Screw Positive Thinking! Why Our Quest for Happiness Is Making Us Miserable

Personal Health  

Farrar, Straus and Giroux / By Oliver Burkeman

Screw Positive Thinking! Why Our Quest for Happiness Is Making Us Miserable 

 

A new book by Oliver Burkeman paints an alternative path to happiness that has nothing to do with positive thinking.

 

December 4, 2012  |

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Sergey Nivens 

The following excerpt is from "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking"

The man who claims that he is about to tell me the secret of human happiness is eighty-three years old, with an alarming orange tan that does nothing to enhance his credibility. It is just after eight o’clock on a December morning, in a darkened basketball stadium on the outskirts of San Antonio, and — according to the orange man — I am about to learn ‘the one thing that will change your life forever.” I’m skeptical, but not as much as I might normally be, because I am only one of more than fifteen thousand people at Get Motivated!, America’s “most popular business motivational seminar,” and the enthusiasm of my fellow audience members is starting to become infectious.

“So you wanna know?” asks the octogenarian, who is Dr. Robert H. Schuller, veteran self-help guru, author of more than thirty-five books on the power of positive thinking, and, in his other job, the founding pastor of the largest church in the United States constructed entirely out of glass. The crowd roars its assent. Easily embarrassed British people like me do not, generally speaking, roar our assent at motivational seminars in Texas basketball stadiums, but the atmosphere partially overpowers my reticence. I roar quietly.

“Here it is, then,” Dr. Schuller declares, stiffly pacing the stage, which is decorated with two enormous banners reading “MOTIVATE!” and “SUCCEED!,” seventeen American flags, and a large number of potted plants. “Here’s the thing that will change your life forever.” Then he barks a single syllable — “Cut!” — and leaves a dramatic pause before completing his sentence: ‘… the word ‘impossible’ out of your life! Cut it out! Cut it out forever!”

The audience combusts. I can’t help feeling underwhelmed, but then I probably shouldn’t have expected anything different from Get Motivated!, an event at which the sheer power of positivity counts for everything. “You are the master of your destiny!” Schuller goes on. “Think big, and dream bigger! Resurrect your abandoned hope! … Positive thinking works in every area of life!’

The logic of Schuller’s philosophy, which is the doctrine of positive thinking at its most distilled, isn’t exactly complex: decide to think happy and successful thoughts — banish the spectres of sadness and failure — and happiness and success will follow. It could be argued that not every speaker listed in the glossy brochure for today’s seminar provides uncontroversial evidence in support of this outlook: the keynote speech is to be delivered, in a few hours’ time, by George W . Bush, a president far from universally viewed as successful. But if you voiced this objection to Dr. Schuller, he would probably dismiss it as “negativity thinking.” To criticize the power of positivity is to demonstrate that you haven’t really grasped it at all. If you had, you would stop grumbling about such things, and indeed about anything else.

The organisers of Get Motivated! describe it as a motivational seminar, but that phrase — with its suggestion of minor-league life coaches giving speeches in dingy hotel ballrooms — hardly captures the scale and grandiosity of the thing. Staged roughly once a month, in cities across North America, it sits at the summit of the global industry of positive thinking, and boasts an impressive roster of celebrity speakers: Mikhail Gorbachev and Rudy Giuliani are among the regulars, as are General Colin Powell and, somewhat incongruously, William Shatner. Should it ever occur to you that a formerly prominent figure in world politics (or William Shatner) has been keeping an inexplicably low profile in recent months, there’s a good chance you’ll find him or her at Get Motivated!, preaching the gospel of optimism.

As befits such celebrity, there’s nothing dingy about the staging, either, which features banks of swooping spotlights, sound systems pumping out rock anthems, and expensive pyrotechnics; each speaker is welcomed to the stage amid showers of sparks and puffs of smoke. These special effects help propel the audience to ever higher altitudes of excitement, though it also doesn’t hurt that for many of them, a trip to Get Motivated! means an extra day off work: many employers classify it as job training. Even the United States military, where “training” usually means something more rigorous, endorses this view; in San Antonio, scores of the stadium’s seats are occupied by uniformed soldiers from the local Army base.

Technically, I am here undercover. Tamara Lowe, the self-described “world’s No. 1 female motivational speaker,” who along with her husband runs the company behind Get Motivated!, has been accused of denying access to reporters, a tribe notoriously prone to negativity thinking. Lowe denies the charge, but out of caution, I’ve been describing myself as a “self-employed businessman” — a tactic, I’m realizing too late, that only makes me sound shifty. I needn’t have bothered with subterfuge anyway, it turns out, since I’m much too far away from the stage for the security staff to be able to see me scribbling in my notebook. My seat is described on my ticket as “premier seating,” but this turns out to be another case of positivity run amok: at Get Motivated!, there is only “premier seating,” “executive seating,” and “VIP seating.”

In reality, mine is up in the nosebleed section; it is a hard plastic perch, painful on the buttocks. But I am grateful for it, because it means that by chance I’m seated next to a man who, as far as I can make out, is one of the few cynics in the arena — an amiable, large-limbed park ranger named Jim, who sporadically leaps to his feet to shout I’m so motivated!” in tones laden with sarcasm.

He explains that he was required to attend by his employer, the United States National Park Service, though when I ask why that organization might wish its rangers to use paid work time in this fashion, he cheerily concedes that he has “no fucking clue.” Dr. Schuller’s sermon, meanwhile, is gathering pace. “When I was a child, it was impossible for a man ever to walk on the moon, impossible to cut out a human heart and put it in another man’s chest … the word ‘impossible’ has proven to be a very stupid word!” He does not spend much time marshaling further evidence for his assertion that failure is optional: it’s clear that Schuller, the author of “Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking” and “Tough Times Never Last, but Tough People Do!,” vastly prefers inspiration to argument. But in any case, he is really only a warm-up man for the day’s main speakers, and within fifteen minutes he is striding away, to adulation and fireworks, fists clenched victoriously up at the audience, the picture of positive-thinking success.

It is only months later, back at my home in New York, reading the headlines over morning coffee, that I learn the news that the largest church in the United States constructed entirely from glass has filed for bankruptcy, a word Dr. Schuller had apparently neglected to eliminate from his vocabulary.

For a civilization so fixated on achieving happiness, we seem remarkably incompetent at the task. One of the best-known general findings of the “science of happiness” has been the discovery that the countless advantages of modern life have done so little to lift our collective mood. The awkward truth seems to be that increased economic growth does not necessarily make for happier societies, just as increased personal income, above a certain basic level, doesn’t make for happier people. Nor does better education, at least according to some studies. Nor does an increased choice of consumer products. Nor do bigger and fancier homes, which instead seem mainly to provide the privilege of more space in which to feel gloomy.

Perhaps you don’t need telling that self-help books, the modern-day apotheosis of the quest for happiness, are among the things that fail to make us happy. But, for the record, research strongly suggests that they are rarely much help. This is why, among themselves, some self-help publishers refer to the “eighteen-month rule,” which states that the person most likely to purchase any given self-help book is someone who, within the previous eighteen months, purchased a self-help book — one that evidently didn’t solve all their problems. When you look at the self-help shelves with a coldly impartial eye, this isn’t especially surprising. That we yearn for neat, book-sized solutions to the problem of being human is understandable, but strip away the packaging, and you’ll find that the messages of such works are frequently banal. The “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” essentially tells you to decide what matters most to you in life, and then do it; “How to Win Friends and Influence People” advises its readers to be pleasant rather than obnoxious, and to use people’s first names a lot. One of the most successful management manuals of the last few years, “Fish!,” which is intended to help foster happiness and productivity in the workplace, suggests handing out small toy fish to your hardest-working employees.
As we’ll see, when the messages get more specific than that, self-help gurus tend to make claims that simply aren’t supported by more reputable research. The evidence suggests, for example, that venting your anger doesn’t get rid of it, while visualising your goals doesn’t seem to make you more likely to achieve them. And whatever you make of the country-by-country surveys of national happiness that are now published with some regularity, it’s striking that the “happiest” countries are never those where self-help books sell the most, nor indeed where professional psychotherapists are most widely consulted. The existence of a thriving “happiness industry” clearly isn’t sufficient to engender national happiness, and it’s not unreasonable to suspect that it might make matters worse.

