Empire of Illusion (20 page)

Dr. Tal D. Ben-Shahar, who wrote
Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment
, taught hugely popular courses at Harvard University on “Positive Psychology” and “The Psychology of Leadership.” He called himself, when he taught at Harvard, the “Harvard Happiness Professor.”

“There is mounting evidence in the psychological literature showing that focusing on cultivating strengths, optimism, gratitude, and a positive perspective can lead to growth during difficult times,” Ben-Shahar has stated.

Positive Psychology has its own therapy techniques to achieve happiness. It instructs patients to write a letter of gratitude to someone who had been kind to them. Patients are instructed to pen “You at your best” essays in which they are asked “to write about a time when they were at their best and then to reflect on personal strengths displayed in the story.” They are instructed to “review the story once every day for a week and to reflect on the strengths they had identified.” And the professionals argue that their research shows that many of their patients have “last ingly increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms.”

Ben-Shahar pumps out the catchy slogans and clichés that color all cheap self-improvement schemes. “Learn to fail or fail to learn,” he says,
and “not ‘It happened for the best,' but ‘How can I make the best of what happened?'”

He argues that if a traumatic episode can result in post-traumatic stress disorder, it may be possible to create the opposite phenomenon with a single glorious, ecstatic experience. This could, he says, dramatically change a person's life for the better.

Those who fail to exhibit positive attitudes, no matter the external reality, are in some ways ill. Their attitudes, like those of recalcitrant Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, need correction. Once we adopt a positive mind, positive things will always happen. This belief, like all the other illusions peddled in the culture, encourages people to flee from reality when reality is frightening or depressing. These academic specialists in “happiness” have formulated the “Law of Attraction.” It argues that we attract the good things in life, whether it is money, relationships, or employment, when we focus on what we desire. The gimmick of visualizing what we want and believing we can achieve it is no different from praying to a god or Jesus who we are told wants to make us wealthy and successful. For those who run into the hard walls of reality, the ideology has the pernicious effect of forcing the victim to blame him or herself for his or her pain or suffering. Abused and battered wives or children, the unemployed, the depressed, the mentally ill, the illiterate, the lonely, those grieving for lost loved ones, those crushed by poverty, the terminally ill, those fighting with addictions, those suffering from trauma, those trapped in menial and poorly paid jobs, those facing foreclosure or bankruptcy because they cannot pay their medical bills, need only overcome their negativity. “I think positive emotions are available to everybody,” says Barbara Frederickson, the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of that university's Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab, in the May 2009 issue of
The Sun
. She also speaks at the Claremont conference. “There's been research done with people in slums across the globe and with prostitutes, looking at their well-being and satisfaction with life. The data suggest that positive emotions have less to do with material resources than we might think; it's really about your attitude and approach to your circumstances.” This flight into self-delusion is no more helpful in solving real problems than alchemy. But it is very
effective in keeping people from questioning the structures around them that are responsible for their misery. Positive Psychology gives an academic patina to fantasy.

The conference is filled with people in business attire. At the break, many stand in clusters, holding a coffee in one hand and a pastry in the other.

The university is quiet for a Saturday afternoon. The weather outside is overcast and cold. The browning lawns of Claremont's Pomona College, dotted with palm trees and oaks, reflect the harshness of the statewide drought. There is a half-moon wall visible from the conference center. “CLOSE THE SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS” is written in large red letters on the wall. “Dan Eats Chicken Skin” and “Dog Boner To The Rescue!” read other graffiti. “SUCK IT, LIFE” is spray-painted in black. Sections of the wall resemble works by Picasso or Diego Rivera. The largest message is “Vote Obama '08.” The university buildings, with imitation adobe walls and red clay tile roofs, cluster around the college's clock tower. The campus has the appearance of a California Spanish mission.

In the auditorium, the round face of Martin Seligman appears in a video on a twenty-foot screen. His gaze is serious. Behind him are disordered bookshelves.

“Welcome to this auspicious occasion,” he says to the attentive, mostly white crowd. A young woman, a student of psychology at California State University at Long Beach, scribbles notes. She underlines
auspicious occasion
.

Seligman speaks of four endeavors for the movement.

“The first endeavor I call ‘positive physical health,'” Seligman says. “If you think about positive psychology as having argued that positive mental health is something over and above the absence of mental illness. That is,” he clarifies, hammering his desk with every “presence,” “the
presence
of positive emotion, the
presence
of flow, the
presence
of engagement, the
presence
of meaning, the
presence
of positive relationships.” Seligman pauses. “Can the same thing be said for physical health?” He believes researchers will find a correlation between these positive mental states and the “real” body.
⁴

Seligman announces that twenty $200,000 grants--a dream sum for any researcher—will be given out for “groundbreaking research” in
the burgeoning field of positive neuroscience. The goal is to locate where positive emotions originate in the brain.

“Education usually consists of taking young people and teaching them workplace skills. . . . But there is an epidemic of depression,” he says sadly. His optimistic tone returns: “Would it be possible to have positive education? . . . That is, without sacrificing any of the usual skills such as discipline, reading, literacy, numeracy. . . . Can we build engagement, meaning, positive emotion, good relations in schools?”

