The Virtue of Negativity
Full resolution comes through letting ourselves feel bad.
Many of us live in societies that highly value productivity and a positive attitude. Certainly, the ethos of Anglo societies pushes us not to engage much with negativity, but to regroup through some inner pep talk, “get back on the horse” and keep working and achieving. Such social environments tell us from early childhood that we should strive to be our best selves, putting our best foot forward and quietly managing any inner conflict. When asked, we are always “great,” or at worst “ok” or “fine.”
The Anglo society as a collective tends to function in a similar manner. The contemporary brand of American meritocracy, for example, which sets the tone for much of global culture today, aims to select the best and weed out the mediocre through a competitive economy. So the functioning of the entire society works to put its own best foot forward, incentivizing excellence with significant financial reward, backing its best talents with industry and showcasing them to the rest of the globe.
On one level, this social ethos has been extraordinarily successful. As we all know, the United States is currently globally dominant, in terms of both hard and soft power, and American media (despite many criticisms that could be made of it) is popular across the world, and recognized for both its quality and quantity. The sheer number of high production value films that come out of the U.S. every year, for example, is staggering. The meritocratic, best-foot-forward mentality of the society also makes it very dynamic – even in hard times such as these, new high-quality media is created chronicling the difficulties. No matter what the society is going through, it knows how to produce and sell itself, usually with a certain excellence.
That said, there is a central dysfunction in this approach. The notion of a “best self” is confusing – how do you determine what parts of you are good and what parts of you are bad? By what others value? Is your “best self” really, perhaps, an idealized image based on consumer marketing and peer pressure? Or do you define your best self by what you yourself value? Assuming you’ve done some soul searching, and have a sense of what you, personally, value, how do you go about bringing out those “best” qualities in yourself? Do you deny self-expression that doesn’t cohere with your model framework? Do you repress yourself in the name of an ideal?
The trouble is that idealizing a best self is divisive. You are not, ultimately, a fragmented being with “good” and “bad” parts. You are a whole. You are one self. Anything that we call “good” points to the integration of the self. Inner peace, intelligence (in a deeper sense than quick reasoning), creativity, inspiration, empathy, compassion, depth – these are all qualities most fully expressed in a whole, integrated person. Integration, however, means recognizing and accepting all the fragmented “parts” of the self; allowing them all to be and resolve themselves.
The fixation on a “best self,” on the other hand, is disintegrative. It is a sort of inner elitism that prioritizes certain expressions and represses or, at best, overlooks others (collectively, we can see that meritocracy can come to engender similar elitism and repression). By prioritizing certain dimensions of ourselves and suppressing others, we keep ourselves divided into parts, denying ourselves integration and the possibility for whole expression. We know ourselves in pieces, rather than truly and deeply. We manage ourselves rather than be ourselves.
The need to constantly perform, to be always positive, useful or productive rather than honest or authentic (when we have to make a choice between both options) perpetuates such inward division. We don’t tend to look at it this way, but constant positivity requires a lot of dishonesty. We are not always great or fine. Often, we feel terrible, and for good reason. Certainly, as we look at the dysfunction of the world around us, it is healthy to feel unwell. To observe climate change or racism and feel ok about them, or to “try not to think about them” because they don’t make us feel good, are, respectively, delusional or avoidant responses. It seems quite healthy to be deeply disturbed, or even depressed for a time by the state of our world. Much of the world around us is not positive, and doesn’t seem to be improving. That’s not a “negative” statement, but the simple observation of a negative reality.
When we refuse to see and feel clearly negativities in or around us, we are powerless to bring resolution. If we refuse to see the real burden of racism in our world, for example, we deny the violent reality that many live day to day. We need to hear and see negativity – to make space in our hearts for the full weight of pain in others, and in ourselves – to truly have compassion, and move towards whole resolution that acknowledges the real depth of conflict present. There is no “moving past” negativity. There is only denial, or engagement. We can’t resolve what we won’t acknowledge. We can’t wish away the pain in us. We can only open ourselves to it and feel it, as terrible as it may be. We can’t really “get over” or “get through” things, but resolve ourselves into them and let ourselves be moved and changed by them. So we look at the pain and negativity in and around us, we listen, and we allow ourselves to sense it with open minds and hearts. That is, on the one hand, scary and overwhelming, because it means giving up control and letting ourselves be moved by the world beyond our egos. On the other hand, it is a path to resolution deeper than we can imagine, and it is ultimately only that total unknown, beautiful though it may be, that so threatens us.
