Keltner sits in his office in Berkeley's Tolman Hall. Students wait in the hallway for an appointment. He is dressed in shorts, a polo shirt, and sweatshirt with Berkeley's blue background with gold stripes.
When asked whether positive psychology could be used for mass coercion, Keltner replies: “As scientists our task is to describe human nature as well as we can. So the motivations of positive psychology are well founded. There are branches of our nervous system that we study in our lab that are really mysteries scientifically. The vagus nerve, oxytocin, parts of the brain that are involved in compassion. That's our first task, and that's the scientific motivation of positive psychology. And then cultures and societies and communities take science and push it in a lot of different directions. [Charles] Darwin had a theory about human nature that was very sanguine. He said we are a sympathetic species, we take care of others, we are inherently cooperative, and then [Herbert] Spencer, and social Darwinists, and libertarians pushed it in all sorts of directions, in the service of their versions of public policies. . . . So you always have to separate science from practice. And you can't critique the science based on the practices that follow. Nazism was an application of a lot of scientific ideas that have nothing to do with the science.”
The theme of the most recent issue of
The Greater Good
is “The Psychology of Power.” It exposes in scenario after scenario the true purpose of positive psychologyâhow to manipulate people to do what you want.
The magazine has an article called “Peaceful Parenting,” in which two practitioners explain “how to turn parent-child conflict into cooperation.” The article begins: “It's nine o'clock on a school night and twelve-year-old Jessie is absorbed in his favorite video gameâuntil his mother comes into his bedroom and announces it's bedtime.”
“I don't want to go to bed!” says Jessie.
“But it's already past your bedtime,” says Mom, “and you know you have to get your rest.”
“But I'm not tired!”
“Well, you will be in the morning if you don't go to sleep soon.”
“Shut up!” Jessie yells. “Anyway, you can't make me go to sleep.”
“Sound familiar?” the article asks. “It does to us. . . . The conversation might go on in this way until Mom, exhausted and angry, shouts something like âI quit! Suit yourself!'”
What parents need to do, says the article, is shift from “using power
over
kids to using power
with
them.”
“Peaceful parenting” should go like this:
“You're having a lot of fun playing now, huh?” asks Mom.
“Yeah,” says Jessie. “And I'm not even tired.”
“So you just want to keep playing until you're tired?”
“Yeah.”
“It must be frustrating to be asked to stop doing something that's so much fun when you don't feel tired.”
“I don't have time for what I want to do. I just have to come home and do homework.”
“Hmm. It sounds like this time between homework and bedtime is really important to you, and you wish it were longer?”
“Yeah, Mom, I do.”
“Thanks for helping me understand that. You know, I'd like you to have as much time as you want for the things that interest you. At the same time, I've also noticed that when you stay up after nine on school nights, you're tired the next morning. Do you hear what my concern is?”
“Yeah, you want me to get a good night's sleep.”
“Yes, thanks for hearing that.”
“I just need five more minutes to finish this game. Okay?”
“Okay. I'll get out your pajamas.”
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The pages of
The Greater Good
are awash in such insincere and coercive techniques. The goal, replicated in the corporate workshops where managers are taught how to speak to employees, is not to communicate but to control.
Richard S. Lazarus, who was a professor of psychology at Berkeley, was disturbed by “the vagueness, the religious tone, and the arrogance with which [the claims of positive psychology] are made.”
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He saw positive psychology as “populist and intellectually much too easy rather than a set of thoughtful ideas or principles to be respected.” “In my opinion, [positive psychologists] are promoting a kind of religion,” wrote Lazarus, “a vision from on high, which is falsely clothed in a claim to science that never materializes.”
Barbara Frederickson, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shows the crowd in the Claremont auditorium a cartoon diagram of a sailboat. She says she has found an exact, “totally scientific,” optimal “positivity” ratio for positive to negative emotions: 3 to 1. The keel of the sailboat, she says, represents the “necessary negative emotions” that are heavy and burdensome and “keep the boat on course and manageable,” while the sail, “having ample and sufficient positivity, is what really allows us to take off. What matters most, I have found, is the ratio of your heartfelt positivity relative to your heart-wrenching negativity,” said Frederickson.
“Why do we need positive emotions to really take off?” she asks. “Because positivity opens us.” On the screen overhead, the image of a blue flower appears. “Now imagine you are this flower, and your petals are drawn tightly around your face. If you could see out at all, it's just a little speck,” she says mournfully. “You can't appreciate much of what goes on around you. . . . But once you feel the warmth of the sun, things begin to change, your leaves begin to soften, your petals loosen and begin to stretch outward, exposing your face”âFrederickson splays her hands open around her face like petalsâ“and removing your delicate blinders, you
see
more and more, and your world quite literally
expands
.
“Now some flowers bloom just once. But others, like these day lilies,” she says, pointing to the slides of the blue and now red flowers,
“they close up every evening and they bloom again when they see the sun. . . . Our minds are like these day lilies. Yet their openness honors momentary shifts in our positivity.” Frederickson pauses. “Positivity is to our minds what the sunlight is to day lilies.”
Christopher Peterson and Nansook Park claim to have found the statistically most important “character strengths” in every society around the world. Peterson and Park stand on opposite sides of the stage. The large screen between them shows a bar graph titled “Adult Character Strengths.”
“We have our adult questionnaire online,” says Peterson. “I think to date it's been completed by about 1.3 million people. Pretty soon it will be the whole world! But about 100,000 people into this, we simply calculated the more common versus less common character strengths, and we have arranged them here.”
Peterson gestures at the graph.
“What's interesting is that on the left side are certain strengths that are more common, like kindness, fairness, honesty, gratitude. And, we wonder, and other people have said this, if these might not be the sorts of strengths that are necessary for a viable society? It's kind of hard to imagine a viable society in which these things are not present.
