CA-The Third Horseman of Neoliberalism-may 12

7/30/2019 CA-The Third Horseman of Neoliberalism-may 12

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CENTRAL AMERICA

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Weve identified four horsemen galloping through

Central America in these terrible neoliberal times.

They cause change, development and new identities.

Weve already looked at drug traffickers and NGOs;

now its the Neo-Pentecostal evangelical churches.

But before following them on their wi ld crusade,

we need to reflect on the syncretism theyve built.

Its based on two harmful nutrients:

management culture and

positive thinking.

43

may 2012

The radio announcers persuasive voice seductively

whispers, Need a miracle? Come and ask Jesus for

your miracle. An energetic masculine voice then

adds, This young woman was suffering from kidney failure,

followed by aremorseful female one: My skin started to

regenerate... Pastor Cash Luna, leader of the House of God

in Guatemala, offered miracles on the nights of September

17 and 18, 2011, in the Dallas-Fort Worth American Airlines

Center in Texas. Jesus Christ did the inviting and thoseblessed with enough good fortune paid for it.

Miracles and miracle workers arent the post-modern

novelty; thats provided by the forms currently adopted in

Central America by the big gurus who oil the systems cogs

The third horseman of neoliberalism:

Management culture and positive thinking

JOS LUIS ROCHA

and ensure that the wealth flows, depositing fortunes for

their own plump bellies and the dilated pockets of the big

companies. They appeal to the same mechanism as the

secular versions: the psychotic desire to see reality spiced

up. The secular exploitation of this appetite appears daily

on television screens: Will this be the love of your life? Do

you want to be sure before taking this great step? Send

WEDDING to 2525.

Send GRIM REAPER to know when and how youregoing to die. Send LUCK to obtain the winning lottery

number. How many take the bait? Abracadabra: the anxieties

and uncertainties of post-modernity can be dissolved by

magic words, by prophetic advice sent to your cell phone or


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44

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CENTRAL AMERICA

After drug traffickers and NGOs, the

Neo-Pentacostal churches are the third

horsemen that deserves attention, due

not to their large albeit not yet massive

numbers, but rather to their influence

and efficacy, their social impact and

their capacity to leave their mark on

the new map of power in early 21st

century Central America

by a visit to a famous conference room or church. The one

sure result is millions in the pockets of the telephone

companies, swindlers, airlines, hotels and other indirect

beneficiaries. Both the religious and secular versions of

positive thinking have expanded their influence and

accentuated their role as accelerator of Christian capitalism

and its mega-businesses.

The power of the Neo-Pentecostals

In this article, Im using the term Neo-Pentecostals for

those political actors who are the fruit of syncretism, who

were formed and propagate by feeding off of and dissem-

inating positive thinking and the secular cult of manage-

ment. Although not all of their groups and leaders are

involved in Politics with a capital P, they are political actors

because they send out guidelines on how to act in society

and how to behave in relation to the State. Their pastors are

an extreme case of organic intellectuals: they not only

disseminate a kind of common sense and a way of being

citizens, but do so penetrating right down to the ins and

outs of the most intimate elements that remain out of reach

of schools and the state apparatus and increasingly elude

the once-omnipresent Catholic Churcheven molding

sexual behavior and family configuration.

After drug traffickers and NGOs, they are the third

horsemen that deserves attention, due not to their large

albeit not yet massive numbers, but rather to their influence

and efficacy, their social impact and their capacity to leave

their mark on the new map of power in early 21st century

Central America.

Religious syncretism digests both

nutritious and unswallowable foods

Are the Neo-Pentecostals syncretic? Syncretism is part of

the vital process of all religions, including the big ones, which

are the result of a vast process of syncretism. As Brazilian

Catholic theologian Leonardo Boff put it in his book Church:

Charism and Power, Catholicity as the synonym of

universality is only possible and attainable through the

process of syncretism from which catholicity itself results.

There are different modalities of syncretism. The

syncretic expressions I will look at correspond to the

modality Boff defines as syncretism as adaptation:A religion

first is exposed to different religious expressions and thenassimilates them, interprets them and recasts them according

to its own identity. For Boff, this historical process is a

decisive factor that allows the basic ethos of the dominant

religion to digest the outside elements and make them

its own. Its a vital and organic process, similar to the one

involving food, which, no matter how diverse it may be, is

injected and absorbed into the system of human life. But

harmful foods are also ingested as are others that produce

excreta.

