He examined how the idea of Positive Thinking had originated in America and spread outward from it, pervading many areas of Western thought and creating a culture which could be highly toxic to the less fortunate, blaming them for failing to think their way out of their hardships. He argued this expressed itself in two other American-initiated movements: the Wellness movement and the Prosperity Gospel.

The Wellness movement has a grain of truth in it inasmuch as optimism has positive psychosomatic effects, just as anxiety can have negative ones. The problem comes when that leads to a belief optimism is the sole determinant of health and ignores the obvious obstacle to that which is the inevitability of ageing and death. Illness is not mostly caused by pessimism though hardship can certainly increase it, but then hardship is not necessarily caused by failing to grasp opportunities; we have to have them before we can grasp them, and anyway, not all opportunites are ethical or wise.

Syed saw the Prosperity Gospel at work in the Church in which he grew up, where there was an assumption good people would be rewarded with wealth and health, and those who lacked these things did so because they lacked faith or were not living good lives. Such a belief would be pernicious and un-Bilbical. There is an entire, to our understanding rather long-winded, book in the Bible mocking the idea, though I suspect its long-windedness is more a result of our lack of appreciation of its humour in our very different culture and language than of any failure by the original author.

It tells the story of Job, a man so devout God boasts about him to Satan who responds with something akin to Syed’s idea of the Prosperity Gospel. Job, he argues is only devout because God rewards him for it. The argument leads to a bet, and Satan is given two succesive opportunities to take away everything and everyone Job loves, and when that doesn't work, Job's health as well. Job accepts all this as God’s prerogative. So far as Job is concerned, God’s in charge and can do what he likes. This sets the scene for the protagonists to gather, on the basis they are friends wishing to comfort Job, only their comforting just torments him further. They believe the reason for Job’s predicament is simple; he must have done something really terrible to deserve what’s happened to him and their first instinct is to ask him for all the scandalous details. They don’t accept his position, insisting he is accusing God of injustice and that proves he is wicked. The argument goes round in circles as they try to persuade Job it’s all about him and his need to face up to what he’s done while Job complains God hasn’t told him and he doesn’t know. Another person who’s been listening becomes frustrated enough to interverne and speak up, spending half his time justifying his right to speak and the other half saying much the same as the others. In the end, God has had enough and intervenes not with an explanation but with withering sarcasm against them all.

This seems to be the style in which philosophical questions were tackled in the ancient world. We certainly know the Greeks later used this method to work through theoretical problems but Job suggests the style predates the Greeks and it appears to be that kind of writing it mocks. With the style though cames the idea behind the style, which is that we can always solve a problem by thinking it through, the idea we can make truth if we think hard enough. It’s an idea which puts us rather than any absolute reality at the heart of things, and that’s a rather arrogant position.

I turned to thinking how this might relate to other ideas eminating from North America and the so called Culture Wars with their roots in them. Are they also a result of the same “positivity”? Is their ultimate root in the idea we can think things into existence? We can be what we want to be. We can define ourselves in our own terms so our desires become part of our nature and an inalienable right. Are these ideas also rooted in that demand for Positive Thinking? Is Positive Thinking responsible for the Post Truth society?

While we’re so busy thinking positively, we seem to neglect some hard truths. The demands we place on the world we live in hit a hard barrier in the world’s limitations and when that happens the world will deal with us and we won’t like it. Climate change could starve us as crops fail across the world. Our huge demand for more and more to power evermore consumptive technologies will at some point hit the resource limitation. The future we envisage might not actually be achievable.

These are not positive thoughts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong.