Favorite Quotes
“Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a ‘gift,’ was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before- one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.”
I can now report, the institutions of recovery and mental health function the same way.
“The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?”
I’m a huge fan of Barbara Ehrenreich. Although she doesn’t explicitly spell this out, her work is a robust argument for a perspective about the self that resonates more with me, perhaps through an indirect connection with “Eastern” thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson and other American transcendentalists, oft-described as the nation’s first homegrown philosophical movement, drew heavily on romantic appropriation of “Oriental” cultures. It was, and arguably remains, a common fashion in the West to project onto the East the qualities it considers foreign to itself. The materialist industrialist West moves forward through rationality and individualism; the spiritual nature-centric East preserves the past through tradition and collectivism. His reworkings of Eastern concepts inspired those like Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, who was among the first to popularize the concept of a superior Aryan race meant to hegemonize the world, and you can figure out what that inspired in the first half of the 1900s on your own.
Despite his hierarchical views about Western supremacy, Emerson did manage to capture a genuine notion of the self that still feels foreign to America through a succinct metaphor: the transparent eyeball. Seeing everything while occupying nothing. Free oneself to explore freely.
Emerson certainly encouraged people to lean on their own potential rather than seeking the instruction or refuge of institutions that would inevitably corrupt the individual with systemic prerogatives. But the outcome of such an endeavor would be to then experience the universe through this newly freed self, not obsess over the self as if it were the sole determinant of reality. The intention was to facilitate liberative action through disconnecting the self from the machines of society, not disconnecting the self from reality to preserve a bubble of self-care routines or happiness rituals. As he said:
“Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth.”
Henry David Thoreau, a friend of Emerson, did exactly that. He moved to a cabin he built and minimized his demands of the world to his basic needs. He acted, and he built a new life away from society where he achieved an intellectual and spiritual freedom he could not find within the rat-race facilitated by institutions. Thoreau believed that you have a moral obligation to actively break unjust laws as “friction to stop the machine.”
In no way can Emerson or Thoreau be said to have withdrawn from the external world into themselves to cultivate positive thinking. Instead, they took radical responsibility for their engagement with the world to free themselves from the control of institutional standards. Changing the individual was supposed to lead to changes in the environment around individual. That’s aligned very well with the takeaway I have from the Gita. Everyone has a role to play in the universe, and you have to discover what that is for yourself, or you might die realizing you never lived.
It is with this consideration that Barbara Ehrenreich critiques the modern happiness industry by invoking Emerson’s name. By turning the ideas behind liberation from social standards into commodified self-help and spiritual guides that becomes the new social standards, the movement defeats itself while turning a pretty penny for any guru who finds their niche of miserable people to shepherd through shallow material befitting an AI chatbot.
Ehrenreich has far surpassed both Emerson and Thoreau in both action and thought, at least to me.
“Like a perpetually flashing neon sign in the background, like an inescapable jingle, the injunction to be positive is so ubiquitous that it’s impossible to identify a single source. Oprah routinely trumpets the triumph of attitude over circumstance… you’ll find a smorgasboard of workshops on how to succeed in life by overcoming pessimism, accessing your inner powers, and harnessing the power of thought.”
“A whole coaching industry has grown up since the mid-1990s, heavily marketed on the Internet, to help people improve their attitudes and hence, supposedly, their lives. For a fee on a par with what a therapist might receive, an unlicensed career or life coach help you defeat the ‘negative self-talk’ - that is, pessimistic thoughts - that impedes your progress… It has its ideologues, spokespeople, preachers, and salespersons - authors of self-help books, motivational speakers, coaches, and trainers… It was New Age meets middle-American business culture.”
Those familiar with my attitude towards The Four Agreements have likely heard me point out that the book was popularized by Ellen and Oprah. It is an insane book that says things like no one can abuse you more than you abuse yourself, so it’s really your fault for agreeing to lower your self-worth into accepting abuse. It is a masterpiece in blurring the lines between empowerment and blame.