Christianity became RomanAlthough Boffs definitions concentrate on the syncretism of

two or more religious traditions, his examples address the

syncretism of the Roman tradition of Christianity, in which

the religious component is just one among others.

Christianity absorbed the norms, rites, policies,

nomenclature and language of the Roman culture. It was

inevitable: the administrative and legal imbrication led to a

doctrinal fusion and the absorption of institutions. The

Christianity-Empire symbiosis was perfect: the Roman

monarchical tradition that sought subterfuges in tetrarchies

and diarchies received the supernatural underpinnings of

the Christian monarchy. The emperor gave the Christians

certain official buildings (basilicas) and then, trying out the

recently-acquired title of the new David, he called councils.

In 315 AD, Christs monogram and other Christian signs

appeared on coins (what was Cesars was finally rendered

unto God!) in a measure of the utmost importance because

they amounted toand still doan almost global propaganda

instrument. The ecclesiastical courts acquired civil

jurisdiction and bishops were put on the same power level as

governors. Tax exemption then reinforced the accumulation

and the happy marriage.

Later, the State became the Churchs fiscal arm and the

Church adopted diocesesconglomerates of the empires


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CENTRAL AMERICA

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45

may 2012

provinces invented by Emperor Diocletian (244-311)as

its administrative units. To improve tax collection,

Diocletian doubled the number of Roman provinces from 50

to almost 100 and grouped them into 12 dioceses, each

governed by an official called a vicarius, another thing

Christianity inherited from the Romans.

Christianity broke with its Judaic roots

In 325 AD, Constantine convened the First Council of Nicaea,

which he directed through a bishop and imperial commis-

saries designated for that purpose. He turned the Councils

resolutions into state laws and assimilated the Churchs

organization into that of his empire. From then on, the

ecclesiastical provinces coincided with the imperial dioceses

and provinces. The Church broke with its Judaic roots and

developed a Christian anti-Semitism built on an already

existing anti-Judaism. The army and civil administration

soon acted as secular arms of the orthodox imperial Church

against heretics. Monophysites, Arians and Donatists all

suffered repression from the new Roman-Christian empire.

Historian Leopold von Ranke tells us that on thosespots where the Olympian gods were worshipped, amidst

the very pillars which had supported their temples, arose

shrines in memory of those who had scorned their worship

and had resisted unto death. This facilitated the fusion

with the old state religion. That early Christianity also

incorporated pagan customs, such as the cult of relics and

the belief in miracles, which were very extensive in

barbarian, grassroots rural areas.

The success of Christianity lay in the fact that it

contained elements capable of satisfying all tastes, having

incorporated rites, protocols and customs from multiple

religious and secular traditions, not as mere syncretism but

truly assimilating and fusing them. The rites thatcommemorated Jesus crucifixion and resurrection recalled

the mystery religions. The figure of Mary, mother of Jesus,

provided a softening female touch that evoked the female

deities of the Greek and Roman pantheons. And the

Christians austere customs coincided with those of the Stoics.

Christianity was open to all, including slaves. The Pauline

slogan of being all things to all men had been applied

effectively and gave generous fruits.

Syncretism is both a risk and a need

As Boff warns, this Christian syncretism implied the

assimilation of both harmful foods and excreta. The

integration into local contexts pushed towards barbarization,

which was taken to the extreme of incorporating practices

incompatible with the original Christianity: the Churchs

participation in violence, ordeals and rituals of penitence.

Divine justice and earthly justice became confused in the

same savagery. And the peaceful Jesus of Nazareth was

represented by a Roman military uniform.

The Roman cocktail was swarming with anti-Christian

bacteria. But some church hierarchs felt so comfortable with

the Roman institutions that they rescued some that had

fallen into honorable disuse: Pope Leo I (440-461) took the

titlePontifex Maximus after it had been renounced almost a

century earlier by Emperor Gratian the Young, who

considered it incompatible with Christianity. The fact is

that once having taken the bull by the horns, Christianity

was not so loyal to the legacy of Jesus, leaving three basic

structures of Roman economic life unscathed: respect for

private property, compliance with contracts and the

legitimacy of profits.

Although it involves dangers, syncretism is a dynamic

that characterizes a religions openness and vitality. From a

theological perspective, the Christian religion seeks

mediations to transmit Christs saving message. It has to do

so because religion sinks its roots into the concrete world inwhich people and the community are inserted. Faith is

expressed in a sociological dimension, drawing on the

instruments it finds in the culture, society and class status.

