Quotes about stupidity

I'm posting some quotes about stupidity today, because the stupidity I see around me has really started to get to me. I don't understand how educated people can behave so stupidly in some instances, and I don't understand how some people won't use their God-given intelligence. They would rather follow a leader slavishly than use their brains and their conscience to figure out the right path for them to follow. They refuse to follow the words of Christ, yet will unthinkingly follow the words of men who are far from Christian. They don't see the hypocrisy of their situation. They don't acknowledge the lying, the self-deception, the polarization they see around them, created by the men (often quite stupid themselves) that they worship. The first and last quotes offer hope to those who want to deal with and get past the stupidity of others, and perhaps in oneself as well. 

·        The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty. --John Steinbeck

·        Stupidity really gets me going, when it's just plain stupid, obvious stupidity. --Lewis Black

·        Scientists will eventually stop flailing around with solar power and focus their efforts on harnessing the only truly unlimited source of energy on the planet: stupidity. I predict that in the future, scientists will learn how to convert stupidity into clean fuel. --Scott Adams

·        We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. --Stephen Hawking

·        There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life. --Frank Zappa

·        Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe. --Frank Zappa

·        My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species. --Joni Mitchell

·        The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity. --Arthur Schopenhauer

·        The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. --Milan Kundera

·        The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois. --Gustave Flaubert

·        No sooner does man discover intelligence than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity. --Jacques Yves Cousteau

·        Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity. --Sammy Davis, Jr.

·        That's how I was taught. That's how I was raised, to ignore the stupidity, continue on and do what I need to do. --Bubba Wallace

Summing up and getting ready to move on

This article resonated with me: Why Are Men Still Explaining Things to Women?   https://tinyurl.com/yxnvabr2

This has been my experience in academia for so many years, I can't count them. How many times my expertise has been ignored by men who need to explain to me how it really works. How many times I've laughed it off, retorted with a sardonic comment, or simply stood there and accepted the idiocy of it all. Mostly the latter. How many times have I done that? How many times have I kept my mouth shut, when I should have opened it and said 'please please please please please stop talking' (like the woman in Hemingway's story). I should have said that so many times, instead of stewing about the injustice and idiocy of it all. What I have done is discussed it with other women, ad nauseam. Today in fact was another such conversation with a woman twenty years younger than me, who has been raised to be respectful and to defer to her elders. In academia, that means to older white men. She has been rudely treated by her doctoral mentor, and he continues to behave that way toward her, even when she has called him on it in a respectful way. I have also called him on it several times. He simply doesn't and won't listen. So many of his type of men are rude, crude, arrogant and conceited. They truly think they know it all. And really, how could we expect them to think any other way when very few people (men or women) have ever challenged them on anything? These men don't know what it is like to be corrected for anything they do, and they don't like it when someone tries. I tried when I was younger, but ended up being labeled as difficult. I was told to smile more. I was told that they knew best. The problem was that they didn't. Sometimes they knew best. Statistics would back that up. No one knows best all of the time. Sometimes they knew best, sometimes they didn't. I have watched men open their mouths and stick their foot in them so many times, I've lost count. They rarely apologized for their arrogant or boorish behavior. Rarely apologized for shouting people down, talking over them, interrupting them, finishing their sentences, destroying their thought processes--in other words, rarely apologized for their bad behavior. In nearly all the cases I've seen in academia, the people they did this to were women--PhD students and post-docs. You take a lot of crap in academia, and you might think you'd be prepared for some of it based on how the world is and has been toward women over the years. But you're not prepared to be told that you're essentially ignorant when you know the opposite is true. You're not prepared to be told to keep your mouth shut as has happened to me several times in the past couple of years when I tried to correct someone's rude and humiliating behavior toward women who were simply trying to be professional about finishing their doctoral work. This particular man was irritated because his student wanted to 'discuss' some ideas with him; he thought she should just accept his ideas as the correct ones. These men are pathetic. They are threatened by women, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why, because these men sit in the positions of power and prestige, not the women they treat like crap. I think what sets them off is the knowledge that some women (like me and the doctoral student) cannot and will not be broken by these men. That was tried on me to no avail when I was younger. My will and my soul would simply not be broken. What is the meaning in that? The meaning in it is that God has a purpose for those lives. God did not want me to be broken. So if I ended up where I am supposed to be, then my life has had meaning. I have stood up for what I thought was fair and just and right. I have dared to correct men, to contradict them, to state my own opinions, to believe in my own ideas. I am proud of myself, proud that I believed in my own ideas and the ideas of other women. My most cited article, and the one that I am most proud of, was one that was rudely ridiculed by a male reviewer. Rather than being crushed by the review, I became livid. I wrote to the editor of the journal to which I had submitted my article, to criticize him for allowing such a review to reach an author. It caused all sorts of repercussions, for which I am glad to this day. I doubt that the editor had ever received a letter like the one he received from me. I still have the letter I wrote and the response I received from that editor. I should have framed both. But it was a glaring indication that I was the author of research work that had threatened the reviewer, one of the reigning gurus in the field, and that was over twenty years ago. Another example of the same was when I thought I was having an interesting conversation at a conference dinner with a well-known Norwegian professor about a particular signaling pathway and the expertise my research group had with how to detect proteins on that pathway. I don't remember if I offered advice or help with some of the detection methods, but my God, how insulted he became. How dare I assume that he needed help. He regaled the entire dinner table with how rude Americans were and how rudely they had treated his sister when she had been studying in the USA. The saving grace of that experience was the Norwegian women who supported me and who later told me privately that he was an arrogant asshole. They laughed at him behind his back. But no one dared stand up to him at the dinner table; he was allowed to be rude to me. 

