Let’s Stop Kidding Ourselves

Umberto Eco (Creative Commons image by Rob Bogaerts, via the National Archives in Holland)

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…