That aside, the last sentence in that excerpt is almost exactly what I’ve said before. The contemporary American spiritual wellness movement seems to be some intersection of New Age appropriation of colonized cultures and outdated pseudopsychology embedded in the collective consciousness of institutional managers. If I had to distill our challenges with institutions into a single problem statement, it would be that institutions change their environment faster than they can change themselves. The arrogance of individuality in assuming that a system can be circumvented or ignored, whether by an anarchist outsider or a sufficiently Great Man as a leader, with the proper cultivation of inner traits is fatal. It is, literally, a superhero fantasy.
I suppose that’s the point, isn’t it? In a world where no one is coming to save you, be your own superhero. All it takes is buying a book or doing a course or hiring a coach, all of which give some variation of the advice “don’t do the thing associated with negative moods, and do the thing associated with positive moods, like spending less time watching the news and more time in nature.” In other words, despite living in a liberal democracy that was explicitly predicated on having an enlightened citizenry that would compete through debates in a marketplace of ideas, we are never to look at actually using those mechanisms to produce systemic changes. As Ehrenreich says,
“This retreat from the real drama and tragedy of human events is suggestive of a deep helplessness at the core of positive thinking. Why not follow the news? Because, as my informant at the NSA meeting told me, ‘You can’t do anything about it…’ The possibilities of contributing to relief funds, joining an antiwar movement, or lobbying for more humane government policies are not even considered. But at the very least there seems to be an acknowledgement here that no amount of attitude adjustment can make good news out of headlines beginning with ‘Civilian casualties mount…’ or ‘Famine spreads…‘”
One thing I appreciate about AA is that it wears its philosophy on its sleeve. It commits to the notion that the individual is powerless to facilitate a surrender to a Higher Power which, for all intents and purposes, is based on the Protestant concept of God. The thesis behind suffering is that the individual’s self-will has run riot and produced an unmanageable life, so only by seeking something outside of oneself for an alternative will can one find an anchor point of sanity. This is actually a far more coherent perspective than the positive thinking that becomes magical thinking, because at least God or a Higher Power is a mechanism through which meditation and prayer can lead to observable changes in the world. You can call AA a cult if you want, and I do call it religious rather than spiritual, but it’s the easiest cult in the world to leave if you don’t like it.
The happiness industry around positive thinking has no such coherence, and in fact invites you to be the God of your own life. The Four Agreements, a text referenced in psychoeducation classes in treatment centers that insurance companies pay for, says this explicitly. You’re God, I’m God, all things are God, and you have complete control of the reality that is your life once you awaken to the dream you’re in. It’s a book that makes a claim, and I’m not exaggerating in any way here, that if you tell someone their face looks like one belonging to someone with cancer, they will develop cancer within a year. It is a book that takes every critique made of the happiness industry’s absurd reliance on the power of willpower and responds with “Yes.” The entire first chapter of this book is a scathing rebuttal of such flippant claims made by New Age profit-seekers as we see Ehrenreich’s firsthand experience with breast cancer and the attitude cures. Much less a negative attitude, she suspects that years of hormone treatments at the recommendations of previous professionals increased her risk of developing cancer.
A rather heartbreaking account in the book comes from a woman writing to Deepak Chopra, who positively reviewed The Four Agreements since they used the same New Age publisher:
“Even though I follow the treatments, have come a long way in unburdening myself of toxic feelings, have forgiven everyone, changed my lifestyle to include meditation, prayer, proper diet, exercise, and supplements, the cancer keeps coming back. Am I missing a lesson here that it keeps reoccurring? I am positive that I am going to beat it, yet it does get harder with each diagnosis to keep a positive attitude.”
Chopra replies,
“As far as I can tell, you are doing all the right things to recover. You just have to continue doing them until the cancer is gone for good. I know it is discouraging to make great progress only to have it come back again, but sometimes cancer is simply very pernicious and requires the utmost diligence and persistence to eventually overcome it.”
I have a hard time not immediately thinking of televangelists and YouTube gurus who solicit money in exchange for reassurance from desperate and lost people. That money could go towards actual treatments, improving their quality of life, or simply savings for their family to use. Any of those sound better than the false hope of magical thinking disguised as a trajectory of positive thinking. And because you can’t measure a positive attitude or negative vibes, the whole theory of positive thinking is unfalsifiable:
“without question there is a problem when positive thinking ‘fails’ and the cancer spreads or eludes treatment. Then the patient can only blame herself: she is not being positive enough; possible it was her negative attitude that brought on the disease in the first place. At this point, the exhortation to think positively is ‘an additional burden to an already devastated patient,’ as an oncology nurse Cynthia Rittenburg has written.”
