When I entered college in the late '90s, I came across some old theological books in the library, and I wrote down these passages about willingness to change one's mind. At the time, I didn't yet have the context to understand that they were part of the so-called "Law of Attraction," under which people are assumed to control all their situations and outcomes simply by changing their attitude, nor did I predict how that belief would be used in 21st-century USAmerican fascism.
Anyhow, at the time, I took notes.
Norman Vincent Peale said, "Change your thoughts and you change your world," while George Bernard Shaw said, "Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything." Taken together, the option is stark: Either we can change our entire personal worlds or we can change nothing at all.
A few people are able to communicate their shift in thinking and, in so doing, influence the worldviews of the entire culture. Alfred North Whitehead wrote: "In its turn every philosophy will suffer a deposition...Philosophy never reverts to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher."
Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality. (Originally 1929.) Part 1, Chap. 1, Sect. 6. New York: Harper, 1960. pp. 9, 14.
Relatedly:
For a college class c. 2000, we were assigned to read:
From Salvation to Self-Realizationn: Advertising and the therapeutic roots of the consumer culture, 1880-1930 by T. J. Jackson Lears. Printed in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980. Ed. by Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears. (New York: Pantheon, 1983.
For some reason — whether for a class assignment or for personal reasons — I wrote this summary and just came across it.
Also, this book criticized the self-help industry in part for "push[ing] people away from proven medical treatments by persuading them that they can cure themselves through sheer application of will."
Also, Jared Yates Sexton has this book about how certain American myths/illusions/inspirational metaphors have become cultish.
Before the 20th century, USAmericans believed that spiritual salvation came through self-denial, hard work, and temperance. But as the industrial and communications revolutions changed their world, they increasingly felt that the fragmented, impersonal capitalist society was "unreal," and they sought salvation through "reality" and "real life." This value shift rang truer to their experience. It manifested itself through religion — but advertisements also reflected it.
Lears calls the new value structure the "therapeutic ethos." People felt dissolved in masses of humanity. They felt stifled, shriveled, as if they had no self at all. Hence the popularity of an ethos that made the healing of the self its top priority. The cultivation of a healthy personality was every person's highest goal. If one lacked vitality, one wasn't enjoying "real life." The self could be healed by following an exercise regimen, eating proper foods, permitting oneself hedonistic self-expression, and buying the right products.
Advertisers seized upon the belief that fulfillment of deep yearnings was just around the corner. The public accepted the explanation that they bore the responsibility for their own depression, exhaustion, and demoralization because they had failed to buy the correct combination of elixirs. They were willing to take more consumer advice and to act on it.
Advertisers didn't merely respond to customer demands but also shaped those demands. They attributed the customer's vague unhappiness to specific consumer complaints which they could remedy. Consumers adopted those claims and used them to shape their own wishes.
Before the 20th century, the dominant Western worldview instructed each person to consider themselves a creature of pure reason and unfettered freewill. Of course, every person has a sense of emptiness, but according to this worldview, it was an obstacle in one's ability to redefine oneself — so if you admit to feeling any emptiness, you admit to a character flaw. Freud's late-19th-century theory of the subconscious allowed each man to relinquish some of that responsibility for his psychological and physical weaknesses. Advertisers happily took on the responsibility for the solution.
The Industrial Revolution was a stressful time in human history, and USAmericans expressed their sense of spiritual emptiness by buying products advertised to them. Dissatisfaction and depression appear in every age, but this explanation and proposed solution was unique to this period, as was the economic ability of the United States to produce and consume enough so that people could live out this "therapeutic ethos." The maxim was economic as well as spiritual.