Faith becomes visible, audible and tangible in the

corporeality of rites and symbols, dogmas and norms,

institutions and behaviors. The key to true syncretism lies

in a religions incarnation in the most diverse cultures

without losing its identity.

How to distinguish between

healthy and harmful syncretisms?

Boff establishes criteria for distinguishing between true andfalse syncretism. The true kind translates the Christian

identity; the false kind deteriorates and destroys it. One of

the main pathologies of syncretism is the betrayal of the

essence of Christianity: a syncretism will be Christian if the

The key to true syncretism lies in a

religions incarnation in the most

diverse cultures without losing its

identity


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CENTRAL AMERICA

basic core of the Christian faith takes form in the symbolic

framework of another culture. For Boff, this supposes a

conversion in the cultures nucleus, to the point of ceasing to

be what it was and becoming instead an expression of the

Christian faith, which is impossible without conversion. If

the contrary takes place, the Christian identity will have

been corrupted and absorbed by the identity of the culture

with which it has come into contact.

If, as appears to have happened in Brazil with the Yoruba

religion, the other cultural tradition produces a syncretism

using elements of the Christian tradition, then we have a

Yoruba syncretism, not a Christian one. This criterion

presents us with a very tough landscape because theres not

a single Christian church. Even within Catholicism, despite

the existence of dogmas and an official doctrine, theres no

unanimity over the definition of what is essentially

Christian.

So how do we know if a syncretism is healthy or harmful

from the perspective of the Christian tradition and its

strategy of permanence? Even without completely clearing

up this unknown factor, the criterion of the betrayal of the

essence of Christianity has the value of signaling that each

process of syncretism can go in at least as many directions as

there are intervening cultural tendencies. And contrary to

popular belief and plain intuition, the shark doesnt always

swallow the sardine: the most callow, emotional and minority

religious tradition can win the day over the most ancient,

wise and massive one.

Lets take a look at whats happening with the new

syncretisms taking place in the Central American countries,

because such processes arent a thing of the past. In a way

thats just as dramatic and gradual as in ancient Rome, they

are happening today in the new Romethe United Statesand in the peripheral provinces that we Central American

Thumbelinas represent.

Managerialism is the new religion

The Neo-Pentecostal syncretism Ive identified digests two

nutrients: managerialism and positive thinking. Mana-

gerialism is an obsession that has turned into common sense.

It propagates as imperceptibly as pollen, but without

producing any allergies or stinging sensation. Its conceptual

heritage and panoply of resources have managed to achieve

the rank of unquestionable instruments, located somewhere

beyond good and bad: they are science, so hands up!Managerialism is the name I givefor want of another

to the empowerment of language and methods coined in the

management cubicleslairs would be a better wordand

then disseminated to the four points of the compass. Its the

proof that the language of managers has become the lingua

franca of the professional discourse of development

cooperation, the organization and accreditation of universi-

ties, reflection on politics and alsothe most novel of

noveltiesreligious discourse.

Ive taken the term from an Anglo-Saxon source. In an

article on NGOs, British anthropologist David Lewis referred

to managerialism when denouncing the strong emphasis

on merely management issues in the form of managerialist

language. He revealed the concentration of issues such as

organizational strengthening, capacity building, strategic

planning and best practices based on a language that pays no

attention to theoretical density applied to the management

science of NGOs and aimed at doing things in the cheapest,

best and quickest way possible, just like any business. Lewis

stresses the influence of managerialism in the literature on

and by NGOs.

Managerialism is proof that thelanguage of managers has become the

lingua franca of the professional

discourse of development cooperation,

the organization and accreditation of

universities, reflection on politics and

alsothe most novel of novelties

religious discourse

Entrepreneurism is the new cult

Managerialism implies, of course, a veneration of entrepre-

neurism. The fallacy that there is a need to promote

productive usebusiness investmentof the remittances

sent home from other countries by migrants is one expression

of the cult of the entrepreneur. That fallacy is based on the

assumption that all receivers of remittances have something

of the businessperson in them and can therefore prosper

with a corner shop, a bread basket, a car shop or a big pot of

nacatamales with a bit of help from NGOs, the State or the

World Bank.

