The Sophistical Fiasco of Positive Thinking

Disposing of some fake-philosophical self-help ads for the happiness industry

I’ve found a galling adversary.

His name’s Alberto García 🚀🚀🚀and he, too, writes relatively philosophical articles. These he posts on two publications he runs, “The Philosophical Inn” and “The Writers Fight Club.”

There are two key differences, though, between his work and mine. First, his is more financially successful, judging at least from the claps his articles regularly receive. His articles average over a thousand claps. I’ve had several articles go somewhat viral like that, but not many. Especially recently, after some unfavourable changes were made to the platform, my average clap count has fallen to a couple hundred or so.

The second difference is that Garcia’s output is sheer sophistry, which is to say it’s sell-out pseudophilosophy. He uses philosophy as raw material to craft dumbed-down, misleading, “self-improvement” pieces.

It’s no mystery, then, why his articles are apparently more popular than mine. Folks who are used to being entertained on the internet by the likes of YouTube, TikTok, and Pornhub are hardly in the mood to be told the truth on comparable media, if the truth happens to be upsetting. They’d rather feast on comforting myths and fantasies, on pandering drivel and neoliberal propaganda.

But to have the worst confirmed so starkly by the case of Alberto Garcia’s body of writings is infuriating.

Writing for café- and washroom-dwellers

The thrust of Garcia’s appalling oeuvre emerges from two of his articles. First, there’s his advice on how to succeed as a writer. As he puts it in his tacky, sensationalist terms, “If You Are a Writer, This Is (Probably) the Most Important Article You Will Read Today.” Of course, his titles frame the vast majority of his articles as listicles, as in “Three Disturbing Self-Help Lessons you Don’t Know but Should” or “Four Disturbing Quotes by Marcus Aurelius That Will Change Your Outlook On Life.”

In any case, Garcia’s advice is twofold: it’s easier to succeed if you like what you’re doing, and because “you write for people who use Medium in coffee shops and bathrooms,” you shouldn’t try so hard as a writer. As he says, “People try to stand out. They try too hard, and that’s why they don’t get readings. They try to write to be read by an Ivy League professor.” But Medium is more like a coffee shop or a bathroom than like a college lecture hall. So, writers should be like stand-up comedians: they should read the room.

Thus, instead of writing something like, “They write in a flowery and pretentious fashion, which is evidently why their audience is dismally meager,” Garcia wrote, “They try too hard, and that’s why they don’t get readings.” Don’t get readings! A four-year old couldn’t have said it any worse or been so careless and imprecise. So that’s a successful sentence in Garcia’s book.

But not just in his book because that article garnered 1.1K claps and 12 comments (at last count). Thus, Garcia is correct. If you try to elevate the proceedings, you’ll be climbing uphill and intimidating potential readers, so your chance of attracting a large audience will be low. However, if you go with the flow, accepting the low bar for what it is and catering to the lowest common denominator, you’ll likely find greater favour with the potential audience. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Garcia portrays the writer’s job like this: “You are a goldsmith making an exceptional piece of jewelry that seeks to stand out, entertain, attract attention, and bring something positive to the reader.”

That indeed sounds like the mission of the sophistical self-help writer. But let’s not confuse that with a philosophical purpose, shall we?

The source of positive and negative thoughts

Yet the most appalling article I think I’ve read on Medium is Garcia’s “How to Stop Hurting Yourself With Negative Thoughts.” The subtitle is “The power of an orderly mind.”

Just to be safe, I should lay down some trigger warnings. The quotations you’re about to read are revolting, from a genuine philosophical standpoint. With that out of the way I can start to drain Garcia’s swamp.

He begins by asking rhetorically, “Would you let just anyone into your home? No, wouldn’t you? Then why do you let any thoughts into your brain?”

Of course, Garcia messed up the grammar. He meant to ask something like, “Would I let just anyone into my home? No, would you?” But remember, Garcia’s deliberately not trying hard because he assumes his readers are all on the toilet or eating donuts at a café.

But his point is that negative thoughts are dangerous so we shouldn’t entertain them. He compares them to an intruder who steps uninvited into your house. And he elaborates on that analogy: “Your evil thoughts are far worse than many annoying guests who show up unannounced and pretend to be annoying: they are like silent assassins who sneak into your mind, steal your peace and leave, leaving you angry, grumpy, diminished: ruining your day.”

