Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [69]
“But it’s already past your bedtime,” says Mom, “and you know you have to get your rest.”
“But I’m not tired!”
“Well, you will be in the morning if you don’t go to sleep soon.”
“Shut up!” Jessie yells. “Anyway, you can’t make me go to sleep.”
“Sound familiar?” the article asks. “It does to us. . . . The conversation might go on in this way until Mom, exhausted and angry, shouts something like ‘I quit! Suit yourself!’”
What parents need to do, says the article, is shift from “using power over kids to using power with them.”
“Peaceful parenting” should go like this:
“You’re having a lot of fun playing now, huh?” asks Mom.
“Yeah,” says Jessie. “And I’m not even tired.”
“So you just want to keep playing until you’re tired?”
“Yeah.”
“It must be frustrating to be asked to stop doing something that’s so much fun when you don’t feel tired.”
“I don’t have time for what I want to do. I just have to come home and do homework.”
“Hmm. It sounds like this time between homework and bedtime is really important to you, and you wish it were longer?”
“Yeah, Mom, I do.”
“Thanks for helping me understand that. You know, I’d like you to have as much time as you want for the things that interest you. At the same time, I’ve also noticed that when you stay up after nine on school nights, you’re tired the next morning. Do you hear what my concern is?”
“Yeah, you want me to get a good night’s sleep.”
“Yes, thanks for hearing that.”
“I just need five more minutes to finish this game. Okay?”
“Okay. I’ll get out your pajamas.”14
The pages of The Greater Good are awash in such insincere and coercive techniques. The goal, replicated in the corporate workshops where managers are taught how to speak to employees, is not to communicate but to control.
Richard S. Lazarus, who was a professor of psychology at Berkeley, was disturbed by “the vagueness, the religious tone, and the arrogance with which [the claims of positive psychology] are made.”15 He saw positive psychology as “populist and intellectually much too easy rather than a set of thoughtful ideas or principles to be respected.” “In my opinion, [positive psychologists] are promoting a kind of religion,” wrote Lazarus, “a vision from on high, which is falsely clothed in a claim to science that never materializes.”
Barbara Frederickson, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shows the crowd in the Claremont auditorium a cartoon diagram of a sailboat. She says she has found an exact, “totally scientific,” optimal “positivity” ratio for positive to negative emotions: 3 to 1. The keel of the sailboat, she says, represents the “necessary negative emotions” that are heavy and burdensome and “keep the boat on course and manageable,” while the sail, “having ample and sufficient positivity, is what really allows us to take off. What matters most, I have found, is the ratio of your heartfelt positivity relative to your heart-wrenching negativity,” said Frederickson.
“Why do we need positive emotions to really take off?” she asks. “Because positivity opens us.” On the screen overhead, the image of a blue flower appears. “Now imagine you are this flower, and your petals are drawn tightly around your face. If you could see out at all, it’s just a little speck,” she says mournfully. “You can’t appreciate much of what goes on around you. . . . But once you feel the warmth of the sun, things begin to change, your leaves begin to soften, your petals loosen and begin to stretch outward, exposing your face”—Frederickson splays her hands open around her face like petals—“and removing your delicate blinders, you see more and more, and your world quite literally expands.
“Now some flowers bloom just once. But others, like these day lilies,” she says, pointing to the slides of the blue and now red flowers, “they close up every evening and they bloom again when they see the sun. . . . Our minds are like these day lilies. Yet their openness honors momentary shifts in our positivity.” Frederickson pauses.