For managerialists, the heroes of the movie are big,medium, small or micro managers/businesspeople. Mana-

gerialism therefore presents itself as a professionalization

of the virtues of the Protestant work ethic: knowing how to

administer, audit, invest; being an expert in calculating cost-


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CENTRAL AMERICA

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47

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benefit. The virtues become techniques that can be acquired

through training. Following this thread leads to the ball of

yarn that is the funding of strategies. In this sense, the

problems and solutions of society and the economy find their

most polished expression in the financial worlds objects,

concepts and methods. If theres corruption, the solution

lies in the famous concept of accountability.

On the field of play, that reductionism means that

proposals must be formulated in terms that are mathema-

tizable, quantifiable money-wise, procedural and/or

expressible in a plan with objectives, activities, goals and

success indicators. The managersoften business admin-

istration professionalsare strategists who design roadmaps,

advise the disoriented and, like Don Quijote, roam the world,

setting wrongs right, redressing injuries and protecting

maiden businesses.

a context in which the State and society have declined as

sources of legitimacy, powerwhich remains unauditable

legitimizes itself through rituals of control. The Audit Society

stresses the dysfunctional consequences that audits generate

among the bodies audited, due to their limited possibilities

and the reductionism that perverts them. This is percep-

tible when, for example, evaluationswhich should assess

the relationship between the changes observed and what

was programmedare reduced to audits, which are incapable

of assessing all the changes and often concentrate on dogma-

like rules and procedures that imitate rituals.

British anthropologist Marilyn Strathern argued that

while the practice of audits tends to appear as an inevitable

element of bureaucratic processes, looking at it in perspective

shows us its contours as a distinct cultural artifact and its

character as an instrument of neoliberalism. An old name is

used for a new phenomenon: accountability. It doesnt matter

what accountability used to be: theres a new consensus about

what constitute good practices and the need to achieve

economic efficiency. Only a determined set of procedures

which Power and Strathern refer to as ritualscan measure

that efficiency and adaptation of practices. Only certain

operations count.

This is how the financial and the moral meet in one

turn of the century rendering of accountability, says

Strathern, in a process thats molding culture: theres an

emergenceand predominanceof socially plausible ways

and modes of assessing the processes. In this favorable

context, the concept of auditing leaped from the level of

finances to all of the stages and is now synonymous with all

evaluations and measures.

Both professionals and the uninitiated are becoming

devotees of implementation. And the language of themanagers is talked and listened to on the left, right and

center of the political spectrum as the language of

standardization and organization. These practices and that

language determine the flow of resources and appear crucial

to business credibility.

Managers are the new priestly cast

We find ourselves standingwith arms crossed? dazzled?

before the imperialism of a discipline. It was lawyers who

officiated throughout the 20th century, absolving or

condemning, brandishing the labels legitimate or

illegitimate. Their monumentsmany in an acceleratedstate of oxidationare the United Nations, the European

Unions bureaucratic agreements and procedures, the now

decadent state bureaucracies and other legal constructs.

Their scholasticism built a virtual reality in which the formal

The current NGO reductionism means

that proposals must be formulated interms that are mathematizable,

quantifiable money-wise, procedural

and/or expressible in a plan with

objectives, activities, goals and

success indicators

Audits are the new rituals

The auditing industry is a sub-world and instrument of thismanagerial culture. Fifteen years ago, Michael Power

published The Audit Society, in which he analyzed the rituals

of verification as a fever that had been spreading in Great

Britain and the United States since the early eighties,

causing a genuine audit explosion: In addition to financial

audits we now hear of environmental audits, value for

money audits, management audits, quality audits, forensic

audits, data audits, intellectual property audits, medical

audits, and many others besides. Power was an accountant,

auditor, professor of accounting at the London School of

Economics, a member of the Institute of Chartered

Accountants in England and Wales, and an associate scholar

of the European Institute of Advanced Studies in Manage-ment, and was therefore someone who lived inand off

ofthe belly of the monster.

Power sustained that the avalanche of audits originates

from a political desire to control and acquire legitimacy. In


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48

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CENTRAL AMERICA

events preceded, produced, compensated for or replaced the

real events. Face value was superimposed over real value.

Now, however, managers are the new priestly class

and accountants their acolytesthat divides businesses,

people and countries into solvent and insolvent, deficit-

making and surplus-creating, precarious or consolidated,

profitable or impoundable, efficient or supernumerary. Their

verification rituals can redeem or excommunicate. If the

only things that exist for the legal pen-pushers are what can

be classified and regulated, all that counts for the managers

is what can be counted.