So many 'learned men' in academia are always saying how the reigning gurus in the field in which they themselves work are wrong and that they instead are right. It's envy; they all want to be the reigning gurus. The most disappointing aspect of academia was finding out that there is very little real thinking going on. The search for truth is sidestepped in the quest for power, prestige, and money. Most of the intellectually-stimulating and creative discussions I've had, have occurred outside of academia, with non-academics. Perhaps it's always been that way. I am so glad I am nearing the end of my academic career. I will not miss the male privilege and the bad behavior, the arrogance, the rudeness, the lack of creativity and the lack of real thinking. I will not miss the staid way of doing things. I will not miss the dinosaurs. And I am fairly certain that they will not miss me. 

Love this song--J. Balvin, Dua Lipa, Bad Bunny, Tainy - UN DIA (ONE DAY)

 Beautiful song and lyrics........

UN DIA (ONE DAY)

Dua Lipa, Bad Bunny, ...

You know that sometimes
I think about us now and then
But I never wanna fall again, ah-ah-ah
Yo no te quisiera olvidar (eh-eh)
Pero contigo es todo o na' (eh-eh)
Yeah-yeah

You're deep in the water, yeah, you're drownin' us
You question my love like it's not enough
But I hate that you know, you know, you know
You got me tied up
You regret it now, but it's your mistake
What makes you think that my mind will change?
And you hate that you know, you know, you know
You know you messed up

One day you'll love me again
One day you'll love me for sure
One day you'll wake up feelin' how I've been feelin'
Baby, you'll knock at my door
One day you'll love me again
Hug me again 'til the end
One day you'll beg me to try
One day you'll realize I'm more than your lover
I'm more than your lover, I'm your friend

Acércate un poquito nomá'
Que yo quiero que te quedes conmigo
Deja a tus amiga' allá atrás
Que no' vamos en un viaje escondido'
No' vamo' pa' Turks and Caicos
Y ahí calmamo' las ganas
Suéltate conmigo, mamá
Que ya no hay marcha atrás
Una noche sin ti
No es tan fácil, baby
Que yo soy pa' ti
Y tú eres pa' mí

Nunca me dejes de querer
Oh, na-na-na
Contigo por siempre, baby
No quiero dejarte esta vez

One day you'll love me again
One day you'll love me for sure
One day you'll wake up feelin' how I've been feelin'
Baby, you'll knock at my door
One day you'll love me again
Hug me again 'til the end
One day you'll beg me to try
One day you'll realize I'm more than your lover (yeah, yeah, yeah)
I'm more than your lover, I'm your friend