Why, then, let such thoughts “into your brain”? Yet does Garcia imagine that thoughts originate outside of brains? Do negative ones derive from the devil? And if negative thoughts float around outside the brain, wouldn’t the same have to be said of positive ones? If, instead, both kinds of thoughts exist just in the brain or mind, even if we needn’t thereby be conscious of all of them, wouldn’t disposing of the unwanted thoughts mean going to war with ourselves?

Happiness and the “dedication to business”

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s proceed further into Garcia’s swamp of salesmanship. He quotes approvingly from CS Lewis, saying that Lewis writes ‘in Book V of the Chronicles of Narnia something like this, “Dedication to business is the root of prosperity, but those who ask questions that do not concern them are steering the ship of folly toward the rock of destitution.”’

The actual quotation from Lewis is,

Or if he was in a peaceable mood he would say, “O my son, do not allow your mind to be distracted by idle questions. For one of the poets has said, ‘Application to business is the root of prosperity, but those who ask questions that do not concern them are steering the ship of folly towards the rock of indigence.’”

Garcia wanted to simplify the wording for his readers, but let’s look at the content which pleases Garcia. Lewis and Garcia are contrasting the dedication to business which leads to prosperity, with the asking of idle questions that don’t concern you, which leads to poverty.

That sentiment, though, is egregious.

First, CS Lewis was supposed to be a Christian apologist, right? Yet he sounds there more like a propagandist for capitalism than like a follower of someone who advised everyone to leave their family and to give away all their possessions, lest they be tempted to idolize money or other worldly things.

Second, who says that dedication to business leads to prosperity? Aren’t consumerism and unchecked capitalism killing the planet?

Third, doesn’t philosophy stand in the way precisely of such hypocrisy and self-destructive myopia? Thus, who says impertinent or subversive questions are always idle? Maybe childlike human happiness must be ended for the greater good. That’s certainly what Jesus taught: sacrifice your worldly prosperity out of faith that you’ll be rewarded in the afterlife. God’s laws are higher than those of sinful humankind. Likewise, philosophical ideals typically clash with those that prop up the unreflective masses to whom Garcia panders.

Fourth, Christian apologists have an ulterior motive for dissuading folks from being intellectually curious, since scientific and philosophical inquiries sink Christian faith. Such inquiries also cast doubt on corporate or self-help propaganda.

Garcia paraphrases Lewis’s point by saying, “we have to mind our own business and not get distracted by things that don’t concern us or worry about problems that ONLY exist in our heads.”

But how foolish is that? Happiness, too, exists only in our heads. The rest of the world doesn’t care whether we’re happy or sad, or complacent or overly analytical. So why is the business of ensuring our happiness automatically better than the philosophical one of making sure our mental states are honourably related to the facts even if the latter should prove to be disheartening or mind-expanding?

Positive thinking and shooting the messenger

Garcia says we achieve this “dedication to business” by “minimizing the toxic habit that damages your mind the most: negativity.”

So, negativity for Garcia is just an illusion, an annoying, toxic, counterproductive intruder. Just to be clear, that is not a philosophical proposition, at least not as Garcia presents it. Instead, Garcia is selling or apologizing for the prevailing neoliberal ideology. His case for positivity is sophistry, not an honest, thorough examination of the problem.

Negativity isn’t just a toxic habit. The objective facts discovered by scientists and philosophers are negative in so far as they clash with human intuitions and preoccupations. Nature is a grotesque, godless wasteland, the inhuman indifference and transparent amorality of which drove us eventually from the nomadic Stone Age lifestyles to our artificial refuges in the present, civilizational period of history.

Thus, negativity isn’t just an idle distraction that can be so easily banished. Negativity is part of our existential condition. We perceive the world as a colossal disappointment when we understand that nature isn’t filled with kind spirits and isn’t the handiwork of an all-powerful, benevolent Creator.

Now, those are philosophical statements that may indeed complicate our “dedication to business.” We can do one or the other, philosophy or self-serving propaganda, but let’s be honest about which side we’re on and not try to have it both ways.

A confused, feeble value system

I’ll pass quickly over Garcia’s slapdash, sentimental attempt at an extended metaphor, in which he lays out three options we supposedly face whenever we get out of bed: we can succumb to “the spirit of blasphemy” or to “the spirit of the world,” or we can pursue “the spirit of goodwill.” The first two are supposed to be bad, the third one good, but Garcia seems to have plucked those “spirits” out of thin air since they have little to do with the meager explanations he offers.