Yet the ineffectiveness of modern strategies for happiness is really just a small part of the problem. There are good reasons to believe that the whole notion of “seeking happiness” is flawed to begin with. For one thing, who says happiness is a valid goal in the first place? Religions have never placed much explicit emphasis on it, at least as far as this world is concerned; philosophers have certainly not been unanimous in endorsing it, either. And any evolutionary psychologist will tell you that evolution has little interest in your being happy, beyond trying to make sure that you’re not so listless or miserable that you lose the will to reproduce.

Even assuming happiness to be a worthy target, though, a worse pitfall awaits, which is that aiming for it seems to reduce your chances of ever attaining it. “Ask yourself whether you are happy,” observed the philosopher John Stuart Mill, “and you cease to be so.” At best, it would appear, happiness can only be glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, not stared at directly. (We tend to remember having been happy in the past much more frequently than we are conscious of being happy in the present.) Making matters worse still, what happiness actually is feels impossible to define in words; even supposing you could do so, you’d presumably end up with as many different definitions as there are people on the planet. All of which means it’s tempting to conclude that “How can we be happy?” is simply the wrong question — that we might as well resign ourselves to never finding the answer, and get on with something more productive instead.

But could there be a third possibility, besides the futile effort to pursue solutions that never seem to work, on the one hand, and just giving up, on the other? After several years reporting on the field of psychology as a journalist, I finally realized that there might be. I began to think that something united all those psychologists and philosophers — and even the occasional self-help guru — whose ideas seemed actually to hold water. The startling conclusion at which they had all arrived, in different ways, was this: that the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative — insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness — that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy. They didn’t see this conclusion as depressing, though. Instead, they argued that it pointed to an alternative approach, a “negative path” to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions — or, at the very least, to learn to stop running quite so hard from them. Which is a bewildering thought, and one that calls into question not just our methods for achieving happiness, but also our assumptions about what “happiness” really means.

Which is how I came to find myself rising reluctantly to my feet, up in a dark extremity of that basketball stadium, because Get Motivated!’s excitable mistress of ceremonies had announced a “dance competition,” in which everyone present was obliged to participate. Giant beach balls appeared as if from nowhere, bumping across the heads of the crowd, who jiggled awkwardly as Wham! blared from the sound system. The first prize of a free trip to Disney World, we were informed, awaited not the best dancer but the most motivated one, though the distinction made little difference to me: I found the whole thing too excruciating to do more than sway very slightly. The prize was eventually awarded to a soldier. This was a decision that I suspected had been taken to pander to local patriotic pride, rather than strictly in recognition of highly motivated dancing.

*   *   *

One of the foremost investigators of the problems with positive thinking is a professor of psychology named Daniel Wegner, who runs the Mental Control Laboratory at Harvard University.

This is not, whatever its name might suggest, a CIA-funded establishment dedicated to the science of brainwashing. Wegner’s intellectual territory is what has come to be known as “ironic process theory,” which explores the ways in which our efforts to suppress certain thoughts or behaviors result, ironically, in their becoming more prevalent. I got off to a bad start with Professor Wegner when I accidentally typed his surname, in a newspaper column, as “Wenger.” He sent me a crabby email (“Get the name right!”), and didn’t seem likely to be receptive to the argument that my slip-up was an interesting example of exactly the kinds of errors he studied. The rest of our communications proved a little strained.

The problems to which Wegner has dedicated much of his career all have their origins in a simple and intensely irritating parlor game, which dates back at least to the days of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who reputedly used it to torment his brother. It takes the form of a challenge: can you — the victim is asked — succeed in not thinking about a white bear for one whole minute? You can guess the answer, of course, but it’s nonetheless instructive to make the attempt. Why not try it now? Look at your watch, or find a clock with a second hand, and aim for a mere ten seconds of entirely non-white-bear-related thoughts, starting … now.
My commiserations on your failure.

Wegner’s earliest investigations of ironic process theory involved little more than issuing this challenge to American university students, then asking them to speak their inner monologues aloud while they made the attempt. This is a rather crude way of accessing someone’s thought processes, but an excerpt from one typical transcript nonetheless vividly demonstrates the futility of the struggle:

Of course, now the only thing I’m going to think about is a white bear … Don’t think about a white bear. Ummm, what was I thinking about before? See, I think about flowers a lot … Okay, so my fingernails are really bad … Every time I really want, like … ummm … to talk, think, to not think about the white bear, then it makes me think about the white bear more …

At this juncture, you might be beginning to wonder why it is that some social psychologists seem to be allowed to spend other people’s money proving the obvious. Of course the white bear challenge is virtually impossible to win. But Wegner was just getting started. The more he explored the field, the more he came to suspect that the internal mechanism responsible for sabotaging our efforts at suppressing white bear thoughts might govern an entire territory of mental activity and outward behavior. The white bear challenge, after all, seems like a metaphor for much of what goes wrong in life: all too often, the outcome we’re seeking to avoid is exactly the one to which we seem magnetically lured.

Wegner labelled this effect “the precisely counterintuitive error,” which, he explained in one paper, “is when we manage to do the worst possible thing, the blunder so outrageous that we think about it in advance and resolve not to let that happen. We see a rut coming up in the road ahead, and proceed to steer our bike right into it. We make a mental note not to mention a sore point in conversation, and then cringe in horror as we blurt out exactly that thing. We carefully cradle the glass across the room, all the while thinking ‘Don’t spill’ and then juggle it onto the carpet under the gaze of our host.”

Far from representing an occasional divergence from our otherwise flawless self-control, the capacity for ironic error seems to lurk deep in the soul, close to the core of our characters. Edgar Allan Poe, in his short story of the same name, calls it “the imp of the perverse”: that nameless but distinct urge one sometimes experiences, when walking along a precipitous cliff edge, or climbing to the observation deck of a tall building, to throw oneself off — not from any suicidal motivation, but precisely because it would be so calamitous to do so. The imp of the perverse plagues social interactions, too, as anyone who has ever laughed in recognition at an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” will know all too well.

What is going on here, Wegner argues, is a malfunctioning of the uniquely human capacity for metacognition, or thinking about thinking. “Metacognition,” Wegner explains, “occurs when thought takes itself as an object.” Mainly, it’s an extremely useful skill: it is what enables us to recognize when we are being unreasonable, or sliding into depression, or being afflicted by anxiety, and then to do something about it. But when we use metacognitive thoughts directly to try to control our other, everyday, “object-level” thoughts — by suppressing images of white bears, say, or replacing gloomy thoughts with happy ones — we run into trouble. “Metathoughts are instructions we give ourselves about our object-level thinking,” as Wegner puts it, “and sometimes we just can’t follow our own instructions.”

When you try not to think of a white bear, you may experience some success in forcing alternative thoughts into your mind. At the same time, though, a metacognitive monitoring process will crank into action, to scan your mind for evidence of whether you are succeeding or failing at the task. And this is where things get perilous, because if you try too hard — or, Wegner’s studies suggest, if you are tired, stressed, depressed, attempting to multi-task, or otherwise suffering from “mental load” — metacognition will frequently go wrong. The monitoring process will start to occupy more than its fair share of limelight on the cognitive stage. It will jump to the forefront of consciousness — and suddenly, all you will be able to think about is white bears, and how badly you’re doing at not thinking about them.

Could it be that ironic process theory also sheds light on what is wrong with our efforts to achieve happiness, and on the way that our efforts to feel positive seem so frequently to bring about the opposite result? In the years since Wegner’s earliest white bear experiments, his research, and that of others, has turned up more and more evidence to support that notion. One example: when experimental subjects are told of an unhappy event, but then instructed to try not to feel sad about it, they end up feeling worse than people who are informed of the event, but given no instructions about how to feel. In another study, when patients who were suffering from panic disorders listened to relaxation tapes, their hearts beat faster than patients who listened to audiobooks with no explicitly “relaxing” content. Bereaved people who make the most effort to avoid feeling grief, research suggests, take the longest to recover from their loss. Our efforts at mental suppression fail in the sexual arena, too: people instructed not to think about sex exhibit greater arousal, as measured by the electrical conductivity of their skin, than those not instructed to suppress such thoughts.

