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Let’s Stop Kidding Ourselves
Mary Trump, in her urgently important tract Too Much and Never Enough, reveals that the Trump paterfamilias, Fred Trump Sr., had a singular devotion to Norman Vincent Peale’s popular self-help manual, The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale’s mantra was that the disappointments and failures in one’s life were the effect of your worldview and the self-understanding that goes along with it. If you are a downer, depressed and floundering, this explains your failure. If you are a success, self-possessed and content, it is a sign that your attitude is correct. For Peale and his acolytes Hamlet was right, even if the prince was aiming to manipulate Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, when he opined “[There] is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2, 249–251) Thus if you are not who you want to be and — more importantly — things are not what you wish they were, change your attitude, otherwise you have no one to blame but yourself.
The kind of easy optimism expressed by Peale disguises an abyss of narcissism. Everything depends on how you think about things, and how you think about things rests on the attitudes you bring to bear on the world by sheer force of will. This is, frankly, insane. It’s solipsism. The outrage hurled by Conservative intellectuals at Postmodernists like Derrida and Foucault in the 1990s academic culture wars — remember them? — was directed at the…