He equates the first “spirit” with the having of “disempowering,” self-accusatory thoughts, which has nothing to do with blasphemy. And he equates the second spirit with hedonism, saying that that spirit “encourages you to let your senses lead you down the road of pleasure.” The “world” contains suffering, too, though, so that’s a sloppy, confusing analogy. I suppose we can chalk that up to Garcia’s pledge to not try hard so he can “get” more readers.

Meanwhile, “goodwill” for Garcia is “What inspires us to be better and rise above the mundane and live in the faith that we are worthy people who can achieve anything.” To have that kind of goodwill is to prefer ‘thoughts like, “Today is going to be a great day, and I’m going to choose me over that person who makes me gaslight. So I’m not even going to think about her.”’

Out of sight, out of mind. “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” thought the three “wise” monkeys, as though there were no independent world that is what it is regardless of whether we pay attention to it.

You might have thought that goodwill has to do with helping others, not just yourself. There’s a charity called “Goodwill,” for example. But no, that altruistic conception isn’t part of the neoliberal ideology Garcia’s soaked up and is spewing.

And “makes me gaslight”? Does he mean to say the negative person gaslights him? The funny thing is that the cult of positive thinking is a classic case of self-gaslighting.

Discernment and an “orderly mind”

For Garcia, goodwill requires the cultivation of “an orderly mind.” We achieve that with “discernment” and “iteration.” The problem, then, he says, is that it’s not so easy to distinguish which “spirit” is haunting us at any moment, because some are disguised. We might think we’re being “positive,” but we’re just expressing laziness. But once we “distinguish by means of the intellect one thing from another,” and specifically the first two “spirits” from the third one, we can repeat the advantageous thoughts until they become second nature.

And that, says Garcia, is “the secret to improving your life.” “All you have to do is make a conscious effort to discern between the types of thoughts you have and choose the third type: the ones that help you progress, and then iterate until you achieve your goals.”

Something else we might want to discern, though, is the difference between Socratic philosophy (as in the love of knowledge over opinion and propaganda) and sophistical demagoguery or advertisements for the self-help and happiness industries. And we should distinguish a genuine concern for the truth from a crude twisting of the facts to profit off people’s ignorance, laziness, and short-sightedness.

Notice how discernments can be narrow. You can tell the difference between X and Y without evaluating whether either is good or bad. Just because you know the difference between cats and dogs doesn’t mean you prefer either of them. Thus, by saying that positive folks of “goodwill” should busy themselves with discernments and iterations, like effective worker bees, Garcia is saying they should presuppose his shabby trichotomy and refrain from further value judgments.

He tries later to muddy the waters, saying, “Discernment is not only selecting and discarding; it reflects and evaluates the possibilities before doing it.” But he’s speaking there of evaluating whether the possibilities are filled with one or the other of the three “spirits.” His point is that “You have to carry out a contemplative vigilance of your thoughts to begin identifying those thoughts that you believe to be dangerous and evaluate them to replace them with more positive ones as the days go by.”

A fearless philosophical vigilance, of course, would question whether neoliberalism and the shallow, consumer-friendly self-improvement and happiness industries are themselves dangerous and bad for us in the long term. But that kind of judgment would go beyond mere discernment of categories. You’d have to philosophize to arrive at an answer. And genuine philosophizing would count as trying too hard, for Garcia.

A disingenuous rejection of egoism

Garcia warns that “When things start to go well for you, don’t fall into the traps of the ego. Ego is a little voice that tells you that you deserve a prize.” He elaborates:

And sometimes you will deserve a prize but sometimes you will not. And if you start to reward yourself without having earned it, the dopamine you will release in your brain will lead you to continue rewarding yourself without reason. And when you want to realize it, you’ll be back on the couch, watching TV and gobbling one pizza after another.

And you don’t want to be Homer Simpson, do you?

For Garcia, then, the problem with egoism is that it’s unproductive: you’ll keep rewarding yourself for no good reason, which will make you lazy.

Again, this preoccupation with productivity and laziness is a telltale sign that Garcia’s presupposing the legitimacy of the capitalist ideology of neoliberalism. I’m not saying here that capitalism is bad. I’m saying its postindustrial propaganda is philosophically weak. The “dedication to business” means we should strive to be positive and productive, which will make us happy. As Garcia says, “You have to start USING YOUR HEAD; ask yourself the hows instead of victimizing yourself with the whys.”

