This seems to mesh with the “prosperity gospel”…many of the CLPs where I work seem to follow some level of this thinking as well, that wealth goes hand-in-hand with their faith.
Quite a few of these people are Trump supporters, and a couple are even vocal about conspiracy theories (last year’s coin shortage was a sign of the impending One World Government and the return of Christ, etc.).
While I don’t agree with you - and that’s OK, that’s what keeps the SDMB interesting-, let me stipulate for a minute that you are right. I’m even going to exaggerate your position -for effect- and imagine that everyone that stormed the Capitol that day was wildly successful due to a lifetime of flawless financial planning.
The thing about good financial decisions is that you have to make them all the time. You can clip coupons, comparison shop, study Consumer Reports before making major purchases and invest your savings wisely. But even a lifetime of good decisions can be wiped out by one bad decision.
If you buy that house you can’t afford with some horrible interest only scam mortgage, or decide to quit your job to be a social media rapper or to sell a miracle weight loss product, the benefits of every good financial decision you ever made can be lost in an instant.
So, even if every single person that stormed the Capitol was a paragon of financial virtue ( yes, I’m still exaggerating your position to make point), each and every one of them made what has turned out to be an incredibly bad financial decision, the decision to use their hard-earned and well-conserved finances to cross state lines and engage in a seditious conspiracy.
And that decision was an epically bad decision, the kind of bad decision most of us would never be stupid enough to make. Not only was it an epically bad personal decision, it was an epically bad financial decision.
Every dime they’ve ever saved and every penny of financial equity they’ve amassed will be eaten up in legal expenses if it isn’t seized by the feds. Plus, they have put themselves in a position where they will be unable to support their families for a long, long time.
Now, my life experience has taught me that people don’t make decisions randomly. There is an underpinning to our decisions and they reflect our worldview and life philosophy. People who make prudent and thoughtful small decisions tend not to make reckless large ones.
I’ll admit this isn’t always true. I have a former close friend who recently made the really bad big decision after a lifetime of prudent decisions and it kind of freaked me out. But it freaked me out because it’s uncommon, and I still don’t believe that hundreds of financially responsible Trump supporters all made that kind of lapse, all at once.
Everyone that stormed the Capitol had succumbed to magical thinking to an extent that very few people in history have every succumbed to magical thinking, a lapse that both psychologists and historians will analyze for centuries to come.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that many of them may have made bad decisions related to magical thinking in the past.
I don’t disagree, but the most basic research should tell you that most businesses fail. So, what are you going to do that makes you or your business idea better than all those who failed?
If you just take on faith that you will succeed, that is magical thinking.
As you described is not just magical thinking, but lazy thinking as well. Opening a business is hard, and it involves far more work than you ever did working for someone else. Your examples are people looking for the easy way to riches, depending on outside forces to reward them, expecting that reward to come, because they feel entitled to it.
Agreed, except not to just this kind of bad decision. I know a bunch of failed business entrepreneurs that did not storm the Capitol.
People who make bad decisions are not incapable of making good ones as well. When they hit rock bottom, or are on the edge of losing it all, they may actually tighten up their belts and get to work. It’s really not that hard to make it, even in today’s economy.
You want an entry level job that I will train you and you will make $50,000 a year within a couple of years, come on by, I’m hiring.
But, if you are a white collar worker with a 6 figure job, if you have ever stood close to the edge, then that is entirely the result of poor financial decisions.
Eh, maybe some or most, but not all. I have a friend that buys one lottery ticket a week. He says that it pays for his right to have a fantasy, and having that fantasy is worth $2 a week. I can’t disagree with that logic. I pay as much for my Disney Plus account, where I get to watch other people live out their fantasies.
I sometimes buy one when the pot is exceptionally large, but I have occasionally bought one after a hard day at work, with the thought that I have a 1 in 300 million chance of not having to go to work tomorrow.
I think this point is slightly wrong. Going back in history, we’ll find that revolutionaries of all sorts have this kind of thinking. To bet one’s life and livelihood on changing the world is not something entirely rational people do. The January 6 insurrection will be on a long list of failed revolutions which school children will wonder about in disbelief.
Or as the first round of a continuing revolution. The Boston Massacre saw insurrectionist Americans shot by the British on the Boston Green and the British were acquitted.
(My bold)
Not a nitpick - found it when I was (unsuccessfully) googling “Toxic brightsiding” - so it’s a suggestion/query. (And BTW I was doing that because this is another well written, thought provoking post. Series of posts, indeed.)
j
The two commonly used terms are toxic positivity and brightsiding, and I inadvertently mashed them up.
Since we’re on the subject, I want to recommend Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Brightsided which is about toxic positivity in everything from business ventures and positive psychology to the treatment of people with cancer. She pinpoints the toxic positivity in business to have grown particularly strong during the mass layoffs of the 1990s when corporations went to great lengths to get workers to believe their success or failure was a matter of mindset. Apparently the self - help market exploded after that.
The phrase “toxic positivity” is new to me, but I definitely recognize it in all the stupid perfunctory baloney “advice” people have given me over the past forever years – both solicited and unsolicited. It has long since come to the point that I’ve actively told people I don’t want to hear any advice from anyone anymore.
I even have a name for it: BSDL. Bullshit, doubletalk and lies. (I have felt for a long time that BSDL should be, and should always have been, a standard initialism that everybody knows.)
… and yet, it’s been known to happen successfully on occasion. There was that case where those guys “mutually pledge[ed] to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” and pulled it off!
Rationality is overrated.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
I prefer the book, “Who Laced my Cheese with Cyanide?”
But you are a megalomaniac if you think that it is your group of thoughtful, committed citizens that will change the world.
If that’s true, then we need some megalomaniacs. (Not, however, the MAGAlomaniacs we seem to be getting.)
I don’t think it’s true, though. If you’re absolutely sure your group will do it, then maybe. If you’re sure your group will do it only because of you, then probably. But just because you think your group might do it, or at least make it possible for some later group to do it, so it’s worth a try? That doesn’t require megalomaniacs at all.
They didn’t, however, start off by claiming that the British Empire didn’t exist, or that the King was actually somebody else entirely; or that everybody in the American Colonies either agreed with them or was part of a cabal which had the purpose of torturing infants.
If they had, I doubt they’d have gotten very far. You need a lever, and a place to stand; and if the place you choose to stand on isn’t solid ground, you’re liable to just drown in the mire. Though sometimes it takes a while.
You do it because it’s the right thing to do, because it will change some small thing in some local way. Those groups who set out to solve a small problem sometimes end up changing the world, but they didn’t set out to change the world, they just set out to get the pothole in their neighborhood fixed.
This is not including groups who have already amassed political or financial power, of course. And I don’t think that the quote was referring to those groups either.
OK, I’ll ask: Why does “bullshit” get two letters but “doubletalk,” a longer word, just gets one?
Probably because you can easily deduce what the first two letters mean as “BS” is already a well-known term.
That, and also I’ve always thought of “bull shit” as two words, whereas I’ve always thought of “doubletalk” as one word. Or just an arbitrary and capricious decision, basically.
That’s true as far as my experience. I graduated high school in the mid-Eighties, and most of my classmates were pro-life, pro-gun, pro-Jesus, and pro-Reagan. I was always a liberal, but my wife started as a conservative Republican, and only later in life drifted to the left.