Matthew Henty

I was at the RSA this evening for and event (#rsasmile on twitter) with Barbara Ehrenreich talking about her book “Smile or Die – How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World” (Amazon link). Guardian review (because I am that type of guy…) here and an extract here.

Her thesis is pretty much what you would imagine from the title of the book, that overly positive thinking does nothing but distract and fool you – be a realist instead. See your real situation. Sounds a bit like rationality to me, as preached by all those over at Less Wrong. So I am all for it – I don’t think that George W. Bush or Sarah Palin can really be doing any good with a completely blinkered approach to life. Just because you believe something doesn’t make it true. And just because something has happened, doesn’t mean it was for the best, or meant to be. Nonsense and piffle.

The point from the audience that struck me was a comment from someone who heads up the UK office of a US organisation. She said that the only reason that she can get away with her approach to work is because of the three-thousand miles of ocean between here and there. She claimed that she would not be employable at the US head office, would be seen as, “not a team player”, and believed that this had major implications for US / UK relations. And for the rest of the world.

I hope she is wrong, but those statements really struck a chord. And this is where it really starts to matter, and where we see leaders appealing to personal conviction to justify actions that have real world impacts. Conviction means almost nothing in the end – not when it runs straight into reality and causes death and destruction. But personal conviction seems to feature more and more in our political discourse, our international relations. That is scary.

As an aside, one thing that confused me is what the definition of positive psychology is. The wikipedia article looks a bit wishy washy from the first sentence, but I interpreted a lecture from Sonja Lyubomirsky I saw online (and posted about here) differently. I thought they were documenting correlations between behaviours and self-reported happiness, which is interesting and harmless, and can help think about what contentment, or happiness is. There must be something else built on top of this to attract the hostility I think Barbara Ehrenreich has for the field. More research needed… perhaps tomorrow.