Of Winners and Losers
Perhaps this is an appropriate moment in America to reflect on the limits of positive thinking.
As intimated in prior posts such as “Is Having a Crisis Normal at my Age?” I sometimes encounter patients who have done well by our society’s standard metrics of success, but have reached a point in their lives when they are ‘in crisis’. At the extreme, these individuals may be extraordinarily successful: the CEO of a profitable tech startup, for example, or a tenured professor at a prestigious university, or a former Olympian turned sports professional, or a former runway model ensconced in a wealthy marriage. Such individuals (albeit with understandable misgivings) come to see me because they have grown dissatisfied with their life, they feel empty, or more than that: they are overtly unhappy and anxious. Why?
There are many individual factors and circumstantial reasons why such a person might decide to consult a mental health professional, but one thing these individuals tend to have in common is that they have always been competitive. Still, they now find themselves asking this question: “I’m doing extremely well; better than my peers. Anybody can see that. It’s crazy for me not to be happy. So why do I feel this way?”
To the extent that they’ve read or experienced psychology previously, these patients tend to have gravitated toward a philosophy of ‘positive thinking,’ formulated in its most benign form by the late Norman Vincent Peale, a self-reported favorite of Donald Trump.[1] Peale was a minister, so his message included a redemptive spiritual dimension.[2] But there are many permutations of this basic philosophy that lack this aspect. One such variant advocates that the vast panoply of humanity can be simplified by pigeonholing everybody into just two basic categories: “Winners” and “Losers”.[3] Needless to say, adherents of such a philosophy want to make sure they always fall into the 'winner' category. This is a worldview, reportedly learned from his father, favored by the 45th President of the United States.[4] And it is a philosophy that well serves competitive, driven people who fully buy in to the value system of a society whose mantras are that everybody has equal opportunities, that everyone succeeds or fails based purely on personal effort and the maintenance of a positive “can-do” attitude, and that success can be measured by one’s wealth, physical attractiveness, partner’s physical attractiveness, attire, zip code (and number) of homes, make of car, size of restaurant check, exclusivity of club memberships…..not to mention the academic pedigree and billing practices of one’s personal therapist or psychiatrist!
Feeling Good?
As I said, this philosophy serves competitive people well - up to a point. Even in its mild form it can lead to a personal dead-end when its practitioners wake up one day feeling empty and realize there’s got to be more to life. Of course that’s precisely the point at which these individuals come to see someone like me.
In its more extreme form, especially as practiced by someone with a touch of emotional insecurity and narcissism, this philosophy can lead to darker and wider consequences. Just beyond positive thinking lies the attitude that one must always win – that it is absolutely necessary to be first – no matter the cost. Individuals who think this way sometimes lie and cheat to achieve their goals. They will demand that subordinates ignore their unethical behavior in the service of always appearing to win or always being ‘right’, cementing loyalty by rewarding acceptance of this ‘fact’ while ruthlessly punishing any whiff of dissent. Rather than admit their failings, such individuals often engage in childlike psychological defenses such as projection – i.e., blaming others for anything that goes wrong, attributing their own personal faults and bad behavior to their opponents, and chiding associates for generating negative energy when it's actually emanating from their own damaged spirit (which must never be acknowledged). Such individuals are generally beyond the reach of a mental health practitioner’s skill to repair, and they do tend to leave a trail of misery behind them.
It may be easiest to illustrate this with a couple of prominent biographical examples:
Napoleon Bonaparte rose from country-bumpkin minor aristocratic origins through a low-ranking army commission to become the Emperor of continental Europe. At the peak of his power around 1810, he was sole ruler of the entire geographical area now covered by the European Union. Critical to his success was that, by all accounts (even those of his enemies), he was not only ambitious but also extraordinarily energetic, self-disciplined and well-informed - not to mention a tactical military genius unmatched in his own day. A Corsican born in 1769, he would nevertheless have aligned perfectly with the contemporary American philosophy of “positive thinking” described above. Napoleon believed in winning at all costs. He routinely cheated at cards and board games “but usually repaid the money he won in that way.” His inability to admit defeat served him in more important ways than card-games: His 1798-99 campaign to conquer Egypt and the Middle East was, by any measure, an abject failure. Although he did conquer territory temporarily, France could not hold it long-term. His ground forces were decimated as a result of his naiveté and hubris: Napoleon and his advisors were not prepared for the climactic, sanitation, and disease conditions in the Middle East, nor did they anticipate guerilla warfare from the local populations he ‘liberated’ (this is a bit of history that George W Bush would have been wise to learn before invading Iraq in 2003).