Notice the slipperiness of equating the idiom of “using your head” with the narrow focus on “how” rather than “why” questions — as though philosophers who raise the latter ones weren’t also using their head. And as if we should shoot the messenger! If we’re “victimized” by asking “why” questions that often have “negative,” unpleasant and sobering answers, isn’t it the real world that would be abusing us, not just pesky philosophers?

Also, Garcia doesn’t seem to understand that The Simpsons is a satire. The point of that animated show is that Homer Simpson represents the average American. So, who is Garcia talking to when he asks rhetorically whether his reader wants to be Homer Simpson? Indeed, by advising against the asking of “messy,” “negative” “why” questions, and by advocating for productivity and naïve happiness, isn’t Garcia helping to ensure that his readers will be just like Homer Simpson in all the ways that count? They’ll be dumb, selfish, self-destructive neoliberal drones too.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

What, though, is an “orderly mind”? Garcia says, proudly, ‘Engrave this on the tablets of your heart. “All disorderly acts are born of disorderly minds.” I don’t know people with messy lives who have an orderly mind. Do you?’

He seems to be comparing an orderly mind to a neat room, in contrast with a “messy” one. And he’s saying a life, too, can be neat or messy. What on earth, though, is a neat or a messy life?

Is neatness here the lack of eventualities? In that case the neatest life would be that of the ascetic who lives in a cave for decades and does next to nothing. When romantic characters in movies describe their relationship by saying, “It’s complicated,” is that kind of relationship supposed to be bad? Is a neat life the same as a simple one? Is Garcia saying we should strive to be robotic consumers without worrying our pretty little heads about whether we’re all on the wrong track?

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d

So wrote Alexander Pope, the Christian apologist who said we should recognize our place in the Great Chain of Being. Modernity passed him by, complicating monarchy and theocracy with liberal humanism, atheism, and the scientific picture of nature.

But Garcia would seem to presume that his readers should seek to have spotless minds, like the castrated Peter Abelard — the subject of Pope’s poem — who could rejoice for no longer having to worry about worldly pleasures. The neoliberal consumer of self-help fluff and balderdash is “orderly,” as in free from philosophical, “negative” doubts.

And Medium rewards Garcia for presuming so. This is because Medium is in the business of being a social media platform in competition with all the other modes of addictive, degrading online entertainment. Medium is not in the business of pure education, and those like me who try to tell even dispiriting truths go against the grain.

A miscarriage of justice

Garcia concludes his odious affront to truth-telling with this grotesque oversimplification: “In short, evil thoughts make you sad in the long run, and good ideas make you happy.”

But that credo is disgraceful, fucking bullshit.

When a loved one dies and you feel sad, is the thought that causes that sadness “evil”? Or when you feel happy as a consumer who’s unwittingly helping to destroy the world’s ecosystems by warming the planet and by participating in the enslavement of livestock and the extermination of hosts of wild species, is the infantile thought that causes that atrocious behaviour “good”?

No, Garcia’s credo is shameful, Orwellian sophistry. Even if we emphasize “in the long run,” to allow for the goodness of some short-term sadness, Garcia’s conclusion is feeble. Here’s a thought that should make us sad in the long run: laissez-faire capitalism is destroying the planet’s ability to support life. Now, is that thought evil? Of course, the thought is only a messenger, and what would be evil is that kind of ravenous capitalism or consumer narcissism itself. Anyway, who cares if a thought’s evil if it’s true?

Here’s another thought that should make us sad in the long run: social media and the internet are addicting and infantilizing us.

Here’s another: God is dead.

And here’s one more: our species is an interloper in the cosmic, inhuman wilderness.

Garcia is preoccupied with booting intruders from his home and scary thoughts from his mind. But perhaps readers would be curious to learn that the entire history of human achievement, or every thought that pops into our head is an anomalous extravagance that will one day count for absolutely nothing in the cosmic scheme.

Is that existential reminder “evil” because it could interfere with the dedication to productive business? Or is it the lowering of the bar by social media platforms and by their neoliberal flunkies that’s the greater offense?

Postscript

Rather than mounting any defense of his pseudo-philosophizing or just apologizing for the weakness of his arguments, Alberto Garcia promptly blocked me on Medium, meaning that he’s sticking to the self-help credo of his “positive thinking”: out of sight, out of mind. He took a page from Zulie Rane’s playbook, who likewise blocked me for criticizing her work.

Neither philosophy nor the truth itself is for the faint of heart.