If you replace “cancer” with “addiction”, “depression”, or “cravings,” you get a very close approximation of the core of the American recovery philosophy. Suffering is not a condition produced relationally between an individual misaligned with an environment, but instead a dysfunction of the individual that is somewhere between personal ignorance, irrationality, and immorality. To have ended up in a position to suffer, one must have one of these vices. To escape suffering, one must remedy these vices and see their illness as some type of opportunity for an awakening. In doing so, those in suffering suffer again from these standards, whether imposed or internalized.
It’s not Just Injustice
“Clearly, the failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease. I, at least, was saved from this additional burden by my persistent anger.”
Fun fact, studies show that witnessing unfair behavior actively raises our stress levels with measurable heart rate spikes, even when they don’t happen to us. Sharing it with other people, or gossipping if you want to be righteous about it, actually lowers our stress. We are built to observe something like injustice, be angry about it, and try to change it.
For America, it’s been two and a half centuries since it won independence. It’s been about eight decades since it became a world superpower and over a century since it’s been the largest economic in the world. American history talks of “The Civil Rights Movement” as a singular wave across the 1950s and 1960s that restored civil rights. The optimists thought 2008 proved America was mostly over racism by electing a black President, and 2015 showed through the legalization of gay marriage that only the most marginal groups were left out of the umbrella of egalitarianism. A reality check is sorely needed.
South Sudan was recognized as an independent state in 2011. From 1955 to 2026, only 27 years have not involved a major civil war.
Timor-Leste became an independent sovereign nation in 2002, though it wasn’t until 2012 that the United Nations ended its peacekeeping mission to facilitate democratic elections amidst refugee crises affecting hundreds of thousands of people.
Croatia, Bosnia, and Slovenia fought wars to maintain independence amidst widespread ethnic conflicts from 1991-1995 in what we call the Yugoslav Wars. Notably, Melania Trump and Luka Doncic are from Slovenia.
South Africa had its first fully democratic elections open to all races in 1994, leading to the election of Nelson Mandela and marking a pivot from apartheid policies.
Eritrea won independence in 1991 after a 30-year war with Ethiopia. Namibia, 1990 after a guerilla conflict with South Africa’s apartheid regime.
Bangladesh seceded from Pakistan in 1971, which became an international conflict involving India.
Zimbabwe underwent The Rhodesian Civil War from 1964 to 1979 as a conflict that ended white minority rule and implemented universal sufferage, with independent sovereignty established in 1980.
I’ll draw on my own heritage here.
India celebrates 1947 as the year of independence because that’s when the British decided to leave. That’s not when the French and Portuguese decided to leave though. In 1954, local Indian socialist and nationalist groups launched a violent uprising against the French encalve on the Malabar Coast. The French administrators were physically driven out ahead of an official treaty to surrender the territory. The Portuguese in Goa, which had occupied India for 451 years, was expelled within 36 hours of a 1961 military operation, after years of attempts to negotiate diplomatically and unarmed protests that were met with fatal violence. My grandparents were alive to see that. Portugal did not acknowledge the sovereignty of India until 1974, which was after my parents were born.
So, you can hopefully understand how viscerally upsetting this happiness industry is to me when it carves up our traditions into commodities for Western institutions on the receiving end of historic exploitation without reparations. The aesthetics are all too easy to adopt: vague notions of aligining yourself with the vibrations of the universe through breathing exercises, planting positive intentions for karmic appraisal, detachment from the environment coupled to increasing attachment to the ego, rearranging furniture to balance your chakras, go on a walk through nature while thanking the sun and the trees, lighting incense while making herbal teas for a lunch break, so on and so forth.
It is within the living memory of my family that things do not get better until you roll up your sleeves to lock arms in a covenant of collective action. I cannot imagine a single piece of advice from this industry I’ve heard that could be useful to anyone who has answered the human call to be angry about injustice. After all, Reinhold Niehbur, author of the Serenity Prayer, was a pro-union socialist who believed that ruling classes must be forced to concede power as they would never do so of their own volition.