from Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 7th 2. 2011
We should see all the good that we ordered appraisal tools. Nonsense says, the American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich. Positive thinking us stupid. The story of a charlatan.
By Matthias Daum
also a Federal Council is not immune. "People who can be constantly plagued by doubts, do not belong in government. In seven and a half million people there must be seven, do not doubt that. I doubt very rare, "said a little more than a Year of then-President Hans-Rudolf Merz in an interview. The UBS bank on the brink, two Swiss in Libya hostage, a German finance minister, who wants to gallop with the cavalry to the neighboring country. However, Merz said, "As long as I'm sure of themselves that really is what I do, as long as I'm not vulnerable." The father of his country believed in the power of positive thinking.
But what about being an optimist? Well, that positive thinking has a history. And that is not all doubt.
It began in 1909 in the United States. At that time, met the 25-year-old journalist, Napoleon Hill, the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. The two came into the business. Carnegie, then the richest man in the world, commissioned the young man, a systematic "philosophy of success" to write. Hill was a rising star. Born in 1883 in a log cabin in southwest Virginia, he was already working with 13 for the local paper. At Georgetown University in Washington, he studied law. His sponsors Carnegie opened the doors to the upper class. Hill allegedly led 500 interviews with the richest and most successful of the country. Including Thomas Edison, inventor of the incandescent lamp, Henry Ford, the automobile king, George Eastman, Kodak's founder, William Wrigley Jr., who made a fortune with chewing gum.
Twenty years conducted research on the Hill formula for success. In 1928 he published "The Law of Success" and 1937's bestseller "Think and Grow Rich!" (Dt "Think and Grow Rich"). To date, the book has sold 60 million times, new editions arrive regularly in the bestseller lists. "Every performance and every success rooted in an idea," is the Hill formula. But an idea is not enough. It also needs the belief: ". For what man can conceive and believe, that it can achieve"
overheard added Hill this claim in an obscure Frenchman Emile Coué, a trained pharmacist, in 1857 in Troyes born. He is the father of the auto-suggestion, faith because it was necessary to convince something long enough - and then it will come true. Coué told his disciples, after waking up twenty times to recite the following sentence in a low voice: "It goes with me every day in every way better and better and better."
Zog, the Frenchman still Coué as a traveling preacher in their own right through Europe, the American Hill was a star. His books justified, together with those of the motivational coach Dale Carnegie, a genre, the self-help literature. Carnegie's "Stop Worrying and Start Living" belongs on the bookshelf of all those who want their melancholy ruminations on earth. (This was the author of a con man. He really was said Carnagey, but changed his name so we took him for a steel dynasty scion.)
find Then and now positive thinkers at the highest level of hearing. The U.S. president Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated Napoleon Hill as a consultant. And most recently to let a Scottish government officials carried away to the assertion that "thinking positive can help us to promote a new kind of education."
But there are growing critics of this happy-go-lucky-rhetoric . Positive thinking is everyone's misfortune. This is the diagnosis of the liberal New York journalist Barbara Ehrenreich in her recently published book. "Smile Or Die - How the ideology of positive thinking the world stupid"
Positive thinking is a displacement method, a refusal to communicate. Positive thinkers thought they could create the world, thought they were her own God. This leads to intolerance of others and promotes an anti-critical stance. Or as a character in Milan Kundera's debut, "The Joke," writes on a postcard: "Optimism is the opium of the people."
Ironically, use of Barbara Ehrenreich, who studied physics and molecular biology, the classic self-help authors principle: She writes from a personal concern. Several years ago the now 61-year-old fell ill breast cancer. They advised her to embrace the metastases.
But she hated her cancer, she wanted to be healthy. And that they should endure the pain with a smile, she felt as an affront. So she started researching. She attended motivational seminars, healers, all the sellers of false hopes. Ehrenreich's findings: The American optimism is delusional. A U.S. president, George W. Bush, whose standard was set: "I am optimistic" - and now in Afghanistan and Iraq bombs fell like soldiers. A bank, Lehman Brothers, which drove their property boss because he warned of the mortgage bubble. And two years later collapsed the financial institution. "The positive thinking has turned our alertness to the inside. Instead of worrying about that the roof collapses, we fear, only the negative correct expectation and they "constantly writes Ehrenreich. The self-questioning and self-control is replaced by self-hypnosis. Positive thinking is a secular dogma.
And a means of power. If achieved, man can do whatever he can think and believe, then he is also - as the reverse - the sole blame for his failure. Hardly surprising, positive thinking was the basis of the most successful evangelical preacher. It is the return of Puritanism, ungracious of God through the back door of the counseling. Everyone is his (un) happiness own blacksmith. It also fits in a neoliberal world. Personal responsibility is all encompassing. Around the loss of jobs. Whether it was on his own inability to world markets, or the miscalculations of top management: fault of the convicts with himself because he has not thought hard enough on its inevitable success.
Only, "a stupid brain is through positive thinking and no wiser." This is the German psychologist Günther Sheikh writes in his book "Positive thinking makes you sick." The work on the ego bears no fruit. Moreover, it is dangerous. Especially for people with poor self-esteem. This was 2009, the psychologist Joanne Wood of the journal "Psychological Science". Anxious people should take any blunders and mishaps targeting, confrontation is for your own peace of mind. Barbara Ehrenreich goes further: "You have to disillusion yourselves all!"
But the positive thinkers are on the rise. Their scientific figurehead is Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He had plenty of neuroses, fears and failures, the human abyss. Now he deals with happiness, security, trust or forgiveness. Positive psychology, he calls his self-invented art. And he has succeeded. The U.S. Defense Department has recently transferred him a 31-million-dollar contract, he will teach positive thinking to the U.S. armed forces. The Positive psychology has even made it to the elite Harvard University. Tal Ben-Shahar lectures on the "Six Steps to Happiness" in 2006 were the most visited of the Unijahres.
But the power of positive thinking has its limits. This had also Emile Coué painfully. He advised his followers in case of symptoms, whether physical or mental nature to lay a hand on the affected area or the forehead and repeat as quickly as possible, "It's over. It will pass. It will pass. . . 'In his own good was the end nothing. He died in 1926 from pneumonia.
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