The Danger of Positive Thinking

Likely you've seen someone infected by the new drug epidemic. Perhaps you have and didn't know it, because, unlike those addicted to conventional narcotics, those afflicted by this scourge are usually well dressed, possess all their teeth and sleep in condominiums and houses in the suburbs instead of on park benches and in trees, but they are among us. They are the ones seen silently meditating at the wheels of their cars in your company's parking lot at 7:58 in the morning, or beating a well worn path between the yoga center and the smoothie shop at your local strip mall. They’re the ones who are always happy, always looking on the bright side. In case you're not sure, they're the ones whose teeth your gut instinct is telling you to knock out of their incessantly smiling face.

They’ve been to a seminar. They’ve watched a video one of their other self-lobotomized friends passed on with the standard endorsement, “This will change your life”. They’ve subscribed to a pseudo-scientific belief that by making the conscious decision to think positively about the world and their lives, no matter what, good things will happen to them through the “Law of Attraction”.

These people are retarded.

Could it be that the Jews are merely the most pessimistic people in the history of man, and thereby brought on centuries of oppression and discrimination, culminating in the murder of nearly half of their total population during World War II? And what of the hundreds of thousands of Sudanese currently wallowing in refugee camps, lucky only to have escaped their own gruesome deaths in the crossfire of their country’s ongoing civil war? Perhaps if after their neighboring village had been razed and pillaged they’d gotten all their friends together to meditate on images of the rebel soldiers dropping their guns and going to the beach instead of marching on to their own village to burn their houses down and rape, kill and kidnap their relatives they wouldn’t be where they are now. Perhaps hogwash.

These people are evil.

Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with thinking positively from time to time if you’re ignorant enough to not realize that nothing will amount to more than a hill of shit in the relative near future anyway, but there certainly isn’t anything at all wrong with thinking negatively or not at all, since doing so keeps people from doing the sort of stupidly ambitious things pushing our species to the brink of extinction after a pitiful 50,000 years on Earth while bacteria have and will continue to live for billions. Furthermore, the doctrine of unconditional positive thinking threatens to undermine the quality of the fleeting lives of the rest of us. For instance, consider a world wherein, instead of writing poetry Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf started their own bakeries selling cookies; or, instead of their being a Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails, Kurt Cobain was still alive and well teaching a Tai Chi class at the 24 Hour Fitness Trent Reznor manages downtown. Super.