Seligman announces that schools in the United States, such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools in Riverside, California, as well as schools in the United Kingdom and in Australia, are putting his theory into practice. The Geelong Grammar School in Australia is implementing a positive psychology curriculum. Hundreds of teachers there are being taught, in missionary fashion, to “spread the notion of positive education.”

In
Authentic Happiness
, written in 2002, Seligman argues that authentic happiness can be conditioned and thus taught.

A similar-sounding life of “enjoyment,” “engagement,” and “affiliation” is the engineered temperament of the pliant characters in Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World.
There, the protagonist, Bernard Marx, turns in frustration to his girlfriend Lenina:

“A typical day is full of anxiety and boredom,” writes Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who is “the brains behind positive psychology,” according to Seligman. He credits Csíkszentmihályi with adding the concept of “flow” to the movement's ideas.
⁶
“Flow experiences provide the flashes of instense living against this dull background.” “Flow” is described by Csíkszentmihályi as a state of “being completely involved in an activity
for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows naturally from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.”
⁷
With enough adjustment, he implies, we could all be making beautiful jazz of our lives.

“People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy,” Csíkszentmihályi writes in
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(1990). “There are two main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life,” he continues. “The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better. . . . We cannot deny the facts of nature, but we should certainly try to improve on them.”

Csíkszentmihályi specializes in “optimizing” human experience. The optimal organization man is fitter, happier, more productive, and less expensive. The optimal worker complains less. He or she obeys more. The optimal worker costs the employer less in health-care expenditures.

Csíkszentmihályi developed the idea of “psychological capital,” or what he terms “paratelics.” When Ed Diener, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, measured the world according to Csíkszentmihályi's paratelic factors, he discovered something so “shocking,” he says, it must be true. These paratelic factors—“I can count on others,” “I feel autonomous,” “I learned something new today,” and “I did what I do best”—are, more than money, corruption, starvation, or abuse, “the best predictors of the positive emotions of nations.”

Diener believes he can measure happiness. He conducted a study that found a correlation between the incomes of undergraduates nineteen years after graduation with their level of cheerfulness.
⁸
His research also showed that happy people have higher supervisor ratings, higher organizational citizenship, and higher incomes.

The movement embraces self-delusion as psychologically and socially beneficial. It also makes handsome profits peddling it. Seligman, Diener, Shelley Taylor, and a slew of positive psychologists write popular books for, essentially, those who can afford the therapy.
It is a trade. Dacher Keltner, a positive psychologist at Berkeley, hosts for-pay motivational workshops that cost $139 for standard registration. Csíkszentmihályi participates in the Annual Positive Psychology Forum, which in 2009 was in Sedona, Arizona, supposedly one of the energy hot spots of the world, for a registration fee of $716.74 per person.

“The effective individual in the face of threat seems to be one who permits the development of illusions, nurtures those illusions, and is ultimately restored by those illusions,” writes Taylor, a psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles.
⁹
In 1991 Taylor published a book titled
Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind
, in which she argued that “positive illusions” protect mental and physical health.”
¹⁰

Taylor's article “Illusion and Well-Being” is a commonly cited resource in positive psychology. She insists that positive illusions have a measurable affect on survival rates among patients with cancer, HIV, and cardiovascular disease or surgery.

Positive illusions, described as “pervasive, enduring, and systematic,” come, Taylor writes, in three types: (1) unrealistically positive views of the self; (2) exaggerated perceptions of personal control; and (3) unrealistic optimism. All of these illusions can, managed the right way, supposedly improve our lives. Illusions are good for people, she says, and therefore, by extension, unadorned reality is negative.

But while Taylor sees positive illusions as tools to ward off dysfunction, stress, and bad health, not everyone agrees. Philosopher David Jopling calls such illusions “life-lies.” He argues that so-called positive illusions may work for a while but collapse when reality becomes too harsh and intrudes on the dream world.

“The deeper and more pervasive an individual's positive illusions,” writes Jopling, “the greater their effect of diminishing his range of awareness of himself, other people, and the situation confronting him.” Jopling argues that self-deception strategies are reality filters that organize what people understand into self-relevant and self-serving packages. “With the diminishing of the range of awareness comes a corresponding diminishing of the range of responsiveness and openness” to what is real. One's ability to interact intelligently with all of the world's real consequences diminishes.

Jopling warns of grave moral consequences for a delusional society. “This means that the range of social, emotional, and personal relations that connect us to others, to the social world, and to our own humanity, are progressively weakened as self-deceptive strategies become progressively entrenched in behavior and thought.”
¹¹

Psychology has a long history of lending its services to the military and government as well as propaganda industries such as advertising, public relations, and human management. The National Institute of Mental Health, from which many positive psychologists have generous grants, though a public institution, has numerous government, military, and commercial relationships .
¹²

Keltner is the author of
Born to be Good: The Science of the Meaningful Life
. He is also executive editor of
The Greater Good
, a magazine, and director of The Greater Good Science Center on the Berkeley campus. He teaches a course on happiness at the university and hosts motivational workshops on “building compassion, creating well-being.” He has had his ears rubbed by the Dalai Lama.
¹³