The Facebook post took a strong stance on an inflammatory issue and followed with a challenge:

De-friend me if you disagree.

I imagine we will see a lot of this sort of post. The reason (You will say it’s unlikely and I will swear by it.): pop-positive thinking. De-friend me if you disagree… But please, just first hear me out.

I have two teenage daughters, and for 10 years I was married to a designer of women’s fashion. The magazines littered the house, just waiting for idle hands. This is my excuse for knowing more than any man should about the divorce and ensuing tabloid drama of TomKat. Through that drama and the interest in the cultish practices of Scientology it spawned I learned more than I desired about The Church of Scientology’s practices of excommunication. Scientology has a similar policy to the person who posted on Facebook. People who challenge or refute The Church’s beliefs are declared “suppressive persons,” and devotees are required to break all ties to these people or risk being declared suppressive themselves. It doesn’t matter if the “suppressive person” is a wife, mother, son, daughter. The rule is simple: de-friend them if they disagree.

We read stuff like this about other people or groups and we recognize it as cultish behavior. We understand the rigidness and fragility of a conceptual framework that demands such blind adherence, the blocking out of all inner and outer voices that might challenge the validity of some personal or group dogma. It’s a policy that very few people outside the cult would try to defend. But then, in our own lives, we are slowly winding down a path toward eliminating all forms of disagreement and conflict. Positive thinking has come to mean closing our ears to debate and blocking out all sources of alternative viewpoints. We see how this extends to politics, the “poles” of which were intended as conflicting sides which, through friction, could ignite productive debate, through which ideas could be forged and sharpened and greater truths approached. Now we see factions that barricade themselves within their own protective and self-reinforcing circles. Their ideas are so certain that they are no longer open to debate.

Of course, the gravity toward this sort of existence is not new. There has always been a battle between those who seek to uncover deeper truths and those who steadfastly defend the status-quo. It was almost 2500 years ago that Socrates proclaimed, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Several years later he was de-friended by the city of Athens and given the choice to live out his life in exile, or accept a death sentence. The charges: corrupting the minds of the young, and not believing in the gods of the state–the gods of the state, evidently, is what they used to call the status quo. His treatment is typical for those who challenge established beliefs. We only need to look at the lives of Martin Luther King Jr., Ghandi, Jesus, Galileo, Sir Thomas Moore, Charles Darwin (whom, fearing persecution, kept his theory of evolution silent for twenty years), or the present day, fifteen year old Pakistani girl, Malala Yousufzai who, several months ago, was shot in the head for attending school.

The great majority of us understand the tremendous example such figures bring to the world, as well as their positive and enduring impact on the way we think. What we sometimes neglect to appriciate is that each, within his or her social-political climate, was perceived by the upholders of the status-quo to be a negative and threatening influence that needed to be extinguished for the greater good. Within the established order, within the collective mindset of a time and place, the ideas of these people were considered a sort of negative thinking capable of corrupting the happiness, and upsetting the balance of that collective mind. And, as all pop-positive acolytes know, negative thoughts can be given no quarter. But what about our own internal Buddhas, our MLK’s and Darwins and Galileos and our Malala Yousufzais–the thoughts which prick at us with discomfort and challenge our steadfast personal paradigms? In the interest of “keeping it positive” could we be stomping out our own most intelligent and revolutionary voices? Could it be possible that the internal dialogue we silence, talk over, or dismiss as negativity is valuable feedback from failed personal experiments which signals the need for a change in methodology–is it the very feedback we need for growth?

It seems obvious to me that negative thoughts often rise up, fearlessly, like martyrs, signaling imbalances, unexamined facets of stale ideas, challenging dogmas. If we wish to evolve we should welcome this “negativity,” and we should seek out people and pursuits who inspire in us a healthy, questioning discomfort. But pop-positive thought teaches us that in the interest of self-esteem and happiness we must stomp these ideas out. We should not question if we are “good,” we should tell ourselves that we are great, we are winners, and question no further. We simply establish our own reality, our own status-quo, and crucify any ideas that might create a conflict with that reality. To me the extinguishing of all negative thoughts and the desire to, or belief that we should, only think about positive outcomes, reflects the very feeling of learned helplessness that the more academic field of positive psychology sees as one of the most destructive forces to our happiness. We do not allow ourselves to engage negative thoughts because we do not believe in our power to respond effectively and transform our discomfort into growth. Does this seem like a courageous or meaningful or positive existence?

