

Psychologist James Marcia laid out four basic states in this process:

• In foreclosure, a young person has happily accepted the big choices -- career, ideological viewpoint -- that were promoted by parents and other adult authority figures. No identity crisis, little self-reflection required, high levels of commitment.
• With diffusion, the key difference is motivation -- there isn't much. The young person avoids an identity crisis and the obligation of making any firm commitments in favor of immediate gratification and a "whatever comes along" approach to life.
• The moratorium stage means the person is still working on defining himself. The process may take a long time, and may be put off until circumstances are more favorable for self-exploration.
• Identity achievement is the hoped-for result of such work. The person lives by an independently formulated moral code that guides future choices. Identity crisis and self-searching are the only way to get here, so the first two stages rule this out as an option.

With even minimal reflection, I can identify people in each of these stages and seem to be more or less fine with it. I know some who've taken the life that was essentially laid out for them and seemed to be quite satisfied with the results. I know chronic goofs who've never seemed to be too bothered by the idea of purpose in life. I know 50-somethings who are still hard at work finding themselves and would seem to run out of steam if they ever got there. Still others have had a solid sense of themselves for ages and stuck with it.

For me, I identify a lot with the moratorium phase. I firmly put off any work on figuring out who I was until I left home for college and then started experimenting furiously to make up for lost time.

The funny thing is that each model seems to offer a chance for a satisfying life (or misery and toil, for that matter.) Psychologists would tell you that people who get to the identity achievement stage have the more mature, fully formed personalities. But try to convince the slackers and hometown heroes at your next high school reunion that they're not really happy because they haven't endured enough inner turmoil and self-doubt. 

Book report: "Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America"

The San Francisco State program I'm working through to become a life coach is based heavily on the growing field of positive psychology, which focuses on the functional rather than the dysfunctional side of the mental spectrum.


So it seems only fair to spend some time with the principled opposition, especially if it comes in as appealing a form as Barbara Ehrenreich, a writer of tremendous power and conviction who's done much to awaken America to the plight of its growing underclass.


With "Bright-sided," Ehrenreich takes aim at the many-tentacled self-industry, including positive psychology and its founder, Martin Seligman.


Ehrenreich clearly starts off with a personal beef surrounding her recent treatment for breast cancer and the relentless positive thinking promotion that made her feel infantalized and negated. From there, she goes on to build a bigger case that the myriad sources promoting positive thinking in American life are:

• Undermining our intelligence.
• Blinding us to injustice and inequality.
• Promoting the kind of magical thinking that helped set the stage for the mortgage crisis and other catastrophes.

There's a lot of thought here and some solid reasoning, but Ehrenreich paints with an awfully large brush. Lumping Seligman, "The Secret" author Rhonda Byrne and Christian Science originator Mary Baker Eddy into an amorphous philosophical blob really does justice to none of them.


Byrne, for instance, takes a basic fact of life -- instant karma's gonna get you -- and flattens it into a "dream it, get it" message that ignores the hard work part of the equation. Christian Science -- well, let's not even go there.

Positive psychology, on the other hand, looks at optimism/pessimism from the basic standpoint that underlies most mental health: Which better serves the individual?


From that view, it's not hard to make the case for optimism. It's more likely to lead the person to act, and "anything + work" is a better formula for success than "anything - work."


"Optimism" here means consistently erring somewhat on the positive side when predicting future outcomes -- always erring on the positive side, despite any evidence to the contrary, is called "delusion." Ehrenreich has some trouble distinguishing between the two, and ignores the obvious adaptive advantage of well-measured optimism. A bit of wishful thinking tends to be quite helpful for getting one's ass out bed in the morning. In fact, there's a name for people who make the most accurate predictions about future events: "clinically depressed."


So cheers to Ehrenreich for doing a bit to expose the charlatans selling a message of success without effort. (The corrosive amorality of such schemes was a favorite theme of author Wallace Stegner.) But next book, it would be good to do a little more work on knowing your opponent.

Book report: "Battling the Inner Dummy"

I wanted to like this layman's guide to psychological structure, subtitled "The Craziness of Apparently Normal People." Its foundational premise -- that most of the big psychological/mental challenges of life come from the primitive emotional center of the brain outshouting the newer (evolutionarily speaking) rational part -- is quite similar to my basic take on the matter.

What's more, for somewhat selfish reasons, I wholeheartedly support the idea of educated laymen trying to present psychological concepts to a mass audience, where PhD's and titles shouldn't matter as much as the ability to accurately synthesize, condense and translate academic information.


But to be honest, I had trouble getting through author David Weiner's freewheeling update on Freudian thought and beyond. (In fact, I've temporarily dropped it in favor of a book on a subject of more urgent interest -- rats. Don't ask.) His structural gimmick of a reanimated Freud reshaping his concepts with the help of modern marketing is irritating but easily enough avoided by skipping alternate chapters.


The real problem is the title and the premise behind it. "Inner Dummy" is Weiner's elaboration on Freud's idea of the id, expanded to cover the entire limbic system, the primitive part of the brain that governs emotional responses and remains better suited to the hunting and gathering lifestyle in which it developed.

Now I'm no huge fan of the limbic system, but I think it's a mistake to insult it by devaluing its intelligence. For starters, emotional drives are powerful stuff, and you really don't want to get them angry at you. I see the goal more as making friends between the limbic system and that big ol' prefrontal cortex. Get them to know and respect each other, so they can have productive conversations. The cortex gently and respectfully refutes the lizard brain's misunderstandings. The lizard brain points out information the rational mind may gloss over.


Because emotion is a kind of intelligence. It certainly isn't a complete source of intelligence, but it does provide all sorts of valuable clues about stuff in the environment that may be too subtle, troubling or whatever for the rational mind to recognize. Call that side of your mental life "dummy," and you risk shutting yourself off from valuable information. Not to mention the experience of feeling...well, alive,

Fear as a tool

While we're more or less on the subject of fear, recent anti-immigrant hysteria has me thinking about all manner of historical precedents that show how effectively a crowd can be made to panic about something that has nothing to do with the actual threats to them.


Last year I traipsed through "The Party of Fear," a penetrating history of nativist/anti-immigrant crusades in America and their ties to wider right-wing movements. Seems that certain of our countrymen have been trying to bar the doors against more recent arrivals ever since Plymouth Rock changed hands. It's truly astounding to see how flexible and self-serving the definition of "real American" has been.


It's also illuminating to note that periods of anti-immigrant bias tend to coincide with economic downturns. People are anxious, angry and looking for someone to blame for their predicament, and swarthy people who talk all funny turn out to be an awfully convenient (and organizationally powerless) target.


I was also struck recently while watching "The History of the Devil," a fine little British documentary recently aired on public TV (and which Amazon lists as "starring Zoroaster," a casting coup if there ever was one) how depressingly familiar the descriptions of various anti-heretic crusades and witch purges sounded. Secret trials, pre-established guilt, ethnic stereotyping -- stop me if you've heard this one before.


The upshot, at least for me, is that it's a really useful practice, if someone is trying to make you afraid of something, to ponder a bit about what they might have to gain from this. An Anglican cleric in the devil documentary tartly makes the point that accusing one of being a Cathar, Templar or other variety of heretic was usually the medieval church's way of saying "What a nice estate you have."


In the case of anti-immigrant movements -- well, it is rather convenient for those in charge, especially the element that favors privileged treatment for the super-wealthy, to have a target for public anger other than the political and legal structures that have allowed such uneven distribution of wealth.


Critical thinking -- such a crazy idea it just might work.