The attempt to give positive spin to all experience even in the background of profoundly tragic times is nothing short of toxic positivity. Ask any psychiatrist, this obsession with good vibes approach, disconnected from the enormity of enveloping gloom of the second wave of the pandemic, is counter-productive from the individual and societal experience.
Human beings are essentially designed to be positive. Unless they look beyond their present suffering they cannot get on with life. But superimposing an inauthentic experience and rejecting difficult emotions can cause damage finally.
Living through a difficult experience is part of much-needed catharsis. When everybody's future is in the air, fear is normal, panic is normal and anxiety is normal. We must grapple with them to come out of the suffering stronger. Covering it up with a veneer of positivity does not help. It is a denial, minimisation and invalidation of genuine human emotional experience.
Avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering, denial of failure is a failure nonetheless and eschewing a struggle is a struggle itself. This toxic positivity is unmistakably impersonal and manipulative. Something like closing your eyes to walk on the burning sand. The suffering remains but the mind is attempted to be distracted. It can go to another extreme of suggesting to people who have suffered that they are being weak or they are failing: pointing out a lack.
Rather than helping them it will break them. When the requirement is compassion or at least trying to share the suffering of another person, these censorious auto suggestions do not help. An invitation to hide whatever is implicitly suggested to be a shame is a form of shame inflicted inadvertently and insensitively. Finally, it festers.
Call for positive thinking is nothing short of a smoke and mirror game to escape blame and to shift the attention. These are the stuff snake oil cure and fakery are built on. They are mostly wrong as guidance to follow camphor snorting, doing breathing exercises and drinking cow urine as cure for COVID. If the virus is not understood, how can broad spectrum cure of unknown efficacy be suggested?
During this health crisis, which could have been prepared against, and the resultant response would have been much better than everyone running like headless chicken, there were lots of things to be staved off.
Running from pillar to post for medicines, oxygen and hospital beds could have been avoided to a large extent. We would have seen a lot less infections and deaths then. The positive spin takes our eyes off the ball and helps people who are responsible for the mess-up to avoid accountability. It also helps in developing apathies to business as usual to go on while deflecting attention, anger and questions.
For long, superstition has trumped reason and ruled our lives in this country. Emphasising that discussion on COVID-19 suffering and deaths are best avoided is an invitation to a trap of amnesia. It is a superstition at best and it has no influence on ambient suffering: it neither becomes less or more. The virus does not go away and death does not stop stalking because negative discussion is eschewed. Confronting the issue perhaps provides a better chance to survive it.
When the situation is so dire both on a personal and societal front, the obsessive insistence on positive thinking may help in hiding the fact that data do not capture the reality and reality finally is grossly under-reported.
It is not only insensitive and damaging, it is eventually an attempt to convert people into 'lotus eaters' who will watch the outside world as an augmented reality through the mirror of positivity and put their mind to slumber when things "ripen, fall and cease".
Why have ghosts to trouble complacence, why have the ‘weary the wandering field of barren foam?’ Insistence on this monochromatic mindset is the denial of authentic experience and the need to speak the truth in this one chance at living this painful but beautifully imperfect life.
(The writer is a former IAS officer and can be reached at satya_mohanty@rediffmail.com)