An ideology disguised as science

Through procedures very similar to those of the pettifoggers,

managerialism has also created its scholastics and its

metaphysical entities. In his book Technology and Science

as Ideology, German philosopher Jrgen Habermas

denounced an attitude that naively correlates theoretical

propositions with matters of fact. This attitude presumes

that the relations between empirical variables represented

in theoretical propositions are self-existent. At the same

time, it suppresses the transcendental framework that is

the precondition of the meaning of the validity of such

propositions. As soon as these statements are understood in

relation to the prior frame of reference to which they are

affixed, the objectivist illusion dissolves and makes visible a

knowledge-constitutive interest.

But managerialism is often impenetrable to that

analysis, as its variables and highly reduced reservoir of

categories present a deliciously simple reality malleable to

mental manipulation. The fact is that, like many other fairy

godmothers of capital, managerialism is an ideology disguisedas science.

Ineffable proposals emerge from it, such as auditing

ethics in small and medium businesses, or advanced

mathematics such as the equation brought to us by a World

Bank official that breaks down components and proportions

of corruption.

The world of life escapes managerialism

Under these scientificist proposals is hidden a desire for

control and technocratic dominion, as interest guides

knowledge. In its desire to legitimize itself as a scientific

authority, a managerial technocracy that concerns itself withessentially social matters reduces experiences to mere digits,

statements, variables and other abstractions from which the

world of life escapes. Experiences arent a matter for

measurement because, as philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer

pointed out, The primary data, to which the interpretation

of historical objects goes back, are not data of experiment

and measurement but unities of meaning. If we dont attend

to the world of meanings, to the production of meaning and

therefore to experiences as the essence of what is human,

social constructions are incomprehensible.

In managerial analyses, human events and slip-ups lack

any meaning. They are errors of calculation, accidents,

collateral damage They end up in the black boxes of

accountancy. Migrations, while experienced by millions of

Central Americans, were negligible as a social event for the

macro-economists who calculate the national accounts. For

years they tossed migrants remittances into the category of

errors and omissions. That was until the error grew to

such an extent that it exceeded the main export categories,

foreign investment, international finance institution loans

and international donations.

The world of experiences has to guide the administrative

space, not the other way round. The administrative arena is

a fragment of the world of experiences, yet there is no space

for that world of experiences in theintendedmanage-

ment universe, savein a caricature-like wayin the

millions of recipe books on business leadership and personnel

management, which is an area where managerialism and

positive thinking intersect.

There are no great discourses to transmit in managerial

literature. Its nothing more than a host of recipes.

Technology has been converted into doctrine. Apparently

there is no imago figurata other than the calculation

protocols, the formats, the sequence of steps, the formulas.

The dogmas are procedures. But for the same reason, this

new modality of indoctrination is more penetrating and

persistent; the concealed catechesis makes inroads with

In its desire to legitimize itself as

a scientific authority, a managerial

technocracy that concerns itself with

essentially social matters reduces

experiences to mere digits,

statements, variables and other

abstractions from which the world of

life escapes


7/13

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49

may 2012

unprepared subjects. The field is free of scrub, clean for

inoculating value systems. No school of cadres has had such

effective prior recruiting work, such customary training

sessions, such a-critical students or so many pro bono

multipliers. But then, what criticism could be made if there

are no theories to refute?

but still atypical, Horkheimer considered that the search for

sense was disappearing in the administered worldwed

call it managed today. Philosophy and rigorous reflection

were tending to disappear and could come to be considered

things for children. In the new instrumental/managerial

thinking the instrument becomes the goal; technology and

procedures replace doctrine; and the preacher/manager

replaces the preacher/theologian and philosopher in the task

of explaining the world and texts. The manager supplants

the lawyer, the accountant the sociologist, and the business-

person the knight errant. Logical frameworks and SWOT

(Successes, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analyses

have replaced current, structural, semiotic, historical and

folkloric analyses or any other label that got slapped on

analyses before the management era.

The priests who talked of social justice in the eighties

are now up to date and preaching the gospel of social

management. Those who embodied the preferential option

for the poor now negotiate business social responsibility.

