{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

The Happiness Conspiracy: against optimism and the cult of positive thinking

Sometimes I can't seem to focus anymore on what I am doing, and then I decide to just search for something a little dark and courageously honest.

I found a few excerpts to grab from The happiness conspiracy. 

Films such as Night and the City (1950), The Third Man (1949), Black Narcissus (1947), the first two Quatermass films (1955 and 1957), the Hammer horrors and the genuinely shocking Peeping Tom (1960) suggested an appetite for the forces of destruction and unreason that flow like an underground river beneath the quotidian. The war had perhaps provided further justification for our darkly ironic native sensibility.

That’s all gone now, because we are no longer allowed to be dark, ironic or, indeed, pessimistic. Neo-optimism is now as brutally enforced in Britain as it is in the United States. “In America, optimism has become almost like a cult,” the social psychologist Aaron Sackett told Psychology Today. “In this country,” says another American psychologist, “pessimism comes with a deep stigma.”

As with any cult, even reluctant individuals are forced to conform. In the same Psychology Today article, B Cade Massey, a professor of organisational behaviour at Yale, says: “It has gotten to the point where people feel pressure to think and talk in an optimistic way.” Massey’s research shows that, when assessing the risks of investments or surgical procedures, people make predictions they know are overly optimistic just because they want to belong, even in life- or wealth-threatening crises, to the clan of idiot grinning optimists who seem to be in charge.

You can feel this pressure wherever you go, notably on the internet, the multiplicity of which is anchored by a single, ferociously imposed neo-optimistic orthodoxy. The “Like” button on Facebook is one weapon of the neos. As a University of Leicester study found, it “directs debate on the social media platform in the direction of the blandly positive”. Social media, with their chattering pursuit of “likes”, followers, comments and shares, are overwhelmingly biased in the direction of an airheaded, cringe-inducing positivity. Look at the breathless Twitter feeds that babble about the sheer wonderfulness of everything, or the groups on Facebook and elsewhere consisting of people gathering together to save the world and spread niceness by, er, gathering together. Daily I get email demands to “help X celebrate” their birthday/promotion/whatever. “Help celebrate” – really?

This is not just irritating, it’s sinister. Clickbait websites are infecting once serious news media simply because they have the ability to rack up clicks in the millions by making people feel optimistic with or amused by pictures of cats. The new books editor of BuzzFeed, meanwhile, once said he would be publishing nothing but positive reviews, rejecting the “scathing takedown rip” he saw in “old media-type places”. To give this approach its proper name – this is ideology-driven censorship.

What is truly sinister here is that the internet, thanks to its useful idiot users, is being turned into a gigantic corporate shill. Be optimistic and then buy stuff and look at our adverts. Or, to put it another way, become increasingly exhausted, ignorant, poor and depressed.

Hell, if you read that much, you might as well read the whole article.

More snippets:


John Updike described the US as “a vast conspiracy to make you happy”. What he did not add was that this conspiracy involved a fierce judgementalism and a puritan need to shun the pessimist and the grouch.

The cruel flip side of this is that failure will be seen as a refusal to think positively and, therefore, the poor and the excluded are not unfortunate or persecuted: they are guilty.

... happy, calm, deluded and optimistic patients sound suspiciously convenient for the medical profession. Again, large sums of money are involved and scepticism is not, therefore, permissible.

...as Saul Bellow put it, casually refuting Socrates’s best-known motto, “the overexamined life might make you wish you were dead”.
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Wanting to be liked is at the root of this conspiracy.   May we be greatly disliked by liars, phonies, authority-worshipers, boot-lickers, and the idiot grinning optimists who seem to be in charge of them.

Thank you Bryan Appleyard of the UK for this rare criticism of ferociously imposed neo-optimistic orthodoxy.

I think no matter what you do, you need to have a more cordial relation with yourself. Of course that's never going to make you more comfortable exchanging ideas and discoveries freely, as such obstacles are not you but very real. I wish there were no psychiatrists and scholars either, but sophists, at first sophists were well regarded, until philosophy degenerated into debates of social usefulness and democracy, what else among men of cruel nature? Modern democracy owes more to native americans that to the greeks, they gave it a sense of freedom, but for how long? I still can't pm you. There are things I wish I could  talk to you about. Thanks for sharing your paper with the world, an homo normalis would never be that honest. Society at large is not genuine, but your views are too aggressive, I'll write about my bunny. I think suicide is a particular deviation that gets trained by itself and sustains itself once it got thru, don't let it get to you. The thing in itself is Your own disease, just let it relax, acept evil if you have faith, trust your own reactions, they just need protection from you. Animals are like a lower class, so it takes very profund insights and a long adaptation to understand them, this is something my bunny taught me: you are not more effective in good with more strength, learn to be softer at soft areas, and as hard as you want in others, learn from physiology and animals, and that humans can be evil in a way that they mess up with life: a hen is like an egg producing machine, they are not like bunnies at all, I've opened hens up to eat them, it's not a normal physiology anymore, they're screwed up if abandonned in nature, they're really innocent, and still sadistic among each other, it's their physiology and mimic, they pick on each other in a particular way, and they are clueless, they are trusting like babies and fragile, and feel emotions. There is no such thing as death, it's why nobody understands it, and why animals don't understand it beyond terror, it's a living state questioning itself in humans who have that luxury and idea, a free animal would just leave and go play freely or live it's life, because their lower class can't afford such questions, or they are useless, they're just a trick of assimilation and induced passivity, somebody somewhere gives people these ideas to keep a hold of them. Animals don't accept the idea that they can die, they would immediatly see that it's just bad and try harder to live or run away.