Yo sé que estoy en tu corazón, quizás en el fondo
Otra baby me escribe, nunca le respondo (no)
La vida da vuelta' y el mundo es redondo
Y yo voy a que te beso de nuevo en London
O si no en Marbella (wuh)
Encima de la arena viendo las estrella'
Yo sé que ni la' ola' han borrao' mi huella (yeh)
Pero tu pichaera es lo que me atropella
Sol, playa y en la arena, vamo' allá (wuh)
Baby, no te quedes callá'
Yo sé que tú quiere' guayar conmigo
Otra vez me tienes en depresión
Fumando en la habitación, eh
Pero yo sé que

One day you'll love me again (wuh)
One day you'll love me for sure
One day you'll wake up feelin' how I've been feelin'
Baby, you'll knock at my door
One day you'll love me again
Hug me again 'til the end
One day you'll beg me to try
One day you'll realize I'm more than your lover
I'm more than your lover, I'm your friend

Baby (ay-ay-ay-aye)
One day you'll love me again
One day you'll realize I'm more than your lover
I'm more than your lover, I'm your friend
J Balvin, man
Bad Bunny, baby
Tainy
Latino Gang (yeah)
La Familia

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Alejandro Borrero / Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio / Clarence Coffee / Daystar Peterson / Dua Lipa / Ivanni Rodríguez / José Álvaro Osorio Balvin / Marcos Efraín Masis

UN DIA (ONE DAY) lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Things are going downhill

Six months into the pandemic, and things are starting to go downhill in terms of how people behave or do their jobs. I'm not sure why, but a good indication is that most (young) people seem to have forgotten how to social distance. There are very few of them that remember to do so, and it is always me who has to move away from them if I meet them on the sidewalk or in a store. It's incredibly annoying. Add to that the ones who hold parties with many people, and you get the picture. For them, the pandemic is over, if it ever even occurred. They are hopeless cases. Case in point: the recent bunker party that nearly ended in the deaths of many of the attendees. In my opinion, not only is there a coronavirus pandemic, but there's an epidemic of stupidity and idiocy. You can read about this incredibly stupid rave party here:   https://www.newsinenglish.no/2020/08/31/two-charged-after-illegal-bunker-party/

There are other things that have happened during the past two weeks that are an indication that people's attention spans are getting less focused and that work output is getting sloppier. The first situation concerns online shopping; I know that a lot of people are shopping on the web now, so there is probably a backlog of orders most places. I ordered four items two weeks ago from an online pharmacy here in Norway. I have ordered from before (three times) without any problems. This time, my order was not confirmed and I had to contact them to get a confirmation. Then today, I got my shipment, but it was someone else's order, so now I am in the process of trying to contact the company via telephone to find out how to return the items at no cost to me. Of course I was put on hold, because as always, there is always a long queue of people waiting to be served, which I never believe is the reality. It's rather that they only have one or two persons dealing with telephone customer service. They would prefer that you contacted them by email or used their chatbot function (which is a piece of garbage). Finally I got through, and of course the onus is on me to prove that I got the wrong shipment. I had to take photos of what I received and photos of the box the items were sent in, and send an email with the photos to customer service. I did all that, so now I wait to see what happens. I cancelled my original order and asked for a refund. I have no patience for this crap. 

Today, out of the blue, I got tossed off my hospital's email server--no warning, no explanation, no nothing. So now I have no functioning email account and cannot receive emails from people. I have two work email accounts, none of which can be accessed from home. It's pathetic. The IT service people are trying to help but they have no idea what's wrong. It won't be solved; just an intuition, but the explanations that have been advanced so far don't hold water. I could connect early this morning, and then suddenly around mid-morning, I couldn't. Go figure. It's a good thing I am retiring sooner than later, because I no longer have any patience for this. And hopefully this isn't an omen for how the rest of the week is going to be. But you never know. 

 

Reflections on hope and Pandora's box

We read the fable about Pandora’s Box when we were children, and it made an impression on me all those years ago that remains to this day. How could a woman who was entrusted with a box containing all the evils and illnesses in the world, open that very box and release them to the world? Was it curiosity that drove her, or was she tainted by evil herself? She only managed to close the box before Hope escaped, so that Hope remained in the box, presumably to ensure that mankind’s destruction was not sealed. Of course one could wonder why Hope was sealed into a box with all the world’s evils and illnesses, but that is not what this post is concerned with today. 

