cassandra or opt-in

During a recent training workshop, which turned out to be a lot more encompassing and thought-provoking than I had expected, we were issued a gift bag of resource books—mostly, unfortunately for the nonce and end up on bulked up office bookshelves and was only referenced in the class one time regarding a battery of self-assessments, which included a review of positive psychology. It was a bit peripatetic, all over the place at turns but certainly not Therapy and Things or something too naïve and Pollyanna-ish. After the training, I did more than the required reading. I was a little bit skeptical since I think I tend to glom on to an argument perhaps too readily, given a reasoned set-up—like when Pollyanna, responding to one of the domestic’s laments that she hates Sundays because it’s the busiest day of the week and church services take up a large block of time, etc., etc., rationalizes in her signature way that the maid could take some solace in that when today was Sunday, then she was as far as possible from the next Sunday. A brilliant and irrefutable stance, I have thought since, although that is more designed to make a bad thing tolerable than a good thing better.
The aims of positive psychology as a discipline and a school of thought strive for recovery and personal-improvement by helping others to uncover innate strengths that have been buried by trauma, and the book was not so doctrine and difficult to summarize in a few words, but espoused that all the hardship and terror in the world is measured out by whether one’s world-view is global or local in a good way or a bad way—optimistic or pessimistic. The tricky bit for me, reluctant to give up the idea of realism and objectivity—although I suspect that aversion to arbitrariness and one’s own judgment is something greatly inflated and if put to the test, would pass away unnoticed—is that on balance, optimistic characters tend to view positive events as universal truths whereas pessimists attribute good outcomes to specific and local factors (I am blessed, lucky, charming instead of I got lucky, my challenger was really off his game, that was a fluke) . On the other hand, an optimist sees negative events as challenges for the nonce and not indicative of future success or failure, the opposite of a pessimist. That’s a little hard to reconcile, for me at least, and I do realize that I am an optimistic person, because there’s necessarily not a category that attributes causes (good and bad) to universal influences or to particulars and I have a tough time believing that even the most cock-eyed idealist would be ignorant of the fact that his challengers have a very different assessment of his fortunes. Like I said, however, it’s probably a much higher level concern if our personal outlook is detached from an analytical reality that is far removed from coping and quality of life. I wonder if there’s an analogue in mythology for the optimist and the pessimist, not just in fable, because that’s something I would buy wholesale—like meta-analysis of Prometheus and Epimetheus (Fore- and After-thought), Scylla and Charybdis or Orpheus. I don’t think it is there to be found—though the heroes and gods are jealous, insecure, arbitraty and fearful, there are always self-same and probably would not admit to a causal violation in their personalities. Of course I am over-simplifying matters, but suffice it to say that the attitudes of men hinge on that Weltanschauung and the framework of hope or gloom that it builds, whether for fabulists or myth-makers, and it is important to be cognizant of that mood proffered and all that goes with it. A little bit of reflection, I think, makes the argument and examples that one can stir up quite apparent and convincing.