The Power of The Power of Positive Thinking
Donald Trump’s a liar, right? Not just an occasional liar, and not just on the big things either. But a serial, day in, day out, barefaced pants-on-fire liar.
And you, you reading this right now, you’re not. Are you? That guy, and you, are a million miles apart. And that makes you feel good about yourself.
We all want to feel good about ourselves, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Until you understand that Donald Trump is not a liar. And that you’re probably more like him than you think you are.
To understand why, you have to go back to 1952 and the publication of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. A classic of the self-help genre, up there with influential works like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
The Power of Positive Thinking basically says that the way you think about things, influences things. You want success? Visualise it. Use positive language. Ignore negativity and naysayers. Set goals. Believe in them, and yourself. And the things you want to happen, will happen.
As well as selling 5 million copies of his book, Peale delivered sermons on TV and radio and was hugely influential among wealthy Americans (including several Presidents). And indeed, one of the people Peale influenced was a young Donald Trump. Trump went to Peale’s church as a young man. Both his sisters were married there, as were he and Ivana.
Donald Trump’s mode of discourse — to deny the facts laid right before him, as he did in his recent Fox interview — seems bizarre. But when you look at it through the lens of The Power of Positive Thinking it all makes sense. A virus that’s just going to go away. An economy that’s going to rebound spectacularly. A climate that’s going to fix itself. And a President who is super-smart, ultra-healthy, immune to the virus, the best at everything, ever.
These aren’t lies, they’re beliefs.
And Donald Trump isn’t a liar, he’s the biggest optimist ever.
(Another optimist we could mention at this point is one Boris Johnson, another man who seems to think that positivity, energy, drive and confidence are enough to overcome a global pandemic, a no-deal BREXIT, a looming recession. Handshakes. Rugby tackles. Bulldozers. Speeches.)
And please don’t kid yourself that you’re immune to this kind of thinking. The world of business, especially this one (advertising, marketing) absolutely thrives on it. Everything’s great. Graphs are always going up. This is the best place to work, ever. Those long nights are totally worth it. This pitch is going to change everything. Indeed, it’s quite hard to work (or at least, last) in this business if you don’t have an optimistic streak.
But, to borrow a phrase beloved of the right, facts don’t care about your feelings.
Optimists in the advertising and marketing business don’t just have one set of difficult facts to face (a looming recession) but a nested box of others too. For one, a global pandemic that’s exposed how much our economy depends on consumption at the expense of health and wellbeing. And for another, the stark fact that consumption — driven by advertising and marketing — drives a huge proportion of global emissions. Emissions that, during lockdown, briefly returned to levels we need to maintain all the time if we want a survivable planet.
Positive Thinking really worked for Donald Trump when he inherited a multi-million dollar property empire and went around the world making deals and building hotels and being on TV. And it really worked for Boris Johnson when he wrote Spectator columns and was hilarious over lunch and made Theresa May look a bit boring. And it really worked for ad bosses when they flew around the world snapping up agencies, building networks, negotiating massive pay deals and making ads that won at Cannes (quite literally the most important event in the world). When everything’s going your way, Positive Thinking feels like the most believable philosophy in the world. You want it? You got it. (It seems to work especially well if you’re rich, white, educated and male).
Unfortunately Positive Thinking doesn’t seem to work on things like pandemics or extinction events. Confidence is not enough.
The sooner we realise we’re all a little bit more like Donald Trump than we wish we were, the sooner we’ll be free of our delusions.
And the sooner we’re free, the sooner we’ll get on with changing our model, firing some clients (and asking hard questions of others), questioning endless growth, living within our means (financially and ecologically), accepting that we need to engage with some fairly radical ideas if we’re going to make life fairer, better and more sustainable.
Doing something about it, in other words. Rather than being the worst kind of liar — the kind that lies to ourselves.