I am reminded of this fable because of the current political situation in America. It seems to me that our current president has opened the same box containing all the evils and sicknesses in the world. They’ve all come rushing out—bigotry, hatred, anger, aggression, white supremacy, lack of empathy, hypocrisy, lying, cheating, disregard for the weak, among others. These evils dominate our media on a daily basis, and ultimately, dominate our daily lives. We wake up, live, breathe, eat, and go to sleep with them. They wear us down, erode our patience, destroy our internal peace, destroy relationships, and create chaos. If you don’t believe me, just take a look around you and peruse social media or your daily newspaper. Or talk to your friends and family members about what is going on. It is clear to me that the president is very good at creating chaos and then benefitting from it in one way or another. If we don’t wake up soon, we are headed for anarchy, and it will be primarily his fault, for opening a box that should have remained shut. I read a good article yesterday written by a journalist who longed for a 'boring' presidency; by that he meant that he longed for a president who doesn't dominate our daily lives the way the current one does. He longed for a president who doesn't foment hatred and chaos. He longed for a president who just governed quietly and calmly without all the hype, PR, tweeting, hypocrisy, and lying. I agree with him wholeheartedly. 

The only thing I’m not quite sure of is whether Hope remains in the box that has been opened. Hope. What is it really? Is it blind optimism? Is it faith in something better for the future? Is it an ordinary human trait, innate in our personality? I’d like to think so. Is it unrealistic? At times, probably. But in dire situations, it’s all we have. We have to hope and trust that things will get better. But when you take a look at other countries in the world, bad situations don’t get better overnight. Sometimes it takes half a century or more for a country to get out from under a brutal dictator, or for a country to rise up from poverty and starvation. Many times they don’t get there without help from other countries. Those other countries have hope that things can be better, and they help because they know situations can change for the better. 

Those of us who live in democracies know that things can get better. We have a say in how our countries should be run, and they should not be run by dictators. If we truly want change, we have to hope and plan for change. We have to trust that change is possible. We have to use our vote to ensure that change. A vote against the man who opened up the box of evils is a good start. We need to restore order where there is chaos, peace where there is discord, kindness where there is brutality, and civility where there is disrespect. If we don’t do this soon, we have no one to blame but ourselves. 

 

Autumn's call

 

I love this beautiful illustration and text about autumn. The illustration was done by Danielle Barlow; she has done illustrations with accompanying texts for each season. I just checked out her website and it is so worth visiting:   https://www.daniellebarlowart.com/    

Enjoy!

Just so spot on, from Stephan Pastis

 

The bird bath is a popular meeting place

A few days ago, it was the sparrows who were enjoying a communal bath in the birdbath in the garden. Today, it was a meeting place for many of the garden's honeybees who were eagerly drinking the water. It was a warm and dry day, so that was probably the explanation for why there were so many (at one point I counted up to sixteen bees sitting on the rim of the bath). I have never seen so many of them gathered at the 'drinking hole' before. They were buzzing to and fro, landing on the rim of the bath and then taking off again. A few of them ended up in the water, twirling about like whirligigs. If they don't get find their way out of the water quickly, they can drown. So I have helped them out a few times, offering a (gloved) finger or a stick for them to climb on. They grab on eagerly, and if they're not too waterlogged, they fly away fairly quickly, which always makes me happy. This is a video of the bees today in the garden. 

Past the halfway mark and moving toward 2021

 

Sparrows having a communal bird bath in the garden today

This is the second time I've seen the sparrows do this. The first time was about a month ago and I tried filming them but something didn't work out right and the videos I took were blank. Today I managed to shoot three short videos of them enjoying their bath, splashing around. When they're done, there are huge drops of water all over the place. They are an endless source of entertainment--I love watching them. 

Are we great yet?

Couldn't resist this, it's just so spot on. I thought Trump was supposed to be making America great again these past four years. What an epic failure that project turned out to be. Just take a look at today's America and ask yourself--are we great yet? Are we better off than we were four years ago? The answer is unequivocally NO.

Some photos from a late August garden

Some photos of the garden from this past Saturday. Enjoy!

