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Dealing with positive psychology and its converts can be most irksome at times because, like religion, they don’t smell the bullshit they are peddling.  Let’s look at the concise way Chris Hedges sums up this toxic phenomena in his book Empire of Illusion.

  “There is a dark, insidious quality to the ideology promoted by the positive psychologists.  They condemn all social critics and iconoclasts, the dissidents and the individualists, for failing to surrender and seek fulfillment in the collective lowing of the corporate herd.  They strangle creativity an moral autonomy.  They seek to mold and shape individual human beings into a compliant collective.  The primary teaching of this movement, which reflects the ideology of the corporate state, is that fulfillment is to be found in complete and total social conformity, a conformity that all totalitarian and authoritarian structures seek to impose on those they dominate.  Its false promise of harmony and happiness only increases internal anxiety and feelings of inadequacy.  The nagging undercurrents of alienation and the constant pressure to exhibit a false enthusiasm and buoyancy destroy real relationships.  The loneliness of a work life where self-preservation is valued over authenticity and one must always be upbeat and positive, no matter what one’s actual mood or situation, is disorienting and stressful.  The awful feeling that being positive may not, in fact, work if one is laid off or becomes sick must be buried and suppressed.  Here, in the land of happy thoughts, there are no gross injustices, no abuses of authority, no economic and political systems to challenge, and no reason to complain. 

   Here, we are all happy. “

– Chris Hedges, The Empire of Illusion, p. 138 -139.