There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.
To fight against a war or, better yet, an entire “war machine,” we had to become warriors ourselves. This is the cunning symmetry of war: Enemies tend to come to resemble one another. And this was perhaps especially so in a culture that appallingly – to us – applied the war meme to just about anything, as in the “War on Poverty.
We were not supposed to know anything about our own bodies or to participate in decision-making about our own care.
As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: “What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid out own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self.
A thing cannot be conscious without having agency, but it can have agency without being conscious.
A hint of – dare I say? – animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the “laws.
To this day, and no doubt for good reasons, suffering remains the almost exclusive preoccupation of professional psychology. Journals in the field have published forty-five thousand articles in the last thirty years on depression, but only four hundred on joy.40.
There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs. If you can’t put up the two months’ rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can’t save by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen for the week ahead. You eat fast food or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store.
With his long hair, his hints of violence, and his promise of ecstasy, Dionysus was the first rock star.
Six witnesses affirmed that Jacoba had cured them, even after numerous doctors had given up, and one patient declared that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than any master physician or surgeon in Paris. But these testimonials were used against her, for the charge was not that she was incompetent, but that – as a woman – she dared to cure at all.
Very often in a classroom or a conversation I feel like yelling, ‘What difference does it make?’ Because 94% of my life is occupied with utter trivia. Much of my rebelliousness starts with indifference to what is urgently important to others.
Why “revere” the unknowable? Why not find out what it is?
She represents something about the corporate world that repel me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness.
The advice that you must change your environment – for example, by eliminating negative people and news – is an admission that there may in fact be a “real world” out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes. In the face of this terrifying possibility, the only “positive” response is to withdraw into one’s own carefully constructed world of constant approval and affirmation, nice news, and smiling people.
The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must because you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success.
America has historically offered space for all sorts of sects, cults, faith healers, and purveyors of snake oil, and those that are profitable, like positive thinking, tend to flourish.
The real issue was control: male upper-class healing under the auspices of the Church was acceptable, female healing as part of a peasant subculture was not.
So great was the witches’ knowledge that in 1527, Paracelsus, considered the “father of modern medicine,” burned his text on pharmaceuticals, confessing that he “had learned from the Sorceress all he knew.
The answer, I think, is that positivity is not so much our condition or our mood as it is part of our ideology – the way we explain the world and think we ought to function within it.
But suburbanization, probably more than any other single factor, hid the poor from view.
Hard-headed corporate culture is becoming interested in how to get more work out of fewer workers. They’re realizing that if their workers are happy, they will work harder and more productively. So they’re leading the charge.”49.