Seen from this perspective, swathes of the self-help industry’s favorite techniques for achieving happiness and success — from positive thinking to visualizing your goals to “getting motivated” — stand revealed to be suffering from one enormous flaw. A person who has resolved to “think positive” must constantly scan his or her mind for negative thoughts — there’s no other way that the mind could ever gauge its success at the operation — yet that scanning will draw attention to the presence of negative thoughts. (Worse, if the negative thoughts start to predominate, a vicious spiral may kick in, since the failure to think positively may become the trigger for a new stream of self-berating thoughts, about not thinking positively enough.) Suppose you decide to follow Dr. Schuller’s suggestion and try to eliminate the word “impossible” from your vocabulary, or more generally try to focus exclusively on successful outcomes, and stop thinking about things not working out. As we’ll see, there are all sorts of problems with this approach. But the most basic one is that you may well fail, as a result of the very act of monitoring your success.

This problem of self-sabotage through self-monitoring is not the only hazard of positive thinking. An additional twist was revealed in 2009, when a psychologist based in Canada named Joanne Wood set out to test the effectiveness of “affirmations,” those peppy self-congratulatory phrases designed to lift the user’s mood through repetition. Affirmations have their origins in the work of the nineteenth-century French pharmacist Emile Coue, a forerunner of the contemporary positive thinkers, who coined the one that remains the most famous: “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”

Most affirmations sound pretty cheesy, and one might suspect that they would have little effect. Surely, though, they’re harmless? Wood wasn’t so sure about that. Her reasoning, though compatible with Wegner’s, drew on a different psychological tradition  known as “self-comparison theory.” Much as we like to hear positive messages about ourselves, this theory suggests, we crave even more strongly the sense of being a coherent, consistent self in the first place. Messages that conflict with that existing sense of self, therefore, are unsettling, and so we often reject them — even if they happen to be positive, and even if the source of the message is ourselves. Wood’s hunch was that people who seek out affirmations would be, by definition, those with low self-esteem — but that, for that very same reason, they would end up reacting against the messages in the affimations, because they conflicted with their self-images. The result might even be a worsening of their low self-esteem as people struggled to reassert their existing self-images against the incoming messages.

Which is exactly what happened in Wood’s research. In one set of experiments, people were divided into subgroups of those with low and high self-esteem, then asked to undertake a journal-writing exercise; every time a bell rang, they were to repeat to themselves the phrase “I am a lovable person.” According to a variety of ingenious mood measures, those who began the process with low self-esteem became appreciably less happy as a result of telling themselves that they were lovable. They didn’t feel particularly lovable to begin with — and trying to convince themselves otherwise merely solidified their negativity. “Positive thinking” had made them feel worse.

*  *   *

The arrival of George Bush onstage in San Antonio was heralded by the sudden appearance of his Secret Service detail. These were men who would probably have stood out anywhere, in their dark suits and earpieces, but who stood out twice as prominently at Get Motivated! thanks to their rigid frowns. The job of protecting former presidents from potential assassins, it appeared, wasn’t one that rewarded looking on the bright side and assuming that nothing could go wrong.

Bush himself, by contrast, bounded onstage grinning. “You know, retirement ain’t so bad, especially when you get to retire to Texas!” he began, before launching into a speech he had evidently delivered several times before. First, he told a folksy anecdote about spending his post-presidency cleaning up after his dog (“I was picking up that which I had been dodging for eight years!”) Then, for a strange moment or two, it seemed as if the main topic of his speech would be how he once had to choose a rug for the Oval Office (“I thought to myself, the presidency is going to be a decision-making experience!”). But his real subject, it soon emerged, was optimism. “I don’t believe you can lead a family, or a school, or a city, or a state, or a country, unless you’re optimistic that the future is going to be better,” he said. “And I want you to know that, even in the darkest days of my presidency, I was optimistic that the future was going to be better than the past for our citizens and the world.”

You need not hold any specific political opinion about the forty-third president of the United States to see how his words illustrate a fundamental strangeness of the “cult of optimism.” Bush was not ignoring the numerous controversies of his administration — the strategy one might have imagined he would adopt at a motivational seminar, before a sympathetic audience and facing no risk of hostile questions. Instead, he had chosen to redefine them as evidence in support of his optimistic attitude.

The way Bush saw it, the happy and successful periods of his presidency proved the benefits of an optimistic outlook, of course — but so did the unhappy and unsuccessful ones. When things are going badly, after all, you need optimism all the more. Or to put it another way: once you have resolved to embrace the ideology of positive thinking, you will find a way to interpret virtually any eventuality as a justification for thinking positively. You need never spend time considering how your actions might go wrong.

Could this curiously unfalsifiable ideology of positivity at all costs — positivity regardless of the results — be actively dangerous? Opponents of the Bush administration’s foreign policies might have reason to think so. This is also one part of the case made by the social critic Barbara Ehrenreich, in her 2009 book “Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America.” One underappreciated cause of the global financial crisis of the late 2000s, she argues, was an American business culture in which even thinking about the possibility of failure — let alone speaking up about it at meetings — had come to be considered an embarrassing faux pas.

Bankers, their narcissism stoked by a culture that awarded grand ambition above all, lost the capacity to distinguish between their ego-fueled dreams and concrete results. Meanwhile, homebuyers assumed that whatever they wanted could be theirs if they wanted it badly enough ( how many of them had read books such as “The Secret, which makes exactly that claim?) and accordingly sought mortgages they were unable to repay. Irrational optimism suffused the financial sector, and the professional purveyors of optimism — the speakers and self-help gurus and seminar organizers — were only too happy to encourage it. “To the extent that positive thinking had become a business in itself,” writes Ehrenreich, “business was its principal client, eagerly consuming the good news that all things are possible through an effort of mind. This was a useful message for employees, who by the turn of the twenty-first century were being required to work longer hours for fewer benefits and diminishing job security. But it was also a liberating ideology for top-level executives. What was the point in agonizing over balance sheets and tedious analyses of risks — and why bother worrying about dizzying levels of debt and exposure to potential defaults — when all good things come to those who are optimistic enough to expect them?”

Ehrenreich traces the origins of this philosophy to nineteenth-century America, and specifically to the quasi-religious movement known as New Thought. New Thought arose in rebellion against the dominant, gloomy message of American Calvinism, which was that relentless hard work was the duty of every Christian — with the additional sting that, thanks to the doctrine of predestination, you might in any case already be marked to spend eternity in Hell. New Thought, by contrast, proposed that one could achieve happiness and worldly success through the power of the mind.

This mind-power could even cure physical ailments, according to the newly minted religion of Christian Science, which grew directly from the same roots. Yet, as Ehrenreich makes clear, New Thought imposed its own kind of harsh judgmentalism, replacing Calvinism’s obligatory hard work with obligatory positive thinking. Negative thoughts were fiercely denounced — a message that echoed “the old religion’s condemnation of sin” and added “an insistence on the constant interior labour of self- examination.”
Quoting the sociologist Micki McGee, Ehrenreich shows how, under this new orthodoxy of optimism, “continuous and neverending work on the self [was] offered not only as a road to success, but also to a kind of secular salvation.”

George Bush, then, was standing in a venerable tradition when he proclaimed the importance of optimism in all circumstances. But his speech at Get Motivated! was over almost as soon as it had started. A dash of religion, a singularly unilluminating anecdote about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, some words of praise for the military, and he was waving goodbye — “Thank you, Texas, it’s good to be home!” — as his bodyguards closed in around him. Beneath the din of cheering, I heard Jim, the park ranger in the next seat, emit a sigh of relief. “OK , I’m motivated now,” he muttered, to nobody in particular. “Is it time for some beer?”

“There are lots of ways of being miserable,” says a character in a short story by Edith Wharton, “but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running around after happiness.” This observation pungently expresses the problem with the “cult of optimism” — the ironic, self-defeating struggle that sabotages positivity when we try too hard. But it also hints at the possibility of a more hopeful alternative, an approach to happiness that might take a radically different form. The first step is to learn how to stop chasing positivity so intently. But many of the proponents of the “negative path” to happiness take things further still, arguing — paradoxically, but persuasively — that deliberately plunging more deeply into what we think of as negative may be a precondition of true happiness.

Perhaps the most vivid metaphor for this whole strange philosophy is a small children’s toy known as the “Chinese finger trap,” though the evidence suggests it is probably not Chinese in origin at all. In his office at the University of Nevada, the psychologist Steven Hayes, an outspoken critic of counterproductive positive thinking, keeps a box of them on his desk; he uses them to illustrate his arguments. The “trap” is a tube, made of thin strips of woven bamboo, with the opening at each end being roughly the size of a human finger. The unwitting victim is asked to insert his index fingers into the tube, then finds himself trapped: in reaction to his efforts to pull his fingers out again, the openings at each end of the tube constrict, gripping his fingers ever more tightly. The harder he pulls, the more decisively he is trapped. It is only by relaxing his efforts at escape, and by pushing his fingers further in, that he can widen the ends of the tube, whereupon it falls away, and he is free.

