Civilised Witchcraft

Positive affirmations are bullshit.

The Card Game by Balthus (1973)

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They’re everywhere one looks. They harass innocent passengers just dragging themselves from Tube station to Tube station. These agents of social corrosion assault the eyes and the ears.

On the carriage, they lurk. They implore you: Look at me! They colonise your attention. You do what any well-adjusted person does. You look at your shoes. Just let them go about their grubby little business. You scuttle off the Tube at Holborn. But still, you must navigate from the bowels to the oesophagus to the tonsils and pole-vault out of the mouth, all whilst avoiding their senseless relentless glare. They’re lined along the escalator walls, neatly pressed together like Roman centurions. You are loved! You are enough! Sexualised staring is a form of harassment. The noise is a sparking Dalek soaked in Coca-Cola: Please hold the handrail! Stand on the right! Walk on the left! And please, do not rush.

You’re being squeezed out of a tube of Colgate. Finally, you escape onto the pavement. There’s more.

“Excuse me, sir. If you could just spare a minute. We are raising awareness of the zebra-striped bumblebee…”

You grin like a hyena on mescaline. The standard ‘I’m fucking busy, mate.’ It works. It’s over.

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Into the Shakespeare’s Head, you step. Here is your safe space. Above the bar, a sign: Bad date? Your Tinder match not who they say they are? Ask for Angela at the bar and we’ll keep you safe.

You wonder what happens to chatty women named Angela, who having not read the sign, inadvertently trigger the codeword during compulsory small talk with the hypervigilant bar staff.

“She said her name was Angela.”

“Who did?”

“That lady over there. With the treble Bombay Sapphire in her hand.”

Click. Before Angela can plop her drink on the table, a platoon of social workers, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, therapists, descend upon her.

“Angela?”

“Yes.”

“Right. Come with us. It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay.”

“You what?”

Angela’s treble gin dresses the carpet as the professional helpers drag her into the waiting van outside. A Polish bouncer, built like a Victorian public restroom, pancakes you. You make out the Polish catch-all swearword. You know that kurwa means something bad.

And all you wished to do today was to meet your friend Angela in the pub.

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This little fable might appear far-fetched. But the ‘Ask for Angela’ bar sign and the ‘You are enough’ Tube poster are twin heads of the same bureaucratic hydra: an institutional obsession with managing human emotion through cheap, state-sanctioned slogans. Everywhere you step, a sign seemingly authored by a neurotic 12-year-old warns you of immanent danger.

But what if such seemingly well-intentioned campaigns were little more than bullshit?

When Professor Joanne Wood studied positive affirmations at the University of Waterloo, she found that not only are they often ineffective, but even downright harmful.

“Among participants with high self-esteem, those who repeated the statement or focused on how it was true felt better than those who did not, but to a limited degree. Repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people, but backfire for the very people who ‘need’ them the most.”

And who needs statements such as ‘You are loved!’ the most? Those with a negative self-image.

“When people with low self-esteem repeated the statement, ‘I’m a lovable person,’ or focused on ways in which this statement was true of them, neither their feelings about themselves nor their moods improved—they got worse,” Wood says.

“Positive self-statements seemed to provide a boost only to people with high self-esteem—those who ordinarily feel good about themselves already—and that boost was small.”

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I can vouch for that. Every time I hear a woo-woo statement that I am loved and I am enough, from an inanimate poster on the Tube, I sink into a misanthropic swamp of Swiftian depth. Are we really so pathetic? Do we really delude ourselves with such civilised witchcraft just to eke out another day?

For the non-misanthropes, there is a glimmer of light. In his work, The Meaning of Anxiety, the psychologist Rollo May rejected the prevailing wisdom that sound mental health meant an absence of anxiety.

By studying young women estranged from their families, May first assumed that anxiety and rejection by one’s mother would work hand-in-hand. The harsher the rejection, the stronger the anxiety felt in the abandoned.

May reversed his assumption after discovering that his middle-class girls suffered far greater than the working-class girls. Why? The truth. The more affluent girls were not explicitly rejected whereas the working-class girls were often bounced out on the street. For May, the mother’s rejection wasn’t so much the source of the trauma, but the rejection that is lied about. Though in an ostensibly harsher situation, the working-class girls at least knew where they stood and could alter their situation. For May, much anxiety stems from the fear that one cannot alter one’s situation.

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Rollo May’s work would today go down like a cup of cold dog vomit. Our prevailing cultural mantra demands that when the affirmations fail, we simply require more affirmations.

Like the bureaucratic apologists of the twentieth century who insisted that failed state terrors simply weren’t real communism, the wellness industrial complex insists that if Transport for London’s pastel posters haven’t cured your clinical depression, you merely failed to internalise the synergy—or something. It is a civilised witchcraft designed not to heal the broken, but to flatter the institutional sayer of slogans.

And so, we are left trapped in a lurid Catch-22: If affirmations make you feel worse, then that is proof that you need another dose of affirmations. Wash, rinse, repeat.

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