In the pseudo-psychology world delivered to us by millionaire motivational speakers with charismatic smiles, and repeated endlessly in the platitudes of Facebook photos, if we can “visualize success” we can attain whatever we desire. Pop-positive thinking is a panacea which can bring us athletic prowess, lift us out of poverty, or even cure cancer. This perversion of positive psychology encourages competitors to ignore the negative feelings stimulated by the thoughts of competition. Maybe, for instance, I am told I should not feel “nervous.” Instead, I should set about convincing myself that what I feel is excitement. Excitement, see, is a positive feeling. It is acceptable because the the stimulus of excitement is usually something good, and because the feeling is “positive” there is no need to look into it more deeply. The problem is that when I ignore the “negativity” behind my nervousness I might be silencing the internal prodding toward a positive change, toward personal evolution. If I had the courage to uncover the roots of my disturbing emotion, maybe I’d discover something of value. It could be some nagging fear that’s stealing my energy and unsettling my peace, but once acknowledged would be exposed in its ridiculousness. Maybe I’m afraid I will lose the respect of my students if I lose, a fear that could lead me to reflect on the value of competition and the example I want to set as an instructor. Or maybe the vague nervous feeling is informative of a self-deceit–I’m coddling myself in training when I should be pushing harder, or in an effort to squelch out the nervousness I am exhausting myself by overtraining. Likewise, a profound, devastating, sickness may provide us the psychological space to reflect on the value of life and legacy, and force us to discover what is most important. In the weakness of a financial crisis we might uncover how much we depend on our friends and family and develop an appreciation for them that enriches our lives. Our political views might be challenged. Our sense of social justice might be refigured. Should we really waste our time wishing things could be “all we desire,” or just like before, and imagine this will bring us out of crisis? When we shut off the “negative” voice that challenges our personal dogma we begin to form a cult within ourself. We allow our mind the same control over our personal growth that repressive regimes lord over those that would advance society, and we miss out on a veritable goldmine of personal insight.

The recent penetration of this sort of thinking into sport pop-psychology is baffling to me. The world of athletics and competition has always been one where the relentless spirit could find satisfaction in the taste of bitterness and the surmounting of obstacles. Athletics was the world of “no pain, no gain,” the world where “steel sharpens steel,” where “pressure creates diamonds,” or in Nietzsche’s enduring words, where “that which doesn’t destroy me, makes me stronger.” Each of these slogans presents a crisis, and a response to that crisis. The response is simple: accept the challenge–the challenge produces growth. Now these same slogans are layered with the contradictory message that our success rests in eliminating challenges from our lives, repressing feelings of pressure, and steadfastly maintaining the status-quo. The recipe for success: avoid negative thoughts, and distance ourselves from negative people and experiences. We decide who we are once and for all and de-friend all who disagree. We insulate ourselves within our own personal compound. This sort of stasis is supposed to bring happiness, and if we only focus our mind on the thing we desire it should materialize, effortlessly, out of thin air. We just believe, and shut out all sources of disagreement.

In Jiu Jitsu, if we applied this thinking to our physical training the results would be disastrous. We would be ill suited for any sort of competition or challenge. In class, we are taught basic techniques. At first we practice–our partners offer minimal resistance or even guide us through the movements. But we need the real-world lab of the sparring session to bring resilience to these technical ideas. We have to face challenges, have experiments explode in our faces; we have to work through disagreements with disagreeable training partners to come to any high level understanding of our art. We don’t avoid the practice partners who prove our ideas erroneous, we embrace them as a valuable asset to our training. One would be hard pressed to find an athletic pursuit where excellence does not demand encounters with resistance. In response to the appropriate amount of negative feedback, the body builds strength. At greater levels of this resistance we are exposed to a mental discomfort as technical flaws are exposed–and once we accept our inadequacy in comparison to the task we wish to accomplish we respond; we struggle to develop a greater mastery of our art. Then, the same way our bodies respond to physical stress by building muscle, our intellect sets about solving our technical problems.

I find it strange that one would believe that any crisis could be solved, or any art or science or society could be advanced without embracing, and even seeking out, this sort of “negativity.” Indeed the greatest minds seem always ready to be challenged in debate or contest, placing themselves out in the public squares, their ideas open to scrutiny and dialogue. They welcome the challenges of “suppressive persons,”–often taking them as their friends–and they embrace new angles, contrary ideas, that through consideration rub up against, conflict with, and sharpen their own. Scientists must publish discoveries in the journals of their profession to endure the scrutiny of their peers. We don’t hear of the historical Buddha, or Christ, or Socrates hiding away in private with a personal army of soldiers or attorneys ready to silence any voice which dared to challenge his own. That is a characteristic of the status-quo, the blissfully ignorant mind, the mind which has accustomed itself to only self-reinforcing thoughts.