In the case of the Chinese finger trap, Hayes observes, “doing the presumably sensible thing is counterproductive.” Following the negative path to happiness is about doing the other thing — the presumably illogical thing — instead.

Excerpted from “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking” by Oliver Burkeman, published in November 2012 by Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2012 by Oliver Burkeman. All rights reserved.

Oliver Burkeman is a writer for The Guardian based in Brooklyn, New York.

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With Amy Goodman & Juan González

Gore Vidal on the "United States of Amnesia"

Acclaimed author Gore Vidal’s new book is called "Imperial America: The United States of Amnesia." We spoke with Vidal recently about the Bush administration, historical memory and 9/11. [includes rush transcript]

Gore Vidal is one of America’s most prolific and best-known writers. He has written more than 22 books and more than 200 essays. A collection of his essays won the National Book Award in 1993.

Vidal is the author most recently of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Bush-Cheney Junta. Taken together, the books constitute a comprehensive attack on America’s imperialist ambitions and the military-industrial complex.

Writing in The Scotsman, critic Gavin Esler called Perpetual War "the finest serious critique of America’s use and abuse of power in the 21st century that I have read."

I had an opportunity to speak with Vidal recently. We’re going to play some of that interview. He begins by discussing his thoughts about the United States post-9/11.

Guest:

Gore Vidal,

Rush Transcript

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Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Gore Vidal, current—concerned about the events of September 11th and many of the unanswered questions. He has a new book out now. It’s called Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia. Gore Vidal, the author of 22 novels, five plays, many screenplays, more than 200 essays, his United States: Essays 1952-1992 is one of the great American books of the 20th century, won the National Book Award in 1993.
I recently sat down with Gore Vidal to talk with him about where he was on September 11th.

GORE VIDAL: Where I was on 9/11, I was south of Naples in a town called Ravello. And I turned on CNN, and the first thing I saw was a plane going into a tower. And I knew that something dreadful had happened.

AMY GOODMAN: And what were your thoughts as the hours unfolded?

GORE VIDAL: Who? What? Why? I’m still wondering who, what, why, since nobody else bothers with those three questions. It’s the only three questions which should ever have bothered us.

I assume it was Osama bin Laden, an Arabian. I assumed it was the people that they say were the hijackers, who were mostly Arabians from Saudi Arabia. And why, I have been trying to work out ever since, and what, I’ve been trying to work out. In a normal country, this would have all been investigated by the Congress, by our various secret services, police services. The United States is not a normal country. We are under—we’re a homeland now, under military surveillance and military control. The president asked the Congress right after 9/11 not to conduct a major investigation, "as it might deter our search for terrorism, wherever it may be in the world." So Congress obediently rolled over.

There was—I remember Pearl Harbor. I was a kid then. And within three years of it, I had enlisted in the Army. That’s what we did in those days. We did not go off to the Texas air force and hide.

I realized the country has totally changed, that the government is not responsive to the people, either in protecting us from something like 9/11, which they should have done, could have done, did not do, and then, when it did happen, to investigate, investigate, investigate. So I wrote two little books, one called Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, in which I try to go into the why Osama bin Laden, if it were he, or whoever it was, why it was done. And I wrote another one, Dreaming War, on why we were not protected at 9/11, which ordinarily would have led to the impeachment of the president of the United States who had allowed it to happen. They said they had no information. Since then, every day the New York Times prints another mountain of people who said they had warned the government, they had warned the government. President Putin of Russia, he had warned us. President Mubarak of Egypt, he had warned us. Three members of Mossad claim that they had come to the United States to warn us that sometime in September something unpleasant might come out of the sky in our direction. Were we defended? No, we were not defended. Has this ever been investigated? No, it hasn’t. There was some attempt at the midterm election. There was a pro forma committee in Congress, which has done nothing thus far. What are we? Three years later. This is shameful.

The media, which is controlled by the great conglomerates, which control the political system, has done an atrocious job of reporting, though sometimes good stories get in. I’ve worn my eyes out studying the Wall Street Journal, which despite its dreadful editorial policies, is a pretty good newspaper of record, which the New York Times is not. If you read the Wall Street Journal very carefully, you can pretty much figure out what happened that day.

At the time of the first hijacking, according to law, FAA, it is mandatory, within four minutes of a hijacking, fighter planes from the nearest airbase, military base, go up to scramble. That means go up and force the plane down, find out who they are, find out what’s happening. For one hour and 50 minutes, I think it was, no fighter plane went up. During that hour and 20 minutes, we lost the two towers and one side of the Pentagon. Why didn’t they go up? No description from the government. No excuse. A lot of mumbling stories, which were then retracted, and new stories replaced them. That, to me, was the end of the republic.

We no longer had a Congress which would ask questions, which it was supposed—in place to do, of the executive. We have a commander-in-chief who likes strutting around in military uniform, which no previous commander-in-chief ever did, as they’re supposed to be civilians keeping charge of the military. This thing is surrealistic now, and it is getting nastier and nastier as we are more and more kept in the dark about those things which most affect us, which are war and peace, prosperity and poverty. These are the main things that a government should look after and we, the people, should be told about. We have been told nothing. And every voice is silent.

So I wrote two little books, which were then noticed by people who like to look at the internet, and then a few hundred thousand people have bought them. And I don’t come out with conspiracy theories. I never became a journalist. I’m a historian. Because journalists give you their opinions and pretend they’re facts. I don’t give you my opinions, because they may be valuable to my mother, but they are of no value to anybody else. They may be of value to me. But I give the facts as I find them, and I list them. And they’re quite deadly.

This government is culpable of, if nothing less, negligence. Why were we not protected? With all the air bases, fighter planes, up and down the Eastern Seaboard, not one of them went aloft while the hijackings took place. Finally, two from Otis Field in Massachusetts arrived at the Twin Towers, I think at the time the second one was hit. If anybody had been thinking, they would have gone on to Washington to try and prevent the attack on the Pentagon. They went back to Otis, back to Massachusetts. So I ask these questions, which Congress should ask, does not ask, which the press should ask, but it’s too frightened. It’s a reign of terror now.

AMY GOODMAN: A recent exposé shows that even the congressional committee that’s looking into this can’t get a hold of documents that are classified, and even public testimony is now being reclassified.

GORE VIDAL: Well, isn’t it pretty clear that the dictatorship is in place? We’re not supposed to know certain things, and we’re not going to know them. They’re doing everything to remove our history, to—they’ve damaged the Freedom of Information Act. Bush managed to have a number of presidential papers, including those of his father, put out of reach of historians, or anybody, for a great length of time, during which they will probably be shredded, so they will never be available. And what I’ve always called jokingly the "United States of Amnesia" will be worse than an amnesiac; it will be—have suffered a lobotomy. There will be no functioning historical memory of our history.

AMY GOODMAN: How has George Bush accrued so much power?

GORE VIDAL: Well, the election of 2000 was the end of the republic. It was—it was the second time it had happened that somebody who got the popular vote didn’t get the election—1876, when Governor Tilden, the Democrat of New York, won the election, but they were able—we still had troops in the South—they were able to turn the election around the electoral college. Tilden didn’t want another civil war, so he just withdrew. But there was no sinister group taking charge. It was just a party group of Republicans who wanted to continue the reign of General Grant. That was mildly sleazy. This is major corruption. This is corporate America, as one, putting in place a president who was not elected, getting the Supreme Court to delay and delay, when under the 10th Amendment every decision about the voting in Florida should be made by the Florida Supreme Court, not the U.S. Supreme Court, which the Constitution rules out in matters of election.

AMY GOODMAN: So, how did that happen? And how did—well, isn’t he your relative, Al Gore?

GORE VIDAL: Well, it’s nothing I go through the streets boasting of, no. But yes, he’s my cousin. And very un-Gore—the Gores are very known for their belligerency. And he is not known for self-defense, let us say. He should have asked—it’s easy to say he should have, but it was pretty clear at the time. I would have, had I been in that situation. "Count the total Florida vote." He has every right to demand that. And they couldn’t have played games, because it’s too big, too big a vote. Instead he asked, I think, three counties—Dade and Broward and one other—to do their count over again.