“Now what I left out is, âWho do these data refer to?' Well, this particular graph is 50,000 Americans. But we subdivided it into all fifty states, and you get the same distribution across the fifty states.”
Peterson chuckles.
“Oh yeah, we also looked at fifty-four other nations, and you get the same distribution across the nations . . . I remember we sent it to a journal,” Peterson says confidently, “and the first journal editor rejected it, and he said, âYou didn't find anything different, any differences.'”
Peterson comically slaps himself on the head, mugging in mock disbelief.
“I said, â
We found human nature
!'” Peterson throws his arms out. “Isn't that good enough!?”
Peterson goes on to talk about the less important indicators. “Oh, look what's on the bottom: Self-regulationâthat's like staying on a diet. That's why I am hiding behind the podium!” The crowd chuckles.
“Modesty,” he says. “Like, âGod, we are good researchers!'” The crowd laughs louder. “You get the idea!”
Kim Cameron is dressed in a black suit with a red tie. He is Professor of Management and Organizations at the University of Michigan, where he is co-founder of the Center for Positive Organizational Culture. Cameron has come to talk about how corporations can use positive or “virtuous” practices to improve profits.
“All organizations exist to eliminate deviance,” says Cameron. “The reason we organize is to minimize unexpected, chaotic, unpredictable behavior. Right? Organization exists to eliminate negative deviance. The problem is, it also eliminates positive deviance. We organize, and thereby, by definition, we eliminate positively deviant or extraordinary or spectacular or virtuous behavior.”
Cameron says he shows business executives how happiness, compassion, and goodness can increase profits. Cameron's clients include
Fortune
100 companies, but also small organizations, nonprofits, and county governments. Clients range from the YMCA to the trucking industry. Cameron reminds the audience he is not in it for the money, but for the fulfillment he gets from his work. What matters is
feeling
good. He sells harmony ideology to corporations.
Most positive psychologists belong to the 148,000-member American Psychological Association (APA), which has lent its services for decades to the military and intelligence communities to research and perfect techniques for interrogation and control. Psychologists working for government agencies in the 1950s and '60s conducted human experiments and discovered that psychological torture, including sensory and sleep deprivation, was far more disorientating and destructive to the human psyche than crude beatings and physical abuse. They refined psychological techniques to ensure complete emotional breakdowns. Psychologists are the only group of major health-care providers who openly participate in interrogations at military and CIA facilities. The American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association have forbidden members to participate in military interrogations. But the APA, despite complaints and resignations by a few of its members, has refused to ban its psychologists from interrogations, including at notorious torture sites such as Guantánamo Bay.
A May 2007 Pentagon report by the inspector general's office acknowledged that psychologists oversaw the adaptation of the military's
Survive, Evade, Resist, and Escape (SERE) program for use against prisoners. SERE was first designed to replicate torture techniques and help U.S. troops resist Chinese and Soviets interrogators. But, in the hands of army and intelligence psychologists, SERE has been reverse-engineered to break prisoners held in American interrogation centers. The sleep deprivation, lengthy stress positions, complete sensory deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, and forced nudity are systematically employed to reduce prisoners to a state of utter helplessness. Many become catatonic. The psychologists monitor the steady deterioration of the prisoner and advise interrogators how to employ techniques to complete the psychological disintegration.
Psychologists, in and out of the government, have learned how to manipulate social behavior. The promotion of collective harmony, under the guise of achieving happiness, is simply another carefully designed mechanism for conformity. Positive psychology is about banishing criticism and molding a group into a weak and malleable unit that will take orders. Personal values, those nurtured by an independent conscience, are gently condemned as antagonistic to harmony and happiness. Those who refuse under group pressure to become harmonious are deemed a drag on the corporate body and, if they cannot be reformed, expunged. Those who are willing to surrender their individuality are granted small rewards doled out by the corporate structure. They can feel, at least until they lose their jobs, that they belong to an important and powerful collective. They can adopt a corporate identity. They feel protected. The greatest fear becomes the fear of disrupting the system, of becoming an impediment to the harmony of the corporate collective. The quest for harmony, which these psychologists understand, lures people into a state of psychological somnambulism.
Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader argues that most oppressive systems of power, including classical Western colonialism and proponents of globalization, all use the idea of social harmony as a control mechanism. There is a vast difference, Nader points out, between social harmony and harmony ideology, between positivity and being genuinely positive. Nader sees harmony ideology as a concerted assault on democracy. The drive for harmony, Nader argues, always lends itself to covert censorship and self-censorship. The tyranny of harmony, when
pushed to the extreme, leads to a life of fantasy that shuts out reality. Nader sees the ideology of harmony as one that has slowly dominated and corrupted the wider culture.
Positive psychology is only the latest incarnation of this assault on community and individualism. A related ideology was lauded by
Business Week
in the early 1980s as the “New Industrial Relations.”
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It was touted as a new form of human management. It was also said to be “nicer” than the earlier “scientific management” and social engineering innovations of Henry Ford or Frederick Taylor.
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Roberto González, an anthropologist at San Jose State University, spent nine months in 1989 and 1990 as a student engineer at General Motors. He later wrote “Brave New Workplace: Cooperation, Control, and the New Industrial Relations,” a study on corporate work teams and “quality circles.” The goal of such programs, González found, “was to end the adversarial relationship between management and labor through âself-managed' work teams, and in so doing improve the efficiency and psychological âhealth' of those involved.” He notes that these workplace reform programs have gone by several names, including “the team approach,” “employee participation,” “workplace democracy,” “human capitalism,” and “quality of work life” programs.
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