Worzel's World- The Origins of Positivity

I met a bloke the other night who had read this column. Obviously an expert, he told me I should be more 'positive'. I replied that I preferred to be realistic.

He shook his head and looked at me like I was some low-life that had just crawled out of a muddy swamp and proceeded to share the benefits of his not-inconsiderable wisdom with me. 

Now, we had had a couple of drinks and so maybe I'm remembering things a little skewiff, but here's what he reckoned. At least, it's how I recall it:

“I can see you’re ignominious of modern sigh-collegy,” he said, “so I s'pose I’ll have to a-splain everything from the beginning.

“In ancient times before we was unlightened, everyone blamed everthing on God but this ended when a fella called Darwin discovered evil-ution. Evil-ution proved that God had been bullshitting everyone big-time about the Garden of Eden thing. That man-kind, man-unkind and even man-complete-and-utter-bastard hadn’t as aforethought been cast from Para-dies but had, in point of fact and science, crawled out of a prime-evil swamp to find themselves in something called the plaster-scene error.

 “Survival of the fittest was the fashion and God, quite writely, was deemed unfit for keeping company with those what had crawled out of swamps. Except for those in fox holes, which is another story entirely.

“Without God and swamps people were left high and dry. And in accordance with the new law of survival of the fittest, they became prone to beating each other up in order to find out who was fittest and therefore who should survive. This proved very frustrating as even the fittest died in the end. Indeed old scientific fossils showed that there were no survivors at all apart from the occasional very dodgy-looking character dug up in places that used to be swamps.

“When people thought about this they became susceptible to depression, since at that stage no-body had got around to inventing Prozac. It was necessary for a bloke called Sigmend Fraud to invent a thing called psycho-analogy or psycho-anthropology or something like that. Anyhow by studying psycho’s he decided that when a bloke’s yakking about tractors or the footy or just about anything, he’s really thinking about shagging some Greek fella’s mother. I think the whole thing’s called an octopus complex though I’m not sure why, probably because it’s very complex and has more legs than you can shack a stick at. This, quite naturally enough, took a few by surprise and many people weren’t too keen to discuss tractors or footy after that, cause psycho-analogists would immediately spot a fraudulent slip and realise that they were actually dirty-minded hua’s. 

“To make a long story slightly shorter, what with one thing and another, the thrust of contemporary scientific thinking concluded that we are all a bunch of pretty sick puppies with no God and that everyone dies early except the fittest who die a bit later on. Of course it’s all very well being wise to this but you’ve gotta admit it’s a bit distressing. There had to be a solution to this sad state of affairs and today the remedy is ‘positivity’. 

“If you’re not positive then you'll suffer from low ‘selfish-steam’. Staying positive is very much the thing and the general idea seems to be that to avoid getting pissed off and depressed we’ve got to continuously bullshit ourselves into thinking that everything is a lot better than it actually is. A great many self-appointed experts have convinced us that most problems are caused by a lack of this ‘selfish-steam’ and that no matter how stupid, bad or useless someone is, it is of vital importance that they convince themselves that they are a great deal better than they actually are. 

“So consequently if you set clear goals, stay positive, and work hard at convincing yourself they can be achieved, there is no limit to the trouble you can cause. By completely deluding yourself that you can climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow, you can end up drowned, freezing on top of a mountain or very leg weary with no pot of gold to show for it. But at least then we won’t have to put up with you any more, which I suppose is better than nothing at all. And looking at it positively we should remember that whenever anyone dies there is more dinner for everyone else that night.”

“Are you sure about this?' I asked sceptically.

“Sure mate?” he replied, “I’m bloody positive.”
 

prof_worzel@hotmail.com