Smile or die

After talking with a positive thinker recently I was reminded of this great video response to it below. I've worked in companies like the ones she mentions on Wall Street, where if you come up with facts contrary to the belief that if you but visualize and affirm it's all ok you are literally fired. Such thinking played a part in the financial meltdown, since these folks refused to accept the realities around them. You saw some of this thinking in the movie The Wolf of Wall Street. I worked for a large insurance company as a risk underwriter and saw the same thing, where my job was to reject bad risks. But managers would constantly override that sort of better judgement in favor of meeting sales quotas based on nothing more than this sort of positive thinking. Which of course always had to face reality when the losses came in from those bad risks. But of course by the time such companies went under these positive sales people had made a fortune and either left with a golden parachute or were hired by other companies with the same philosophy that cared only for short term gain. It's an insidious, cruel and destructive worldview that cares only about itself and those part of this delusional club. She also astutely correlates this sort of thinking with market capitalism's invisible hand, which goes along with the sort of manifest destiny inherent to its proponents.