Sermons, which once aimed to produce a hermeneutical

exercise to penetrate and illuminate the meaning of life,

history and the scriptures, cede to motivational talks their

indisputable millenarian first place in the top ten of

introjectors of norms and values. The institutions of Christian

inspirationincluding parishes and other pastoral bodies

no longer analyze reality or conduct see-judge-act exercises.

Almost all do strategic planning following the guidelines of

some business school from the North.

A suicidal change of direction,

a spiritual impoverishment

The owners of the money impose the method and categorieswith which organizations must evaluate themselves and plan.

And those methods and categories are clearly managerial.

They emerge untainted, free of any leftwing ideological

blemish that may want to contaminate them. The managers

and their emulators dont worry about debating concepts; in

fact they try to avoid ideologizing discussions.

When words arent being used to weigh up technically

relevant probabilities, they are suspected of being nothing

more than mere charlatanry because knowledge and

production of meaning stopped being ends in themselves.

Why question the predominant focus of citizens security?

Why reflect on the meaning of violence in society if the

managerial panoplywith its logical frameworks, indicatorsand scenario technologiescan tell us where, when and how

much we can invest in projects to reduce that violence?

Mathematicsthe extreme example of the formali-

zation of thinkingrenounces thinking about what is at

The priests who talked of social justice

in the eighties are now up to date and

preaching the gospel of social

management. Those who embodied

the preferential option for the poor now

negotiate business social

responsibility

Theres no longer a search for meaning,

just logical frameworks and SWOTs

Philosopher Max Horkheimer observed that the triumph of

instrumental reason meant the reduction of reason to its

operational dimension: calculating probabilities and

determining the right means for achieving a given end. From

the point of view of this kind of reason, it doesnt make sense

to discuss the rational preeminence of one end over another.

The original task of reason, before being reduced to mediating

between means and ends, was precisely to understand and

determine the ends.

Bourgeois tolerance, an extremely ambiguous concept,assumes freedom from dogmatic authority, but also a neutral

attitude toward any spiritual content, which is thus

surrendered to relativism. Formalized reason, the

intermediary between ends and means, is profoundly

relativist. Having its autonomy taken away, reason

degenerates into a mere instrument. Its unrelatedness to

content is played up and its operational value is lauded: Its

operational value, its role in the domination of men and

nature, has been made the sole criterion, explained

Horkheimer. Any use transcending auxiliary, technical

summarization of factual data has been eliminated as a last

trace of superstition. Concepts have become streamlined,

rationalized, labor-saving devices. It is as if thinking itselfhad been reduced to the level of industrial processes,

subjected to a close schedulein short, made part and parcel

of production.

When this current was becoming alarmingly massive


8/13

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50

envo

CENTRAL AMERICA

stake. The mental economics of mathematics might be good

for industry, but not for reasoning about institutions,

development, justice, equality, happiness: the statement

that justice and freedom are better in themselves than

injustice and oppression is scientifically unverifiable and

useless, complained Horkheimer, for whom the result of

this suicidal change of direction in reason is a spiritual

impoverishment, a constant dumbing down.

Parodying Horkheimer, we could say that the manage-

ment culture is one of those perversions of reason that

degenerates against it. But it is a perversion that became

the norm. The management culture has penetrated

universities (with its audit culture), NGOs and development

cooperation (with its SWOTs, logical frameworks, strategic

planning) and international finance institutions (with its

accountability as a panacea). Certain religious tendencies

are also assimilating it. That absorption is perceptible in

whats known as Ignacian social management in the

Catholic Church and in the theology of prosperity and the

business and leadership schools in the Pentecostal and Neo-

Pentecostal churches.

You attract what you think about

Religion is perishing not at the hands of science, as Hork-

heimer predicted, but rather at the hands of a superstition,

a new magic: the power of the mind to materialize desires.

Positive thinking is the new element religion has syncretized

with in our countries.

After achieving great success exposing the impossibility

of surviving on a workers wages inNickel and Dimed, US

writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich turned her energies

to Smile or die: How positive thinking fooled America andthe World. It is the most complete and penetrating study of

the science?/industry?/religion? of positive thinking.

Is positive thinking a science? The Secret by Australian

TV producer Rhonda Byrne, which has become the Bible and

Koran of positive spirits, claims without hesitation that it

is. The book reveals that the law of attraction, the most

powerful law in the universe, is the principle and foundation

of success: Everything thats coming into your life you are

attracting into your life. And its attracted to you by virtue

of the images youre holding in your mind. Its what youre

thinking. Whatever is going on in your mind you are

attracting to you.

