outwardly.inward

Positive Psycho(path)logy…

University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center defines Positive Psychology as “the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive…The field is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play.” Although positive psychology is not a new discipline, it has gained popularity in the last decade as a supplemental view to classical psychology, which traditionally only focused on the treatment of mental illness. “Psychology after World War II became a science largely devoted to healing. It concentrated on repairing damage using a disease model of human functioning. This almost exclusive attention to pathology neglected the idea of a fulfilled individual and a thriving community, and it neglected the possibility that building strength is the most potent weapon in the arsenal of therapy”. Positive psychology aimed to address the preoccupation with only treating mental illness by focusing on mental health and resiliency as a sort of prevention therapy. Some invaluable research has come out on topics that are of everyday concern to healthy North Americans by focusing on ‘optimizing’ healthy mental functioning and increasing wellbeing. But, since the initial surge in research from 1999 onward, the popularity of positive psychology has eclipsed classical psychology and spilled over into the arena of self-help. Self-help gurus have taken positive psychology out of its context as a supplemental method, in order to make it more commercially viable.

Self-help doesn't always help... 

The popularity (and marketability) of this kind of Pop-psychology is twofold and inter-related. Firstly, its appeal lies in filling a void in the psyche of a consumer culture run by the inescapable presence of advertising. Media continues to expertly prey on our animal-tendencies by refining their understanding of what will increase consumption and possession practices. Corporations have thus tailored their marketing to appeal increasingly to hedonic, aesthetic, and ritualistic dimensions. This level of manipulation, coupled with the inescapable presence of media that saturates every waking moment of life, has created a consumerist culture that is no longer voluntary, or avoidable. This pathology of habitual desire (that has all the characteristics of a psychological addiction) is intensified by credit card-culture, and this ‘addiction’ is only worsened by constant acquisition. North Americans have become consumer addicts, and slavery to credit-card debt, coupled with longer working hours to facilitate more shopping, results in increasing unhappiness, which in turn worsens the pathology. In this environment of constant psychological ‘emptiness’, self-help thrives because of an approach rooted in positive psychology, where the techniques focus on maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. Conversely, Pop-psychology also serves to smooth the progress of this addiction by asserting North American’s ‘right’ to have everything they’ve ever wanted, and thereby endorses an approach that encourages a cost-benefit analysis of every action and interaction in life. So, we are left with a populace that is deeply addicted to consumerism and estranged from their community by ‘righteous self-interest'. This populace then turns to self-help, in order to combat the growing discontent in their lives, and are advised to reach a further level of introspection where they will find some untapped resource that will lead to health, wealth, and hopefully happiness. By examining the popular Western ideology on which the misguided self-help industry depends, it is apparent that these ideologies set limits on what human flourishing looks like.

I am my only company...

 The central tenets of self-help rest on the ideology of individualism. Individualism is a moral stance, a political philosophy, and an ideology or social outlook. It stresses "the moral worth of the individual and promotes the exercise of one's goals and desires and so values independence and self-reliance while opposing most external interference upon one's own interests, whether by society, family or any other group or institution”. In the West we largely agree with this ideology, yet it deserves some scrutiny as the platform to launch our hopes of wellbeing from. Firstly, by embodying the most extreme kind of individualist ideology, self-help has rendered our society completely blind to systematic injustices, because it puts the onus on individuals to ‘create’ the life that they want, and denies other factors like race, class, sex, ability, and even random tragic events. This ‘though luck’ attitude asserts that all individuals should be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and that if they can’t, they must not be working hard enough. This extreme individualist ideology has weakened our ability to stand together for change. No radical social change is possible when each individual is only concerned with his/her own agenda. If we are told we can ‘have it all’, it is likely we will not make any concessions, even if it will result in a higher standard of living for everyone. Our definition of self is so wrapped up in our need to be right, that we are unwilling to take on other points of view. Lastly, self-help ignores research findings that do not fit the individualist ideology. Money has been shown to have little effect on long-term happiness; community involvement and relationships are essential to wellbeing; and regular acts of altruism have been linked to long-term happiness (Grohol, 2010). In this way a disguised ideology perpetuates a socio-political status quo, and fails to do justice to moral visions outside the dominant outlook. Unfortunately, self-help has flooded the North American psyche with unrealistic notions of individualism that diminish our perceived need for social interdependence, and reinforce the habits and ideologies that are the cause of our discontent.

The truth is in the world, not in your head…

 For many non-Western people this separate sense of self, that is taken for granted and promoted in Western cultures, is seen as illusory, limited, and a source of suffering. Buddhism, Yoga, and Taoism encourage, as the root of their practice, an unrelenting ‘search for the real’.  Yoga talks in extensive detail about how identification with the ego or self leads to attachment, sin, and destructive emotions. Yoga philosophy asserts that the root of all suffering arises when we disconnect from reality in order to avoid unpleasantness. Instead, it teaches that we can experience pain without suffering, since suffering arises when we resist negative experience. Conversely, it teaches to experience pleasure without attachment to also avoid suffering. This is wildly different from the Western self-help industry, where the name of the game is minimizing pain and increasing pleasure. Eastern traditions also emphasize that it is by learning to identify with ever-greater communities or wholes that we find equanimity, peace, and wellbeing. Ultimately I think that if we were to only adopt either collectivist, or individualist ideologies, that either one will eventually fail us. Binaries are always questionable when it comes to ideology, since most of life is a sliding scale. Every event, philosophy, and ideology needs it’s opposite. Opposites are, in the end, only two sides of the same stick, where each half serves as a definition for the other. Social change will only be possible when we seek to expand our knowledge, instead of pruning it down to fit our current ideologies, and so I propose a look into eastern tradition in the hopes that it will supplement our western psychology, ideology, and governance, but not replace it.