I would venture to say that the psychological nakedness required of elite athletes is the reason athletics has often been the arena in which people representing opposing ideologies have come together and formed friendships that rise far above above ideologies. Such friendships have sometimes become examples to nations. The most famous of these might be the “24-karat friendship” formed at the ‘36 Olympics between the African-American Jesse Owens and the German athlete Luz Long, a darling of Hitler who should have represented Aryan Supremacy. The Olympics were held in Germany that year as the country hurdled toward what would become the second world war. It was an anxious environment for visiting athletes, but the safety of Owens, and all Olympians, had been secured by the African-American boxer Joe Louis’ friend and opponent, Max Schmeling, another would-be Aryan who asked Hitler for a guarantee that all athletes, of all colors and countries, would be protected.

What was it that these athletes experienced in the ring or on the track that made differences in color, nation, and ideology so transparent? Whatever it was it seems to be almost as old as recorded history. The same protection of athletes that Schmeling requested of Hitler dates back to the Ancient Greek Olympics when athletes of warring states were guaranteed safe passage to the games at Olympia. In this way athletics sometimes forms a strange circularity by which the physical becomes the meta of the metaphysical. The brutal lens of self-examination that opens to us at the most demanding levels of physical pursuit can bond us together on a plain that rises far above the divisive field of ideologies. We can see from this the importance of competitive sport in human life, and the transcendent power of fearlessly pushing up against psychological boundaries. In my experience, the best martial arts schools are always full of unlikely friendships–ideological melting pots where sweat-soaked, post training, we can debate heated issues with a sort of lightness that is far more rare in a barroom or a diner, or across a Thanksgiving table. I attribute this to our willingness to endure discomfort in the pursuit toward truth and excellence, and to the experience of being near each other in that raw, unfiltered state.

There is a very real psychology of sport which is becoming increasingly precise and profound, and this sport-psychology in many cases has been the breeding ground for the dumbed down ideas that reach us through pop-psychology and posts on our Facebook newsfeed. When the simple concept of “positive attitude” comes to mean ignoring or avoiding reality, rather than embracing and transforming negativity, we begin to have a problem already–sometimes our best friends are the ones willing to tell us the things that are the hardest to hear. It is really no surprise, with all the defriending going on, that we are increasingly hearing about a lack of competitiveness in younger athletes. The pop-positive thinking movement has left them with a fragile, artificially high self-esteem that has not been formed through actual accomplishments, hard won successes, and hard lost failures. They lack the psychological fortitude to look into the polished mirror that competition, when honestly engaged, will always furnish us. Of course, I understand how this anti-competitiveness may be a reaction to the cancerous win-at-all-costs culture that has turned our sports heroes into drug-addled, needle-happy, pill-popping commodities; the same culture that infected Wall Street and the entire finance world and almost sent us spiraling into a second Great Depression. Who wouldn’t want to react against such a destructive mindset? But aren’t the lose-at-no-cost and win-at-all-costs phenomenons just two sides of the same pop-positive culture? Both groups are allergic to the friction caused when their personal paradigms are internally challenged. The Wall Street trader who would rather defraud and destroy his clients and the economy than let go of the positive notion of winning and success; the athlete who violates all personal and professional ethics to stay on top, who pumps himself full of drugs rather than listen to his aging body; the new-fangled pop-positive runner who turns a race into a parade rather than set out to reach a difficult goal–aren’t they all avoiding the same thing? Do any of them want to evolve?

The serious pursuit of athletic accomplishment is an endeavor we understand as capable of leading toward personal growth, deepened self-awareness, peak experiences and even transcendental knowledge. It is for this reason that great athletes have often been revered much like artists or philosophers–as people who have reached for and touched something rare, and who may be able to offer insights beyond the ordinary. Their insights and our respect were earned through their struggle with difficult issues and circumstances. Through publicly confronting and surmounting obstacles they have sometimes inspired us to to confront and overcome obstacles of our own (the story of “Cinderella Man,” James Braddock comes to mind). But somewhere along the line we all became confused. We began to think what we respected was not the process of and commitment to battling adversity, but the act of winning which sometimes resulted, and winning athletes won their way into our hearts despite their path to success. In this same way, committing the first of Nietzsche’s four great philosophical errors–confusing cause and effect–we have come to conclude that positive thinking is the path to success rather than the result of continuously confronting and transforming adversity to positive ends. Now our most celebrated athletes often seem victims of this confusion. They lower their eyes as they reveal in congressional hearings–much like their counterpart bankers who do not lower their eyes–the myriad ways they attempted to skirt the harsh competitive realities, to drown out those negative voices, to keep it positive and, by all means, to keep on winning. Is this supposed to be our path to happiness and a life worth living? The answer seems clear. Not everyone can be a great winner, and even the greatest of winners will only win for a short time. But everyone can be a great fighter. Maybe this is where we should focus our efforts.

Don’t de-friend me if you disagree, but please, feel free to leave a comment.