Too Much and Never Enough--a review

I finished Mary Trump's book today; it's a quick and easy read, coming in at 211 pages. The best writing comes toward the end, in the last chapter and the epilogue. It is there you find her strongest psychological assessments of Donald Trump, and they are very interesting since she is educated as a clinical psychologist. Rather than my writing a review of the book, I encourage everyone to read it, as it is well-worth reading. I am including some quotes from the book (Fred is Donald Trump's father, Freddy is Mary's father and Donald's brother who died very young). The quotes speak for themselves.

• “The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for. At this point, we can’t evaluate his day-to-day functioning because he is, in the West Wing, essentially institutionalized. Donald has been institutionalized for most of his adult life, so there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.”
• “Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information.”
• “Though nothing Donald did surprised me, the speed and volume with which he started inflicting his worst impulses on the country—from lying about the crowd size at the inauguration and whining about how poorly he was treated to rolling back environmental protections, targeting the Affordable Care Act in order to take affordable health care away from millions of people, and enacting his racist Muslim ban—overwhelmed me.”
• “Donald’s need for affirmation is so great that he doesn’t seem to notice that the largest group of his supporters are people he wouldn’t condescend to be seen with outside of a rally. His deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s soaked it in. Nothing is ever enough.”
• “I hope this book will end the practice of referring to Donald’s “strategies” or “agendas,” as if he operates according to any organizing principles. He doesn’t. Donald’s ego has been and is a fragile and inadequate barrier between him and the real world, which, thanks to his father’s money and power, he never had to negotiate by himself. Donald has always needed to perpetuate the fiction my grandfather started that he is strong, smart, and otherwise extraordinary, because facing the truth—that he is none of those things—is too terrifying for him to contemplate.”
• “The simple fact is that Donald is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others. Telling the stories of those we’ve lost would bore him. Acknowledging the victims of COVID-19 would be to associate himself with their weakness, a trait his father taught him to despise. Donald can no more advocate for the sick and dying than he could put himself between his father and Freddy. Perhaps most crucially, for Donald there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring for other people. David Corn wrote, “Everything is transactional for this poor broken human being. Everything.” It is an epic tragedy of parental failure that my uncle does not understand that he or anybody else has intrinsic worth.”
• “Fred didn’t groom Donald to succeed him; when he was in his right mind, he wouldn’t trust Trump Management to anybody. Instead, he used Donald, despite his failures and poor judgment, as the public face of his own thwarted ambition. Fred kept propping up Donald’s false sense of accomplishment until the only asset Donald had was the ease with which he could be duped by more powerful men.”
• “That’s what sociopaths do: they co-opt others and use them toward their own ends—ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance. Fred destroyed Donald, too, but not by snuffing him out as he did Freddy; instead, he short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it. His capacity to be his own person, rather than an extension of his father’s ambitions, became severely limited.”
• “Abuse can be quiet and insidious just as often as, or even more often than, it is loud and violent. As far as I know, my grandfather wasn’t a physically violent man or even a particularly angry one. He didn’t have to be; he expected to get what he wanted and almost always did. It wasn’t his inability to fix his oldest son that infuriated him, it was the fact that Freddy simply wasn’t what he wanted him to be. Fred dismantled his oldest son by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality and his natural abilities until all that was left was self-recrimination and a desperate need to please a man who had no use for him.”
• “With millions of lives at stake, he takes accusations about the federal government’s failure to provide ventilators personally, threatening to withhold funding and lifesaving equipment from states whose governors don’t pay sufficient homage to him. That doesn’t surprise me. The deafening silence in response to such a blatant display of sociopathic disregard for human life or the consequences for one’s actions, on the other hand, fills me with despair and reminds me that Donald isn’t really the problem after all.”
• “Many, but by no means all of us, have been shielded until now from the worst effects of his pathologies by a stable economy and a lack of serious crises. But the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression, deepening social divides along political lines thanks to Donald’s penchant for division, and devastating uncertainty about our country’s future have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage."

Reflections on “Everything’s great. Right, Toots? You just have to think positive"

I am reading Mary Trump's book Too Much and Never Enough. I can't say that it's an enjoyable book to read, that would be lying, but it is interesting in its own way--the tale of a dysfunctional family that created the man who is currently the 45th president of the USA. What strikes me about the Trump family is that lying about nearly everything plays a major role in their interactions with each other. Or if not directly lying, a blatant and total disregard for the truth staring them right in the face. It's hard to know where to start, and since I haven't yet finished the book, I'll wait until I do before posting a review. However, there are some things I can comment about already.