Napoleon’s setbacks in the Middle East were so pervasive and unending that the destruction of his fleet by Admiral Nelson at the Battle of the Nile in late 1798 can be viewed as a military ‘coup de grace’. Nevertheless, Napoleon managed to turn the situation to his advantage by use of a ploy, the 18th century equivalent of the modern American entrepreneurial trick of “failing your way to success.” He quietly slipped away from Egypt, beating the news of his failures back to Paris. Upon arriving he engaged in a campaign of misinformation to the public, selling his fool’s errand in Egypt as a resounding success. Within a few months he capitalized on this (and on the ineptitude of the French revolutionary government) by staging a coup d’etat in the legislative chambers, setting the stage for the end of the First Republic and for his reign as an absolute ruler. This is another bit of history that contemporary Americans might be wise to take to heart.
Napoleon employed this attitude “of refusing not to win” throughout his career. It worked again and again - until it didn’t: The end came with his final defeat at Waterloo, after which the British made certain he could never “fail his way to success” again by locking him up on the barren island of St Helena in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, from which there was no possibility of escape. He died in 1821 - by all accounts a broken, lonely, miserable and resentful middle-aged man – less than 6 years after his defeat at Waterloo and a mere decade after the peak in his political and military power. In inevitable irony, Napoleon, the military prodigy and former Emperor of all Europe, died not in glory surrounded by his adoring court and army, but in near total isolation, choking on his own blood, downed by a gastrointestinal cancer.[5]
Even success has a dark side
A more recent biographical example comes from the life of Steve Jobs, a modern poster boy for American capitalism and entrepreneurship. By conventional measures, Mr. Jobs was extraordinarily successful – he was a millionaire by the age of 23 and died extremely wealthy; there would be no Apple Inc without him, as well as no Pixar or iPhone - it’s possible that without him we’d all still be using flip-phones. Mr. Jobs accomplished all this because, among other traits, he insisted on excellence and on winning. But the dark side of this trait included a personal need to always be viewed as the smartest guy in the room: It was routine for him to witheringly shoot down his subordinates’ ideas as “stupid” or “brain-dead” - only to resurrect them a few hours, days, or weeks later as his own: “Hey guys, listen to what I just thought of!” If you wished to remain employed, you just rolled with it - even if the idea had been yours in the first place. This was such a common occurrence that his associates coined a term for it: “The Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field”. This was also a man who asked friends for confirmation that his fiancée was physically attractive enough to marry him, a man who repeatedly denied paternity to his eldest daughter, and who treated her and her mother, an ex-girlfriend, appallingly – according to what I've read to the point of emotional abuse. I admit that, having never met Mr. Jobs, I am no direct authority on his personality or behavior, but from everything I’ve heard and read about the man, including from a few people who did know him personally, it’s pretty clear that while all would describe him as extremely driven, creative, and totally inseparable from Apple Inc’s success, many, especially his subordinates, found him thoroughly unlikable if not misery-making, and few if any would describe him as a generally “happy” or “contented” person. In an odd parallel, Jobs died at a similar age to Napoleon and from a similar cause – pancreatic cancer.[6]
Between Waterloo and Napoleon's death, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelly reflected in a poem, Ozymandias, about all that was left of a once-mighty “winner”:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Like Shelly, perhaps this is a time for us all to reflect and reaffirm that there is more to life than achieving outward forms of success, and that some American principals are far more important to defend than winning at all costs.