AMY GOODMAN: Concerned that he wouldn’t win outside of those.

GORE VIDAL: No, he—I think he figured that he had won those. Dade is certainly a large minority vote, which had all voted for him. There’s a wonderful vote by Nichols called Jews for Buchanan, and it’s a marvelous shot of four Jewish gentlemen looking terribly alarmed. And you see Dade County goes for Buchanan. Even Buchanan said, "Look, these were not my votes down there. Something’s wrong." And they—it was stolen, by the secretary of state, that lady who has now been rewarded with a seat in Congress. The president’s brother, the losing president candidate’s brother, was governor, and he took part in it.

And the court did by five to four. Two of the five should have recused themselves, should have just withdrawn from the case when Gore v. Bush came before the court. Why? One of them, Scalia, had a son who was working for the Bush team of lawyers before the Supreme Court. Does Justice Scalia recuse himself as he should because his son is arguing? No. He wants to kill Gore. He wants to make sure that the bad guys win. Thomas’ wife was busy getting curricula vitae of potential people to serve in a Bush administration. Clarence Thomas should have recused himself and withdrawn from the case, in which case it would have been four to three for Gore, who would now be president. And Iraq and Afghanistan, I could guarantee, would not have been knocked down in order to benefit Halliburton and Bechtel.

AMY GOODMAN: Antonin Scalia recently went to Cleveland. He spoke at the Cleveland City Club, which is known as the oldest free speech forum in the country. He allowed no press in. And the night before, he spoke in the city, and he said that that vote, choosing George Bush, was his proudest moment.

GORE VIDAL: I would impeach him. And in a well-run country, the Senate should make a movement toward the impeachment of—the trial of, anyway, of Justice Scalia. And back of that, there’s some interesting organization going on, which is hard to determine, Opus Dei. Both Scalia and Thomas have connections with Opus Dei, which is a secret Catholic order, originally fascist. General Franco in Spain was a sort of godfather to it. And we don’t know much about it, and it’s all over the place, about 80,000 worldwide. Louis Freeh of the FBI at that time was a member, as was Mr. Hanssen, the spy, who had been giving all of our secrets to the—he was with the CIA. He had been giving our secrets to the Russians for many years. I make no charges, but I simply bring up questions. Why not ask questions of these people? Does it suit Opus Dei that Bush is president? Now we’re getting into God territory, which I normally would stay away from, as any good American should. It’s not my business, other people’s religions. But, Bush is born-again. That’s why he uses biblical language: "He’s evil. He evil. He evil-doer." Well, that’s theological language. Wouldn’t say he’s a bad man; he’s a dishonest man.

AMY GOODMAN: Gore Vidal, his latest book is Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia.

The Sociopathic Movement That Is The American Society

December 14, 2011 at 13:02:21

The Sociopathic Movement That Is Poisoning The American Society

By michael payne (about the author)

Poisonous by poisonbilliards.com

This American society is comprised of individuals with widely divergent thoughts and opinions about the issues facing this nation; but there are two groups, in particular, that stand out because they are so diametrically opposed in their thinking. On the one hand there are those people who care deeply about their country, about justice, fairness and equity for all people, and are sincerely concerned about the welfare of others less fortunate than themselves. On the other there are those that, by all indications, have none of those concerns but use manipulation, control and suppression of others to achieve power and personal gain.

This latter element is comprised of individuals who, in psychological terms, are referred to as sociopaths; those who have a difficult time relating to and interacting with others, who lack a social conscience, have a distorted sense of morality and associated values, are adept at lying and manipulation, lack empathy, are remorseless, merciless and have an egocentric, "me" complex.

This is the Sociopathic Movement; the darker side of America that, while it has always been present in this society, in recent times it has been growing at an alarming rate. Those in the Occupy Movement might say that the 1% of Americans who control the wealth of America and have no intention of sharing any part of it with others represents the majority of this movement; that may be a harsh indictment but, then again, it may be largely justifiable by observed behavior and actions.

If we're looking for the best real life examples of this movement we need look no further than the U.S. Congress. We might call this the hotbed, the center of this movement, a perfect illustration of sociopathic behavior. Congress is where "self" is paramount and the needs and interests of the vast majority of Americans have become irrelevant. Not only is this a place where nothing of substance gets done to solve this nation's problems, it is also where these political misfits, primarily the Republican brand, are hard at work promoting the interests of Wall Street and Corporate America.

While not published and distributed in writing, this sociopathic movement has very clear objectives; at the top of its list is the objective to take complete control of this society and how it functions. Now that's a tall order to say the least so, if that is their intent, then how in the world could they go about achieving it? Simple; since the government is the vehicle by which the needs of the people and the problems of the nation must be addressed, their aim is to create gridlock, havoc and render the political process dysfunctional. And by the evidence at hand, their plan is working quite well.

Does anyone think that these supposed representatives of the people and this democracy spend sleepless nights agonizing over the plight of their fellow Americans, the anguish of those who cannot find jobs or have given up on the prospects of ever finding one? No, of course not, because they are concerned only about "numero uno", aka themselves, and how they can secure more and bigger campaign contributions from their corporate masters.

For those who feel that calling this breed of politicians sociopaths is unfair and unjustifiable, consider this: these are the people who are fully aware that up to 25 million of Americans remain unemployed, underemployed or have given up on trying to find jobs. The fabricated government unemployment rate of 8.6% is, in reality, 18%.

So what do these sociopaths do to help these Americans in their time of great need? Do they burn the midnight oil to come up with legislation to create a government/business climate that would create good jobs? Are they trying to find ways to reinvigorate America's dying manufacturing sector? Are they enacting laws that would help those threatened with home foreclosure -- using the same procedures as they did with the bank bailouts? They clearly see what is happening in America and it bothers them not.

No, they are doing none of these things. They have made it very clear that they have no sympathy, empathy and no feelings for the suffering of many of those who elected them. Thoughts of job creation never enter their minds. In fact, as bizarre as it may seem, they are brazenly blocking every attempt at government assistance of any kind to people in need. That could not be more clear than their refusal to extend the payroll tax cuts and the unemployment benefits. What kind of human beings behave in this manner?

But let's not think that just because Republicans are members of this dark movement, that Democrats are entirely innocent, because they're not. Too often, especially in the Senate, a certain group of Democrats have exhibited their sociopathic tendencies and have sided with the GOP obstructionists to disregard the wishes and interests of the people.

A great danger lies in the fact that we the people still do not comprehend the breadth and depth of their plan to take control of this society. These political slaves of Corporate America are entirely comfortable allowing 1% of Americans to control the wealth of this nation. They view those "other" Americans who are not a part of their social strata as mere pawns to be used and manipulated. Justice and equality are not a part of their philosophy; the great disparity of wealth and income within America is something that they believe has been ordained and must be preserved.

This Sociopathic Movement, headquartered in the U.S. Congress and fueled by the money and power of corporations and their many thousands of lobbyists, has branches all over this nation; these branches are located in those states that are controlled by Republican governors and legislatures. We've seen the governors of Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan go after teachers, public sector workers and unions with a vengeance while, at the same time, they brazenly reduce corporate taxes.

But their worst crime against this democracy and its people can be found in what they are doing to limit or eliminate the voting rights of the American people. Nothing could be more undemocratic and un-American than this sinister plan designed to destroy voting rights. And yet, that is exactly what is happening in many states as Republican controlled legislatures are enacting measures that would only allow voters with specific identification, primarily drivers' licenses, to cast their ballots. These agents of voter suppression are well aware that millions of voting age Americans do not have drivers' licenses.

The GOP presidential candidates; with the possible exception of John Huntsman and Ron Paul, this is the worst assemblage of politicians that America may ever have seen; a collection of people who have no regard for those they consider "lower class" Americans; their ignorance and misinterpretation of American history is astounding. They have no understanding of diplomacy or foreign policy. We should all be praying with all our might that none of them ever becomes president because America would never recover from such a deadly blow.

In this same vein what about those many giant, heartless transnational corporations who have ruthlessly and mercilessly laid off many millions of workers and show no remorse for shipping their jobs to workers in China and other overseas nations? Can corporations actually be called sociopathic? Yes, of course they can, since the Supreme Court ruled that they have the right of free speech under the Constitution, then they must be people. Not only had that, but Mitt Romney, the noted Constitutional scholar, also stated that they were people.

