I came through the kitchen in the middle of the afternoon yesterday and noticed my wife staring at the television. Oprah Winfrey was telling her, “The way you think creates reality for yourself. If you adopt a positive attitude you
will attract good fortune like a magnet.” Oprah was trying to offer encouragement to a group of fairly desperate people who had been put out on the street by the collapse of the U. S. mortgage market.
“Sheesh,” I said. “Does she really believe that? Does anybody believe that?”
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“Oh stop,” she said. “Being gloomy doesn’t help them, does it?”
“If it helps them face the facts, a little gloom wouldn’t be out of place.”
“Oh, you’re so negative sometimes,” she sighed. My wife grew up on a farm and spent her formative years listening to the daily moan about malignant markets and punishing debt payments. One of the promises she wrote out for me at the altar was a vow never to work full-time at anything that depended on the weather. Oddly enough, she came away from that
experience with a disposition just a little sunnier than Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. To her all things are possible. The glass is always half full.
My wife and Oprah are both relentlessly positive people. They believe if you can just focus your mind with laser-beam intensity you can achieve anything you want. They long for the day when the rest of us just tap into that hidden reservoir of positive energy that surrounds us. And why not? Who wants to go through life being anxious, fretful and depressed? Who can argue with them?
I can, for one. Optimists are the people who have turned the world economy into a complete shambles. They’re the ones who thought the line on the real estate sales chart would keep going up forever. They’re the auto executives who insisted that all their problems would eventually work themselves out. They’re the hedge fund managers who thought, like Tinker Bell, that if they just really, really believed, the light would get stronger. It didn’t. It fizzled and went out and with it went the hopes and dreams of the next two generations who are now going to have to figure out how to pay off trillions in corporate and government debt.
I used to work for a big insurance company and one of the reasons I left is that I could see people doing a lot of stupid things with the company, but every time I raised a voice of objection I was seen as someone who wasn’t a team player. A decade later, the company disappeared into the maw of a corporate takeover and effectively ceased to exist, along with a pile of shareholder cash. The pessimist was right after all.
Anthropologists tell us the reason homo sapiens succeeded so spectacularly as a species has a lot to do with pessimism. Those big frontal lobes behind the eyeballs stored a pile of information about all the bad things that had happened to him personally so far and left enough room for all the stories he had heard about bad stuff happening to other people. This gave him a huge advantage when he was planning his day, running down antelope and dodging sabre-tooth tigers. He did not look at a mammoth and say, “Gosh, I’ll bet I could knock him out with one well-placed rock.” He was more likely to say, “Even if we did kill him, how long would he keep in this weather?”
Bad stuff can happen to pessimists, too, the same way paranoids can have enemies. The difference is they see it coming and are more likely to be prepared for it. I had my money in silver dollars in a sock for the last 10 years because it seemed to me that liars, thieves and idiots have been running a lot of our public and private institutions for far too long. And when the meltdown finally did come, I found myself reaching into my storehouse of agricultural images for a phrase that summed up the situation. “The chickens have come home to roost,” I said.
Optimism is a dangerous emotion that leads to overplanting and big barns and too much debt. Pessimism is a joyful and a healthy quality and the very thing to keep a farmer from going nuts. He knows that planting beans into cold, wet ground in May is not a statement of faith in the future. It’s an invitation to phytopthora rot.
Ask me to choose between a gloomy farmer and a starry-eyed investment banker and I’ll go with the farmer every time. But that’s just me.
ILLUSTRATION: RICK KURKOWSKI
