When I was a kid back in the 50s and 60s, my parents had a book called The Power of Positive Thinking (read an extract here), written by a minister called Norman Vincent Peale. I never really got into the book, but the idea was that people’s negative thoughts could cause negative outcomes in their lives, and that people should learn to think positively; if they do, God will grant them positive outcomes.
In the intervening years, I’ve rarely thought of the the Reverend Peale, his book, or his philosophy (although I’ve been vaguely aware that the basic idea has modern proponents, although not usually with the Christian approach advocated by Peale).
However, today, I read this interesting NY Times article about the role their respective religious backgrounds have had on the campaigns and personal and political philosophies of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. In the section on Trump, the article reports that
Mr. Trump’s bravado can be traced to what he learned inside Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, according to Gwenda Blair, the author of “The Trumps,” a multigenerational portrait of the family, and one of our guests on the show. At the church, a charismatic minister named Norman Vincent Peale preached a theology of positive thinking, the rejection of negative thoughts and relentless self-promotion. Sound familiar?
“He was known as God’s salesman, but it was really selling the idea of success,” Ms. Blair says of Dr. Peale.
That message seemed to resonate for a young Mr. Trump. “Everything he does is about winning. It’s only about winning and losing — those are the only two principles that are involved,” Ms. Blair says. “That’s a very Norman Vincent Peale notion — that notion of success above all.”
It goes on to point out certain similarities in the language used by Peale and Trump, including the use of superlatives such as “tremendous”.
This was an epiphany for me. Donald Trump is a Norman Vincent Peale follower! The modern equivalent might be a Tony Robins follower, or, for that matter, a Trump University graduate, or any New Age philosophy which teaches that one can control one’s environment by one’s thoughts. He really has drunk deeply of the kool-aid, and has adopted an outlook on life wherein if he really, really believes that he will succeed, then he really, really will. And apparently this philosophy resonates with his supporters.
If true, this explains many things without the necessity of invoking any kind of mental illness beyond simple credulity and well-entrenched religious belief. Why do counterfactuals matter, for example? If you can just keep that positive attitude going, just never let reality bring you down, then you will succeed, through the supernatural intercession of Christ.
It is important to recognize, by the way, that for Peale and Trump, “positive” does not have its ordinary meaning. It means “positive for yourself”, not generally positive or positive for the nation or for mankind. This is how the extreme negativity radiating from every aspect of Trump’s campaign (and his approach to life) can remain compatible with Peale’s philosophy.