So truly meaningful resolution requires the engagement of negativity. We have to allow ourselves to see the whole picture, good and bad, best and worst, in order to come to personal and collective resolution. On a social level, the denial of this whole picture through a “best-foot-forward” mentality has created so many specialized systems with unintended destructive effects. So, for example, we have found ways to efficiently transport goods all over the world. So we’ve created massive and successful cattle industries, and pesticides to protect monoculture crops. So we’ve created efficient systems for the disposal of waste in landfills. All of these achievements are impressive in themselves, and if we consider them ”positively,” only in the light of their benefits, they are very good things. But their unintended environmentally destructive consequences are vast, and in the pursuit of excellence we have lost sight of sustainable balance.
Surely, whatever is truly good is so not only in the short term, but sustainably. Through refusing the whole picture, and prioritizing the “positive” and “productive” rather than integrating all of our negative doubts and misgivings – through pushing for a controllable progress rather than allowing a genuine, natural tendency of resolution to move through us – haven’t we lost ourselves in monstrous particularities of determined achievement, and don’t we continue to do so? Don’t we force into the world a limited “good” at the expense of the whole? Is all of this the genuine progress of resolution, or a shortsighted contrivance of gain and measured success?
Through such a limited focus we have also pathologized many negative reactions to our collective activity. We know that what we call mental illness doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and that environment is a significant factor in its development. Of course not all, but much of mental illness is very much a reflection of surrounding circumstances. In an age of alienation, gross overproduction and destructive consumption, it seems natural that many might “shut down” in unconscious disengagement. Social withdrawal and depression, for example, are understandable possible reactions to a context that is acting unsustainably and out of balance. A whole variety of “disturbed” reactions seem possible natural reflections of a disturbing world, and a global status quo or normative functioning that hasn’t yet reconciled itself to the consequences of its own dysfunction (climate change chief among them).
In our current global state, where overpopulation and environmental destruction are the greatest challenges facing humanity, is increased productivity or growth really a virtue? If the single greatest threat to our race is overgrowth itself, isn’t it more important to “step off the gas pedal” rather than press down harder? Isn’t the real virtue in an overgrown world the deceleration of growth? I’m aware that such a notion might sound absurd to modern ears, accustomed as we are to a lifelong association of productivity and achievement with goodness. But doesn’t our notion of goodness have to consider what is actually, sustainably good for us, as a species? If our current global “work hard, play hard” growth paradigm is unsustainable, then is the determinedly positive and productive spirit it encourages really so good?
Or is it better, in these times, to allow ourselves to see clearly, and to feel, all the complicated circumstances about us, letting them act on us as they will, and trusting that perhaps we are profound enough as humans to recognize it all, and to shift? We underestimate the depth in ourselves if we believe that we have to block out the negativities around us. We can instead become present, feeling our inner aliveness and becoming rooted in consciousness, and allow the wisdom of all of the fragmented “parts” of ourselves – even the negative ones – into our hearts. We can invite the integration of our whole being, letting ourselves acknowledge and feel all that we know, good and bad, and come to live with a whole understanding of ourselves and the world around us. That process may not look positive or productive, but it is the only path to true resolution. Only through internal integration can we open our perspectives to see the full consequences of our actions – even those that our selective paradigms have blocked out. To give up on determined positivity and productivity may seem plainly negative, but the resolution of all the negative weight within us into our being is the only way to a truly healthy world, even if it starts with feeling bad.
Please feel free to get in touch for meditation classes or spiritual counseling over video.
You can also find me at my website, Facebook page or Instagram account (I’m now up with the times).