Manifesting was invented by rich people who don't understand how their own privilege works, and sold to poor people as a magical thinking solution to a systematic imbalance in opportunity
— si oppington (@stillwellgray.ca) May 13, 2024 at 1:35 PM
In the 2023 indictment in the election-related charges:
“As we’re learning more about how...Trump plans to defend himself,” noted SE Cupp, it seems the former president is reaching for the so-called “Seinfeld defense,” George Costanza’s infamous adage, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” — Opinion: Trump’s indictment hat trick takes America to the brink, Jane Greenway Carr, CNN, August 6, 2023
If other people are using the law of attraction to gain power to hurt you, believing that they have the power to do so may just aid their tactic. Try believing that you have the power to change the outcome — and take some action.
"If Trump has a political superpower, it’s that other people believe he has political superpowers. They believe that any effort to hold him accountable will backfire. They believe that he will always ride a wave of backlash to victory. They believe that challenging him on anything other than his terms will leave him stronger than ever.
Most of this is false. But to the extent that it is true, it has less to do with the missed shots — to borrow an aphorism from professional sports — than it does with the ones not taken in the first place."
— If Trump Is Not an Insurrectionist, What Is He? Jamelle Bouie, New York Times, Jan. 5, 2024
You would think that the "law of attraction" people would support gender transition, since it's a way of becoming what you wish. But many of them only support law of attraction for themselves, to magnify their own power, not to let others empower themselves.
"There is a form of social and political control implemented by medicine, a way to sever an unpopular minority [trans people] from their own bodies and then sell back limited access to their bodies if they will submit to a set of trials to prove they can be good people, or at least made better. The people opposed to that kind of medicalization simply think that trans people enjoy no right to their bodies at all, under any circumstances."
— Detransition is a Mythology, Jules Gill-Peterson, Sad Brown Girl (Substack), Feb 6, 2024
Believing everything is fine should be based in reality so that it amounts to thought, not mere belief. B. Lorraine Smith discusses it.
I have moral expectations of myself and others. It's fair to have them, and we need to set mutual expectations so that we can co-create a livable society. Moral expectations are not quite the same thing as "law of attraction."
JD Vance
Alissa Quart writes:
"Welcome to the Art of the Deal of the Hillbilly.
Trump for much of his career was alternately mocked, admired and amplified by New York’s liberal media. Like Vance, he also peddled what I think of as crappy prosperity populism. (Here we might ask whether all prosperity populism is crappy!) Crappy prosperity populism is the claim that all success is the result of an individual’s gifts and efforts, and anyone who tries hard can make it. It’s also the faith that this achievement is best measured by dollars and the ability to enter the highest reaches of society.
Finally, it's a contempt for the poor — in Vance's case, his own family members, who he blames for their condition. As Vance wrote in Hillbilly Elegy, of those he had left behind in Ohio, they were simply spending their 'way into the poorhouse.' 'People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown,' he sniped. 'You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.'"
— Alissa Quart, "JD Vance is the Toxic Byproduct of America’s Obsession with Bootstrap Narratives," LitHub, July 18, 2024
Here's another idea
Diane Aoki discusses the idea of "ontological design," meaning a focus on designing the real, shared space you inhabit, not only your inner world. Some people believe "that unless you change your self, and deal with the issues that are thwarting your emotional health, you will take your problems with you wherever you go. That is what ontological design argues against. It argues that your outside does affect your inside, so be intentional about the world in which you reside. Curate it."
Change is political, and political change is possible
Yes, you have a political fantasy, but insofar as we put power into our fantasies, we have the ability to make them reality.
"All politics is also itself fantasy…the implication of force in fantasy means that nothing is only fantasy."
— Steven Connor. The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing. Reaktion, 2019.The illusory truth effect
See this article: "Why do we believe misinformation more easily when it’s repeated many times?: The Illusory Truth Effect, explained." Decision Lab.
Agreed. Really starting to feel like rats hitting the cocaine button. It was productive for a while because it was helping cement the perception of him as a weird sex pest (100% true). But we’ve wrung the last bit of the illusory truth effect out of it at this point.
— Aunt Sylvia’s Home for Wayward Women and Lurid Tulips (@socialistboghag.bsky.social) Jul 28, 2024 at 9:22 AM
[image or embed]More
If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.
.jpg){kind=link}