Mary Trump says her uncle Donald fits all of the criteria for the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. If you have never had any contact with a true narcissist, consider yourself lucky. For those of you who have had the bad fortune to know one in your personal life, you have my sincere sympathy. I wrote a post about narcissistic personality disorder in October 2019; you can access it here:   https://paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com/2019/10/learning-about-narcissistic-personality.html

Narcissists are walking cyclones that will destroy your life if you let them (in). As I wrote in October 2019, "......steer clear of these types of people if you want your life to be in any way peaceful or happy, or if you want to prevent the destruction of your own life. Let the professionals deal with them. It is not worth the heartache involved to try and care about these people". 

I have not changed my mind, and Mary Trump's book merely reinforces my statement. How do you know you are in the presence of a narcissist? They lie. Even when confronted with the naked horrible truth about themselves or their life situations, they lie. They promote themselves shamelessly. They are all about self-aggrandizement. They think the world of themselves and very little of others (others are often stupid, lazy or cowards for not taking the risks they take). Conversations with them are all about them, never about you or your life. They demand loyalty but don't give it in return. When they are done with you, they will cut you out of their lives without a moment's notice. They are delusional for the most part, with some rare few moments of insight, that give you hope that they will perhaps seek help and get better. But they don't. They promise that they will though, but they don't. They may even work as therapists, which terrifies me even more. Because the operative word is terrified; they are scary people, cyclones as I said. Steer clear of them. When you are in their presence, all good fresh healthy air is sucked out of the room and replaced by an air of suffocation. An hour with a narcissist is more than enough for a lifetime. They live in their own worlds of insanity and drag you in and along for the wild ride, if you let them. Many of them are whip-smart and charming, and that's how they hook you. And once hooked, trust me, getting yourself unhooked will require a courage and a willpower that you never knew you had. My advice to anyone who is living with or has interactions with a narcissist--get out and get away.

The title of my post is “Everything’s great. Right, Toots? You just have to think positive.” That's what Donald Trump's father used to say all the time, especially to his wife who was often in ill health. How comforting that must have been to hear. Essentially you say to another person, your illness is your fault because you didn't think positively enough. Imagine saying that to someone with cancer or any other terminal illness. I know younger people with cancer, and a few that have recently died of cancer. Not a one of them wished their illness on themselves. None of them is a negative person; in fact, the one person who died recently from brain cancer was a cheerful upbeat person with many friends who respected him highly. If 'thinking positively' had any real merit, the world would not be drowning in painkillers and addictions to painkillers that are killing thousands of people. It would not be drowning in the abuse of anti-depressants. 'Thinking positively' does not lead to sobriety, it is the humble willingness to admit that you have a problem and that you need help that lead to sobriety. You have to want to change your life. The Serenity Prayer says it best "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. The Serenity Prayer is the complete opposite of narcissism. Narcissists never really admit that they need help; you may think that they're asking for help, but ultimately you have misunderstood the situation. Because a few days later, everything's fine again, and your conversation with them about all that was 'wrong' has been forgotten, or perhaps never took place. “Everything’s great. Right, Toots? You just have to think positive.” 

What a strange world we live in, a world that adulates and rewards the shallow thinkers, the con-men, the narcissists, the ruthless capitalists, the criminals, the 'do as I say, not as I do' people. Whenever one of them gets caught for his or her crimes, I rejoice. It's a start toward dismantling the hold that narcissists have on our society. Because if you think about it, the message of 'think positive' has morphed into 'think only of yourself'. Too much emphasis on self can only lead to the mess that surrounds us in the world. Too much emphasis on self has destroyed personal lives and relationships. I applaud Mary Trump; it probably took all of her courage to write the book. It must have been extremely hard to write about a family that probably terrifies her. She exposes the 'people of the lie'. And in that context, I can recommend M. Scott Peck's excellent book People of the Lie, if you want to learn more about how Peck defines evil and his confrontations with pathological liars and narcissists in his therapy practice. You gain valuable information, but not without a cost. That cost is the fear that you feel when you read about them, and the true fear when you know you have to deal with them. 

Black Pumas - Colors (Official Live Session)