This Sociopathic Movement is currently winning the battle since they have most of the weaponry, i.e., money, power, and influence. However the people are fighting back with a fury as evidenced by the growing power of the Occupy Movement across America. And in the coming November, 2012 elections the American people will have the opportunity to put an electoral dagger into the belly of the beast.

Michael Payne

Michael Payne is an independent progressive activist who writes articles about social, economic and political matters as well as American foreign policy. He is a U.S. Army veteran. His major goal is to convince Americans that our perpetual wars must (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

November 29, 2011 at 21:52:25

The Grand Jury Report: Part two of "What did Joe Paterno know and when did he know it?"

By Walter Uhler (about the author)

The Pennsylvania State University is linked to the Jerry Sandusky sex scandal because: (1) it employed him as an assistant coach of Penn State's football team during the period when some of his alleged sexual molestations occurred, (2) it employed him when a specific allegation of sexual misconduct was investigated (but not prosecuted) in 1998, (3) a janitor at the university witnessed, but never reported a specific alleged molestation by the now retired Sandusky in 2000, (4) another alleged molestation by Sandusky, which took place on 1 March 2002 in a university shower, was witnessed by a graduate assistant on the football team, (5) Coach Joe Paterno, Athletic Director Tim Curley, Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz and President Graham Spanier received some kind of notice about that 2002 incident and (6) Jerry Sandusky was allowed continued access to Penn State facilities, even after the 2002 alleged incident.

However, when it comes to the potential legal and moral culpability of Penn State officials, such as Paterno, Curley, Schultz and Spanier, only two events come into play: (1) the allegation that prompted the investigation by university police in 1998 and (2) the allegation made by the graduate assistant (subsequently revealed to be Mike McQueary) to Joe Paterno on 2 March 2002.

Part one of this article addressed the events of 1998, where one plausibly might suspect that officials at Penn State, including Paterno, had such knowledge. As I've concluded in Part One (see http://www.walter-c-uhler.com/Reviews/paterno1.html), there exists no evidence -- at this time -- that would allow anyone to responsibly, and thus ethically, assert that Joe Paterno or anyone else at Penn State had a clue about Sandusky's alleged dark side until 1998. I repeat, notwithstanding the sexual molestations that Sandusky allegedly committed up through 1997, there is no evidence that officials at Penn State, including Paterno, knew about them.

In 1998, however -- as I've written in Part One -- "an 11-year old boy (identified as Victim 6 in the November 2011 grand jury report) came home with wet hair and told his puzzled mother that he had showered with Sandusky at Penn State's athletic complex. The mother immediately reported the incident to the university police. The university police conducted an investigation and compiled a report running almost 100 pages, which convinced some subsequent investigators -- according to The New York Times, -- that "campus police officers truly wanted to make a case against Sandusky.'"

"Nevertheless, the district attorney (who subsequently disappeared) found insufficient reason to take the case to trial. As the Times reports: "According to people with knowledge of the current Sandusky case, the district attorney's decision in 1998 was a close call, even with the evidence the campus police had.'"

My examination of the few facts available led me to conclude that Joe Paterno either did not know about the 1998 police investigation -- or that he did, indeed, know about the investigation, but also knew that the DA found insufficient evidence to indict.

(Please note: Since the publication of Part One, The Altoona Mirror has written an opinion piece, "Offering Sandusky to PSU Altoona Troubling," which notes that, between late 1998 and early 1999, Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky met with President Spanier and Allen Meadows, then the CEO of Penn State's Altoona campus, to discuss the possibility of starting a football program there, with Sandusky as its head coach. Given the suspicions now swirling around Sandusky and the fact that university police investigated him in 1998, the author of the Mirror article finds the Altoona connection troubling.

Actually, had the author done his homework, he would have found a1982 Sports Illustrated column about Jerry Sandusky in which Joe Paterno expressed concerns about Sandusky not being able to become a head coach because of his commitment to The Second Mile. Paterno asserted that, "many people have talked to me about hiring him"but Jerry's been reluctant to talk to them because of all the commitments he has in the area." Thus, by working as a head coach at PSU Altoona Sandusky would have been able to pursue both objectives.

More surprising is the fact that, in 2000, Sandusky applied for the job of head football coach at the University of Virginia and ultimately was offered the job, only to lose it after contract negotiations became stalemated.

Nevertheless, after giving the Mirror's opinion piece considerable thought, I've concluded that there are as many innocent reasons to have Sandusky move to PSU Altoona or the University of Virginia as there are suspicious reasons. Thus, there is no reason to change the conclusions I reached in Part One.)

Consequently, based upon the evidence available to us thus far, we can stipulate that the events of 1998 -- the allegation, the police investigation and the DA's decision not to indict Sandusky -- constitute the only instance in Sandusky's entire career as a coach at Penn State, when he came under a cloud of suspicion. In other words, if Coach Paterno, Athletic Director Tim Curley, Vice President Gary Schultz (who had administrative responsibilities for the University police), Penn State's general counsel, Wendell Courtney, and President Graham Spanier learned anything about Sandusky's alleged dark side while he was still coaching at Penn State, they would have learned about it, thanks to the events of 1998.

Although we can't say with certainty what Joe Paterno knew about the 1998 police investigation of Jerry Sandusky and the DA's subsequent decision not to indict him, we can reasonably assume that such knowledge or lack of knowledge would have influenced how he handled the information given to him by then graduate assistant Mike McQueary on 2 March 2002.

Nevertheless, according to the November 2011 grand jury report devoted to "Victim 2," on the evening of March 1, 2002, McQueary witnessed Sandusky anally raping a young boy in a Penn State shower. According to the grand jury report: "The graduate assistant was shocked, but noticed that both Victim 2 and Sandusky saw him. The graduate assistant left immediately, distraught."

"The graduate assistant went to his office and called his father, reporting to him what he had seen. His father told the graduate assistant to leave the building and come to his home. The graduate assistant and his father decided that the graduate assistant had to promptly report what he had seen to Coach Joe Paterno, head coach at Penn State. The next morning, a Saturday, the graduate assistant telephoned Paterno and went to Paterno's home, where he reported what he had seen."

Thus, any person possessing the reading comprehension skills of a fifth-grader would be hard pressed to read that specific part of the grand jury report and not conclude that McQueary told Paterno that he witnessed Sandusky anally raping a young boy. But that is not what Paterno told the grand jury. Instead, he testified that McQueary told him that he "had seen Jerry Sandusky in the Lasch Building shower fondling or doing something of a sexual nature to a young boy."

Moreover, after publication of the grand jury report, Paterno took pains to assert: "It was obvious that the witness [McQueary] was distraught over what he saw, but he at no time related to me the very specific actions contained in the grand jury report."

On November 11, 2011, Sara Ganim further sharpened the apparent contradiction separating the testimony of McQueary and Paterno, when she reported: "Paterno said this week that he had stopped the conversation before it got too graphic. Instead, he told McQueary he would need to speak with his superior, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and with Schultz." [Harrisburg Patriot-News] (When I questioned her about the source behind her reporting, Ms. Ganim responded by saying it came from a public statement made by Scott Paterno, Joe's son.)

An even stronger reason to believe Joe Paterno can be found on page ten of the grand jury report. It reads: "Schultz did not ask the graduate assistant [McQueary] for specifics. No one ever did."

But, if we believe Paterno and the grand jury report on this point, we must then ask ourselves, "How do we reconcile such information with that part of the grand jury report that claims McQueary "went to Paterno's home and told him what he saw?'" If Paterno did stop McQueary's conversation "before it got too graphic," how could McQueary have "told him what he saw?"

That very question suggests that we don't really know what McQueary actually told Paterno in 2002. Moreover, given the fact that McQueary didn't testify to the grand jury until December 2010 and Paterno didn't testify until early 2011, one can be almost absolute certain that both McQueary and Paterno have creatively reconstructed what they saw and heard almost nine years earlier.

In Chapter 4 of his book, The Birth of Christianity, John Dominic Crossan attempted to answer the question: "Does Memory Remember?" Crossan examined the scholarly literature devoted to memory, including a very persuasive study conducted at Emory University, where psychology students were asked to complete a questionnaire about the Challenger spacecraft explosion (in January 1986), a mere day after it exploded. When representatives from Emory asked those same students the same questions three years later, they found their answers to be significantly different. These students had "constructed" different memories during those three years without realizing it -- leading Crossan to conclude: "Memory is as much or more creative construction as accurate recollection."

