Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [67]
“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