Toxic Positivity

Self-portrait, by Arnold Böcklin.

Toxic positivity is an expression that has gained traction in recent years and is used to describe a range of views, attitudes and culture based on the idea that we should be — or at least try to be — always upbeat, happy, content and fighting, without letting anything get us down. The expression has been linked to social and political criticism, especially when it condemns a certain type of motivation that is obviously commercial and exploitative. An example of this is the growing flood of criticism and jokes made about companies that encourage their employees to always show “grit” or “good will” regardless of how precarious their jobs. However, even outside the corporate environment, the idea is linked to the issue of productivity, albeit personal. Even in our private lives, there is pressure to always try to see the bright side of things and be ready to get back up when life knocks us down.

There is a growing market of self-help disguised as anti-self-help that has been attacking toxic positivity. I think this is partly due to the occupation of a niche of thought that was previously little explored, except by a few creators in literature and music: the niche of recognizing the haunting moments. But when we look deeper, this is still positivity. They will, of course, say that although it conveys a positive message, it is no longer toxic because it has stopped denying the dark side of things, incorporating it into the human. Yes, this is less bad than trying to force contentment without acknowledging the existence of negative states.

But in a way, even this kind of “enlightened positivity” continues to promote the insidious pressure for ceaseless productivity, creativity and engendering. Even in political movements that seek to establish a society without masters, the notion of total withdrawal from the world is considered anathema. If in a market society, someone who gives up on the world is seen as a bum or a coward who didn't have the "urge" to pursue personal success, in an egalitarian society, the person who gives up is a class enemy who defends, even without knowing it, a reactionary position.

What seems clear to me is that, as horror writer Thomas Ligotti put it, “If you can't say something positive about humanity, then say something equivocal.” Ligotti here refers to humanity not in a social or political sense, but in an existential sense. Politically, Ligotti claims to be a socialist, but more than that, he defends the grim thesis that it would have been better if none of us had existed in the first place and that the Earth were as barren as the surface of the Moon, to paraphrase Schopenhauer. We can rephrase Ligotti’s phrase to fit more into the mold of the heralds of enlightened positivity: if you have nothing positive to say about conscious life, then say something ambiguous, but never dare to condemn life as a terrible phenomenon.

Being able to bring nuance to the discourse and point out the dark side of life is good and makes enlightened positivity, at first, seem less pernicious than toxic positivity, but in the end the result of both is the same. We continue to turn the wheel of samsara. Starting from Ligotti and Schopenhauer's point, then, any positivity is toxic, because any affirmation of life, even if it recognizes the suffering inherent in being, keeps us tied to the world. It doesn't matter if positivity is toxic or enlightened, it generates the affirmation of life and induces us to continue producing copies of ourselves that will suffer in the most creative ways possible. Ligotti, commenting on the academic and literary success of the philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe and the writer H.P. Lovecraft, in addition to the success of Schopenhauer in the 19th century, writes the following:

Zapffe, Schopenhauer, and Lovecraft fared well enough without surrendering themselves to life-affirming hysterics. This is a risky thing for anyone to do, but it is even more risky for writers, because anti-vital convictions will demote their work to a lower archive than that of wordsmiths who capitulate to positive thinking, or at least follow the maxim of being equivocal when speaking of our species. Everyone wants to keep the door open on the possibility that our lives are not MALIGNANTLY USELESS. Even highly educated readers do not want to be told that their lives are an evolutionary contingency—and nothing else—and that meaning is not what people think it means.

Schopenhauer questions, at a certain point in his work, whether humanity would continue to exist if procreation were entirely based on rational deliberation and not on the emotions and sensations of the flesh. His conclusion is that perhaps we would have enough pity for the next generations and would refrain from generating them if we stopped to ponder. In fact, when speaking more poetically about the act of procreation, Schopenhauer writes that, after the sexual act, it is possible to hear the laughter of the devil, the god of becoming, where everything is unstable, painful and fleeting. Metaphorically speaking, the devil laughs after a reproductive sexual act because yet another victim has been generated to continue the temporal chain of suffering to which creatures are subjected.