Like the stark fact of the Challenger explosion, it's unlikely that McQueary would creatively construct an anal rape, but surrounding details might have succumbed to creative construction. The same holds true, perhaps more so, for Paterno, who never had his mind riveted by the anal rape.

The possibility of creative construction -- as well as the possibility of intentional deception -- must be kept in mind, not only when examining the conflicting testimony of McQueary and Paterno, but also when examining the testimony of Athletic Director Tim Curley and Vice President Gary Schultz (who was in charge of campus police). They also testified in 2011 about an event that occurred in 2002.

Nevertheless, regardless of the "specifics" related in that conversation between McQueary and Paterno, they proved to be sufficient to persuade Paterno that allegations of sexual misbehavior by Sandusky were being made by McQueary and that such allegations needed to be reported up the administrative hierarchy.

Thus, according to the grand jury report, Paterno testified that he "called Tim Curley"Penn State Athletic Director and Paterno's immediate superior, to his home the very next day, a Sunday, and reported to him that the graduate assistant had seen Jerry Sandusky in the Lasch Building showers fondling or doing something of a sexual nature to the boy." (p. 7)

By reporting to Curley, who, administratively speaking, was a direct report to President Spanier, Paterno fulfilled the requirements of Pennsylvania's mandatory reporting law (23 Pa. Cons. Stat"6311), which requires that reports go to "the person in charge of the institution." Those people who rushed to castigate Paterno for not doing more might want to reconsider, given that the same law "does not require more than one report from any such institution, school, facility or agency."

According to Wendy Murphy -- a leading victim's rights advocate and nationally recognized television legal analyst -- in Pennsylvania "the law is explicit that employees need not report directly to outside authorities and can satisfy their reporting obligations by reporting only to a supervisor." But she adds, in "chain of command" states, employees who report directly to outside law enforcement and child protection service agencies face employment sanctions, including termination, for reporting outside the chain of command." [Wendy J. Murphy: "Prosecute Penn State for "chain of command' cover-up," The Patriot Ledger Nov. 14, 2011] Although it is hard to believe that Penn State might sanction someone for reporting outside the chain of command, the very same law that requires reporting also contains provisions for redress in the event an institution sanctions someone for issuing an unauthorized report.

Moreover, Wes Oliver, an associate professor at Widener School of Law in Harrisburg, has noted the unintended consequences that could occur if every report was filed directly with law enforcement.

"Law enforcement may get bombarded with false (information) from people who have axes to grind, want to make trouble and are seeking whistle blower status," said Oliver.

According to the most recent 2010 Child Abuse report by the state Department of Public Welfare, which investigates child abuse reports, 3,656 of the 24,615 reports investigated qualified as child abuse. ChildLine, the state's child abuse hotline, received 121,868 calls in total. [Caleb Taylor, the Pocono Record16 November 2011]

Did Joe Paterno go beyond the state's minimum requirements for reporting up the chain of command? Yes, if you believe that part of page 8 of the grand jury report where "Schultz testified that he was called to a meeting with Joe Paterno and Tim Curley, in which Paterno reported "disturbing' and "inappropriate' conduct in the shower by Sandusky upon a young boy, as reported by a student or graduate student."

Was Schultz lying? Or did the author(s) of the grand jury report edit out any mention by Paterno or Curley of Schultz's participation? Unfortunately, we lack sufficient information to answer either question.

What we do know -- and what this writer considers to be astounding, given all the media attention devoted to him -- is that Joe Paterno's testimony consumes but one small paragraph among the 18 paragraphs that address Victim 2, and but one small paragraph in the 23 pages summarizing the case against Sandusky, Curley and Schultz.

One the one hand, it's hard to believe that the grand jury would omit that part of Paterno's testimony that mentioned Schultz's participation in his meeting with Curley. One the other hand, unless Joe Paterno only spoke to the grand jury for 10 seconds, the grand jury report appears to have omitted most of Paterno's testimony.

If Shultz did participate in the meeting with Paterno and Curley, it would be in accord with the reporting of Sara Ganim, who wrote that Paterno "told McQueary he would need to speak with his superior, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and with Schultz." But what's critical, is the fact that McQueary was eventually able to make his allegations about Sandusky to the official who was administratively responsible for the university's police.

If Paterno was merely concerned with "covering his ass" -- now the consensus opinion among the thoughtless mob in America -- why would Paterno tell McQueary that he not only needed to talk to the Athletic Director, but also the Vice President in charge of University police? Both Curley and Schultz directly report to Spanier, so either one can "notify the person in charge of the institution." Thus, the insistence that Schultz be involved gains Paterno nothing in that realm. But, by including Schultz -- by insisting that McQueary meet with Schultz, as well as Curley -- Paterno guarantees that McQueary will be able to make his allegations to the person charged with administering the University police.

And if McQueary actually met with Curley and Schultz some ten days after the meeting between Paterno and Curley, didn't Paterno have sufficient reason to believe that he fulfilled his obligation to report sexual abuse AND put McQueary in touch with the person who could launch a police investigation?

None of the above definitively puts to rest the widespread suspicion that Paterno, Curley, Schultz and President Spanier participated in a cover-up, which assured that the police never would be brought into an investigation. Plans to cover up might best explain why it took approximately ten days before Curley and Schultz met with McQueary. State law, after all, requires reporting of such sexual assaults within 48 hours of notification. McQueary and Paterno performed their legal responsibilities to report immediately, Curley and Schultz did not. Plans to cover it up also might explain why Schultz never notified his immediate subordinate, the Chief of the University police.

Nevertheless, the fact that Paterno told McQueary to meet with Curley AND Schultz, that Paterno subsequently met with Curley, if not Schultz, to report something of a sexual nature between Sandusky and a young boy to within the 48 hours required by law, and the fact that McQueary subsequently met with Curley and Schultz -- without Paterno in the room -- all strongly suggest that Paterno not only did his part to foster an investigation, but also was willing to let the chips fall where they may.

These actions fully support Paterno's subsequent assertion: "As coach Sandusky was retired from our coaching staff at that time, I referred the matter to university administrators." The grand jury report, which looked for and found that Curley and Schultz engaged in a cover-up, concluded that Paterno performed his legal obligation, which is why he will be a witness, rather than a defendant in the trials against Sandusky, Curley and Schultz.

Even Pennsylvania state police Commissioner Frank Noonan acknowledged that Paterno fulfilled his legal obligation when he forwarded McQueary's allegations to university administrators. Finally, in early November 2011, the Harrisburg Patriot-News reported praise for Paterno: "sources said the deputy state prosecutor handling the case said that Paterno did the right thing, and handled himself appropriately in 2002 and during the three-year investigation that ended Friday."

Consequently, the evidence available to us thus far not only clears Paterno of any suspicion that he engaged in a cover-up -- an extremely far-fetched suspicion, in the first place -- but also that Paterno earned praise for performing his legal duty. Arguably, by insisting that Schultz be brought in, Paterno went beyond his legal obligation.

Unfortunately, such evidence proved worthless as jackals in the news media seized upon the hysteria surrounding the news of despicable sexual molestation of young boys by Jerry Sandusky to transform a "Jerry Sandusky scandal" into a "Penn State scandal" and then a "Joe Paterno scandal." Now, there's no questioning why the "Jerry Sandusky scandal" emerged. Moreover, given that Sandusky was once employed by Penn State (and maintained close ties with Penn State), and given the grand jury report and the subsequent indictments of Penn State's Athletic Director, Tim Curley, and the Vice President responsible for overseeing the University police, Gary Schultz, one understands how the "Sandusky scandal" became the "Penn State scandal." But, how the "Sandusky scandal" and the "Penn State scandal" became the "Joe Paterno scandal" is much less easy to understand.

This is the question that I will address in Part Three of this article.

Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow Times and the San (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Monday, November 21, 2011
What did Joe Paterno know and when did he know it? Part One
This article examines what Joe Paterno knew about Jerry Sandusky's alleged sexual molestations of young boys during the period from the mid-1970s to 1998.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Lynching Joe Paterno in the Court of Public Opinion
(17 comments) Thoughtless public opinion and reckless journalism has set the stage for Joe Paterno's lynching by Penn State's Trustees

Criminal Minds

Criminal Minds

Will testing the brain, even before birth, separate the good seeds from the bad?

by Josh Fischman, from The Chronicle Review
November-December 2011



David Gothard / www.davidgothard.com

When he was in his late 20s and living in his native England, Adrian Raine spent a lot of time locked in a van with violent criminals.

