The power of negative thinking

The news that Trump describes Norman Peale, the author of the self-motivational book The Power of Positive Thinking, as his mentor didn’t surprise me. But it did scare me.

I’d better state my position straight away: I regard such shamanistic self-hypnosis as the height of vulgarity. But then Trump’s photograph, along with representations of his taste in interior design and wives, should be in the encyclopaedia, next to the entry for Vulgarity, n.

Courses in self-motivation are all based on the assumption that, if you will your problems to go away, they’ll obediently do so – provided you repeat your wish regularly and with dervish-like repetitiveness.

This sort of thing is doubtless useful in training insurance salesmen. Trainees are brainwashed to wake up and repeat several times “I’ll make 50 phone calls today”, even though 45 targets will tell them to perform a ballistically improbable procedure on themselves. But their positive thinking would enable them to take it in stride, knowing that the remaining five punters are prospects.

I think even my American friends (and family members) will agree that the salesman is the central figure of American life. It’s inevitable that a land defined by market pursuits will see buying and selling as its focal activity.

That national mindset has made the country materially successful, albeit at some cost to other aspects of life. It has also made most Americans, including those for whom sales isn’t ostensibly their occupation, attach universal significance to what’s essentially designed as a sales training course.

‘Positive thinking’ is thus widely accepted as a virtue, and so it may be for people who flog things to one another, or campaign for political office, which in the US amounts to the same thing. But it’s lethal to statesmanship, as any vulgarity is.

This isn’t to say that a statesman must be a man of subtle mind and refined tastes. Some of the most effective US presidents weren’t. Ronald Reagan, for example, was arguably the best post-war president, and yet he acted in Westerns, dyed his hair and wore brown suits.

But Reagan was endowed with the power of realistic and moral thinking, which is the most essential quality for a statesman. Realistic means neither positive nor negative in itself, but, to remain realistic, it has to gravitate more to the negative end, eschewing bien pensant positivity.

Ever since Augustine told the story of Adam and Eve in Christian terms, the concept of original sin has shaped Western thought, including political thought.

The assumption is that we’re fallible because we’re fallen, and it’s the assumption on which every successful commonwealth was ever built. Conversely, all attempts to erect a political structure on the positive premise of man’s inherent goodness have ended in disaster.

The Enlighteners were influenced by Rousseau’s positive thinking. The Swiss postulated that man’s primordial goodness was compromised by Christendom. Remove that pernicious pimple from the noble sauvage’s face, open the paths for all and sundry, and every problem will vanish.

Inspired by this positive thinking, chaps like Robespierre and Marat culled all and sundry in apocalyptic numbers. They thus expressed their disappointment with people, who yet again frustrated a beautiful ideal, as they inevitably do.

Hence a statesman shouldn’t inspire himself the way a salesman does. Things won’t happen because he wills them to happen, especially in foreign policy. Most other countries see life differently, and they can be safely assumed to be run by imperfect –often evil – people.

Now Donald Trump is an international property developer, which is a salesman par excellence. His stock in trade is talking people into risking millions in the hope of making tens of millions.

This activity can benefit from Peale’s platitudes, and it can also turn one into an effective motivational speaker. Trump certainly is that, although his facial expressions could do with some work – unless he expects to become a professional gurner.

But this ability is secondary in his new job, and I hope his advisors will explain to him what is primary. A statesman must understand the world not in terms of deals and sales, but in terms of power relationships and how they reflect our civilisation.

Unlike a salesman, who doesn’t think beyond his next contract, a Western statesman must think back to the millennia of Western civilisation and forward to at least the next several decades. For a treaty (a deal, in Trump’s parlance) may look good and profitable in the short term, but prove suicidal over the long run.

For example, there’s every indication that Trump plans to do some horse-trading with Putin and arrive at a mutually beneficial division of sales territories… sorry, I mean areas of influence. That would make global extinction a distinct possibility, but perhaps not in the next four or even eight years.

Supping with the devil, which is Putin, Trump needs to bring the long spoon of overwhelming military force. Just delivering a sales spiel and having the punter sign on the bottom line isn’t going to do the job.

I’m not sure that Trump can think in those terms, no matter how positive he is. One just hopes he’ll have advisors who know how to think realistically, which usually means thinking negatively.