Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [64]
Happiness, Cooperrider explains, is achieved through “a progressive concentration and release of positivity—a ‘concrescence’ or growing together—whereby persons are ‘enlarged,’ and organizational or mutual strengths, resources, and positive-potentials are connected and magnified, where both (person and organization) become agents of the greater good beyond them.
“In other words,” he continues, “institutions can be a vehicle for bringing more courage into the world, for amplifying love in the world, for amplifying temperance and justice, and so on.”
He ends by saying that this generation—presumably his—is the most privileged generation in human history. It is a generation that will channel positive emotions through corporations and spread them throughout the culture. The moral and ethical issues of corporatism, from the toxic assets they may have amassed, to predatory lending, to legislation they may author to destroy regulation and oversight, even to the actual products they may produce, from weapons systems to crushing credit-card debt, appear to be irrelevant. There presumably could have been a “positive” Dutch East Indies Company just as there can be a “positive” Halliburton, J. P. Morgan Chase, Xe (formerly Blackwater), or Raytheon.
Corporate harmony means all quotas can be met. All things are possible. Profits can always increase. All we need is the right attitude. The highest form of personal happiness comes, people like Cooperrider insist, when the corporation thrives. Corporate retreats are built around this idea of merging the self with the corporate collective. They often have the feel, as this conference does, of a religious revival. They are designed to whip up emotions. In their inspirational talks, sports stars, retired military commanders, billionaires, and self-help specialists such as Tony Robbins or Cooperrider claim that the impossible is possible. By thinking about things, by visualizing them, by wanting them, we can make them happen. It is a trick worthy of the con artist “Professor” Harold Hill in The Music Man who insists he can teach children to play instruments by getting them to think about the melody.
The purpose and goals of the corporation are never questioned. To question them, to engage in criticism of the goals of the collective, is to be obstructive and negative. The corporations are the powers that determine identity. The corporations tell us who we are and what we can become. And the corporations offer the only route to personal fulfillment and salvation. If we are not happy there is something wrong with us. Debate and criticism, especially about the goals and structure of the corporation, are condemned as negative and “counterproductive.”
Positive psychology is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis. Positive psychology—at least, as applied so broadly and unquestioningly to corporate relations—is a quack science. It throws a smokescreen over corporate domination, abuse, and greed. Those who preach it serve the corporate leviathan. They are awash in corporate grants. They are invited to corporate retreats to assure corporate employees that they can find happiness by sublimating their selves into corporate culture. They hold academic conferences. They publish a Journal of Happiness Studies and a World Database of Happiness. And the movement has sought and found academic legitimacy. There are more than a hundred courses on positive psychology available on college campuses. The University of Pennsylvania offers a Masters of Applied Positive Psychology established under the leadership of Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment and a former president of the American Psychological Association. The School