In Schopenhauer's philosophy, everything in the empirical world is representation, including our bodies. Behind these representations, there is a single, timeless Will. Because it is Will, it is insatiable, and the way it manifests itself is through lacking. This is why the philosopher states that what we consider bad, negative, is in reality the positive aspect, that is, the aspect that drives all existence. Quoting Schopenhauer:

I know of no greater absurdity than that of most metaphysical systems which declare evil to be something negative; whereas it is precisely that which is positive and makes itself felt. On the other hand, that which is good, in other words, all happiness and satisfaction, is negative, that is, the mere elimination of a desire and the ending of a pain.

Life is ingenious, yes, it has beauty, love and pleasure, yes, but all of this has a macabre side. The easiest example to understand is that of hunger. If we did not feel hunger, we would not eat and we would die without the nutrients necessary to sustain life. If we did not feel the pain of a wound, it could become infected and worsen, causing our death. If this happens before we perpetuate the species, we fail to affirm the Will to life in a broader sense. Sexual desire itself is a lack that drives the species. Ironically, no desire is ever fully satisfied. Hence Schopenhauer's pessimism and his ethical prescription so detested by everyone: the denial of the Will within ourselves, the only possible victory against the monster that is existence. Compassion or a feeling of goodwill towards others would come from the recognition of our pain in other creatures and would go hand in hand with the denial of the Will within oneself, since in this insatiable world, our individual will always tries to overcome the will of others. To deny it is, therefore, to love our neighbor while renouncing the self.

About the macabre ingenuity of life, Machado de Assis—writer who was influenced by Schopenhauer's philosophy—puts the following words in the mouth of Brás Cubas, one of his most famous characters:

[...] I inferred that life is the most ingenious of phenomena because hunger only becomes sharp with an aim to bring on the occasion for eating, and that life only invented calluses because they perfect earthly happiness.

Now, life is this misery in which we are never satisfied because the foundation of everything that exists, including the foundation of life itself, is insatiable. There will be no final point of fulfillment at which things will be calm. The more one looks behind the curtain of the world, the sadder and more disappointed one becomes, for there is no admirable machinery there, nor a brilliant director. There is a horrifying emptiness that forces the actors to perform the same play over and over, day after day, without rest, only to be replaced at the end by new actors. Enlightened positivity may be more mature than so-called toxic positivity, but it affirms the Will anyway. It just doesn't do so in such a naive and neurotic way.

For 170 million years, the Will to Life manifested itself in the various species of dinosaurs that emerged and became extinct through evolutionary processes driven by intra-planetary natural selection. This lasted until the Will, in some of its purest manifestations, that is, in the form of the forces of physics, caused an asteroid measuring approximately 10 kilometers in diameter to collide with the Earth at a speed of 20 kilometers per second. The catastrophic result of this event, which occurred approximately 66 million years ago, left several marks, such as the sudden iridium layer in the geological records that covers the entire globe, as well as the Chicxulub crater, discovered in the 1970s in the Gulf of Mexico.

The mass extinction that followed allowed a group of animals to thrive and, through evolutionary processes driven by the same natural selection, become masters of the Earth. We humans are part of this group, the mammal group, and we were only able to exist thanks to a cosmic event that ended the reign of hundreds of millions of years of gigantic reptiles. There is no guarantee that the same thing will not happen again. Given our current knowledge, we are certain that, barring some technological or even supernatural miracle, all life will cease on this planet, as it may have already ceased on others. We are not special, really, and everything that surrounds us is contingent, that is, it depends on the good will of a cosmos that does not care about us. We are like fleas that can be thrown off the face of the Earth at any moment, but that believe that their suffering is worth something and, therefore, must be endured for the sake of that something.

Staying infinitely positive in the face of this situation can be seen as an act of courage, of defiance in the face of certain defeat. The problem is that this act of courage creates new sufferers who may not even understand this situation and who will go through the tortures that only conscience is capable of producing. Sobriety when it comes to being positive can't change this. Positivity, no matter the type, always ends up being toxic, because it is through it that we continue to dance while we fall into the abyss. Some fall more attentively than others, noticing the sordid details of the fall, but while they dance, all this attention does not change much, because they participate or, at the very least, encourage others to participate more and more in the chaotic revelry of life. To affirm life is to play the pernicious game of the Will, something unnecessary and a source of infinite disappointment.

by Fernando Olszewski