Raine worked at a maximum security prison in Hull, where his job involved attaching polygraph-type sensors to the prisoners’ skin to measure their agitation as he bothered them with loud sounds and flashes of light. His lab was in the back of a van, he says, “and the guards were very concerned these men would commandeer the vehicle and escape.”

Their solution? “Take my keys away and lock the doors from the outside.”

“So there I was, in this very tiny space,” recalls Raine, who is now in his 50s and is the chair of the criminology department at the University of Pennsylvania. “And I kept watching the needles these sensors were connected to, for I imagined that the first sign these men were about to rush me would be the needles starting to swing wildly as the men got excited and prepared to attack.”

They never did. And since then, Raine has never strayed far from the company of killers, wife batterers, and psychopaths—searching for clues to bad behavior or even criminal intent. Along with several other researchers, he has pioneered the science of neurodevelopmental criminology, which has established that among adult offenders, juvenile delinquents, and even younger children there are features in the brain that seem to reduce fear, impair decision making, and blunt emotional reactions to others’ distress.

While Raine was attending Oxford, he vacillated between wanting to be an experimental psychologist and wanting to teach primary school. As a result, he did some student teaching, which showed him that “there were some kids who were just bullies, very extreme, and I wondered, Why? Where did the behavior come from? Why were some kids angels and some devils?”

He made the topic into his doctoral research at the University of York, where he began using the lie detector–like sensors to measure heart rates and changes in the way the skin conducts electricity in teenagers with varying degrees of aggression.

After graduating, Raine began his work at Hull, where he did time with murderers, rapists, and pedophiles. “The main thing I learned was that I really can’t change these people,” he says. “It brought me back to kids, to earlier stages, thinking we’ve got to look at the earlier, predisposing factors, when maybe we can do something.”

Raine eventually broke out of jail and into academe, first at the University of Nottingham and then at the University of Southern California. One of his major lines of research was long-term studies of children, measuring physiological reactivity at young ages to see if any pattern related to bad behavior decades later.

Raine lucked into a major source of data. In the late 1960s, the World Health Organization had started to follow about 1,800 children on Mauritius, a small island nation in the Indian Ocean.

Over the years, Raine and several colleagues have shown that children from Mauritius who have slower heart rates and reduced skin responses when they are exposed to loud tones or challenging questions tend to run afoul of the law when they get older. In 1996 the researchers learned that 15-year-olds with this pattern tended to have criminal records by age 29. In 2010 the age was pushed back further: 3-year-olds who had similar physical responses were rated by teachers as more aggressive than other children five years later.

Normally, a startling noise races the heart and sends the body into a high state of alert, which is what the skin electrodes pick up. But there’s evidence that children who are not alarmed don’t react to the threat of punishment when they mis­behave. Nor do they react to other people’s distress.

At Southern California, Raine was part of a team studying 605 families of twins. Some of the twins were identical, sharing 100 percent of their genes, and some were nonidentical, sharing 50 percent. When the children were ages 9 and 10, researchers gave them a battery of psychological tests to assess aggression and antisocial behavior. They also asked parents, teachers, and other children to rate the subjects’ antisocial tendencies. The results showed that these traits were more consistent in the identical pairs. “I think at least 50 percent of this can be attributed to genetics,” Raine says.

Raine then began wondering what blunted the senses. Was there something actually in the brains of these people that tied into this lack of fear, lack of sensitivity, and abundance of mayhem?

Others had wondered the same thing.

During the 1990s, Antonio R. Damasio, then a pioneering professor of neuroscience at the University of Iowa, focused on the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped area in the middle of the brain known to help process emotions. In patients with lesions in the region, he observed a repeated pattern of bad decisions, like making risky bets while they were gambling. Cut off from emotional reactions, these people lacked an alarm bell that signaled a poor choice. They could see many courses of action but, shorn of feedback from the amygdala, couldn’t tell good from bad. This extended to reading other people’s emotions, as well.

Damasio also found that damage to the prefrontal cortex, a brain area involved in decision making, could turn mild-mannered patients into rash, destructive individuals, seeming to rob them of a brake on their impulses. This led him to propose that the two regions normally link up to prevent people from harming others by generating emotional alarm (the amygdala) and acting on it (the prefrontal cortex). When either part of the chain is damaged, antisocial actions result. Damasio called this “acquired sociopathy.”

In 1997 Raine and several colleagues put the theory to the test on real killers. They compared the functioning of the brains of 41 convicted murderers with that of 41 normal people. Using positron emission tomography, or PET, a type of scan that measures the activity in areas of the brain, they saw lower activity in both the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala of the murderers’ brains.

When they further divided murderers into those who came from “good” homes and those who came from “bad” homes—those filled with neglect, abuse, and poverty—the first group showed lower activity in the prefrontal cortex, in particular an area called the orbitofrontal cortex. Raine’s interpretation: Genetics and anatomy were more influential on their development than was the way they grew up.

What’s more, a series of studies using magnetic resonance imaging, which reveals structures and shapes, showed that criminals and people who scored high on tests of antisocial disorders had a smaller than normal orbitofrontal region and amygdala. And the corpus callosum, the communications bridge between the brain’s two hemispheres, was abnormally large.

But those findings raised a chicken-and-egg-type question: Did the brain features produce the behavior, or did the behavior change the brain? Violent criminals are known to bang their heads into walls and abuse drugs, and both of those things damage the brain, possibly producing the shrinkage Raine was seeing on the brain scans. He needed to go back even further and look for a defect that begins before birth and can still be detected in adults. Raine found it in a hole in the head. More precisely, a thin wall of brain tissue that separates a hole—all brains have these spaces—into two. The hole appears during the 12th week of a fetus’s development, and the wall—pushed forward by a normally developing amygdala and other brain areas—divides it by the 20th week. When the wall doesn’t form completely, a condition known by the jawbreaking name of cavum septum pellucidum, it’s usually a sign of abnormal development in the amygdala and other structures. Years later, in adults, the failed wall can be spotted in a brain scan.

In a 2010 paper, Raine and his colleagues compared people with and without the feature on several fronts. The groups were tested for antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy, and aggression. Their records were searched for criminal arrests and convictions. In every single one of those areas, there were a lot more men and women with the wall defect. Here, finally, was evidence tracing criminality back to the womb, before any head-banging could occur.

“I think there’s no longer any question, scientifically, that there’s an association between the brain and criminal behavior. We’re beyond the point of debating that,” says Raine. “Every study can be criticized on methodology. But when you look at the whole, at all the different designs, it’s just hard to deny there is something going on with biology.”

So what do we do now?

One thing we don’t do, says Nathalie M.G. Fontaine, an assistant professor of criminology at Indiana University at Bloomington, is mark children as future criminals. “I would never put a risk number on a specific child,” says Fontaine, who has studied callousness among children as a predictor of bad behavior. “We are talking about groups, not individuals. We don’t know what will happen with any one child, because there are also protective factors.” A strongly supportive family, or an influential schoolteacher, or religion could blunt the effects of a hole in the head on the plastic, changeable brain.

Raine is a big believer in protective factors. “You can’t make a lesion to the prefrontal cortex and, hey presto, you get a criminal. It’s not like that,” he says. “Of course social factors are critically important.” In his current study of Philadelphia children with the slow physical reactivity that has been linked to trouble, some are getting a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids and calcium to see if they protect brain cells, some are getting cognitive-behavioral therapy, and some are getting both to see if trouble can be staved off.

Still, the time is coming, Raine believes, when putting numbers on children will be tempting. If a 75 percent chance of a bad seed isn’t high enough, he wonders, what about 80 percent? Or 95? “Look, I have two children, 9-year-old nonidentical twin boys,” he says. “And I’d definitely want to know, especially if there was a treatment that has a chance of success. But I realize not every parent will. We have to start having this conversation now, though, so we understand the risks and the benefits. It’s easy to get on your moral high horse about stigma and civil liberties, but are you going to have blood on your hands in the future because you’ve blocked an approach that could lead to lives being saved?”

Josh Fischman is a senior editor at The Chronicle Review. Excerpted from The Chronicle Review, an award-winning weekly newspaper for college and university faculty members, administrators, and students. www.chronicle.com

Read more: http://www.utne.com/Science-Technology/Neurodevelopmental-Criminology-Acquired-Sociopathy-Predict-Criminals.aspx?page=4#ixzz1f1Wu7ZiM