According to Byrne, Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, VictorHugo, Beethoven, Lincoln, Emerson, Edison and Einstein

all knew the secret. The book quotes John Assaraf, presented

as a street child turned businessman and expert in the art of

making money: We can have whatever it is that we choose.

I dont care how big it is.What kind of house do you want

to live in? Do you want to be a millionaire? What kind of

business do you want to have? Do you want more success?

What do you really want?

The Secret offers good news: It doesnt matter who

you are or where you are, the law of attraction is forming

your entire life experience, and this all-powerful law is doing

that through your thoughts. You are the one who calls the

law of attraction into action, and you do it through your

thoughts.

The Secret lavishes pieces of advice that its millions of

readers blindly believe: To attract money, focus on wealth.

Its impossible to bring more money into your life when you

focus on your lack of it. Its helpful to use your imagination

and make believe you already have the money you want.

Make it your intention to look at everything you like and say

to yourself, I can afford that. I can buy that. You will shift

your thinking and begin to feel better about money. Give

money to bring more of it into your life. When you are generous

with money and feel good about sharing it, you are saying, I

have plenty. Visualize checks in the mail...

Religions absorption of the

management culture is perceptible in

whats known as Ignacian social

management in the Catholic Church

and in the theology of prosperity and

the business and leadership schools in

the Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostalchurches

The roots lie in Christian Science

The infallibility of the law of attraction is explained by the

placebo effect: When a patient really believes the tablet

represents a cure, he receives what he believes and is cured.

So all those who persuade themselves they are happy end up

being so. The thinking creates the reality, as in Aldous Huxleys

Brave New World, where Sixty-two thousand four hundred

repetitions make one truth. Its from here that manybusiness administrators, international lecturers, life coaches

and also former Nicaraguan President Bolaos took the slogan:

the secret is attitude. A positive attitude gets you everything,

even if the literature on the topic is markedly financial.


9/13

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51

may 2012

Byrne is convinced that People who have drawn wealth

into their lives used the secret, whether consciously or

unconsciously. They think thoughts of abundance and wealth,

and they do not allow any contradictory thoughts to take

root in their minds. Their predominant thoughts are of

wealth. They only know wealth, and nothing else exists in

their minds. Whether they are aware of it or not, their

predominant thoughts of wealth are what brought wealth to

them. It is the law of attraction in action.

Digging around to discover the roots of positive thinking,

Ehrenreich takes us back to Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. The

father of the New Thought movement and grandfather of

positive thinking, he discovered that Calvinist doctrine was

producing a growing number of psychosomatic illnesses

among its followers; they were frequently plagued by feelings

of guilt or terrified by the idea of their inevitable and eternal

sentence. Quimby became famous developing therapeutic

talks aimed at convincing his patients that the universe was

fundamentally benevolent, that they formed a single unit

with the Mind from which they were constituted and that

they could cure their illnesses with the power of their minds.

In 1863, Mary Baker Eddy, a 42-year-old invalid who had

been widowed by her first husband and abandoned by her

second, became his patient and disciple and benefitted from

a miraculous healing.

As a prolific writer and charismatic teacher, Eddy

disseminated the focus of the new thinking so successfully

that she turned it into a religion, known as Christian Science.

The core of its doctrine is that there is no material world,

only Thought, Mind, Spirit, Goodness and Love, or, using the

economic term she tended to employ, Supply. Therefore,

illness and maladies do not exist except as temporary

delirium.

Many applauded the advent of Christian Science and

New Thought. From an eminently pragmatic point of view,

William James recognized that an academically trained mind

resists admitting its postulates, but has to recognize and

accept its results. Christian Science cured legions of that illness

called Calvinism, which was responsible for neurasthenia and

associated with the outdated theology of hell.

Positive thinking: A concept

popularized some 60 years ago

Fearing that unless they were reigned in, Christian Scientists

would form a majority in the US Congress in 1930, Mark

Twain dedicated one of his most caustic booksChristian

Scienceto them, in which he crowned Mary Baker Eddy as

queen of frauds and hypocrites. Eddys magnum opus and

the Christian scientists bible, Science and Health with Key

to the Scriptures, inspired this and other visceral paragraphs

by Twain: For of all the strange and frantic and incompre-

hensible and uninterpretable books which the imagination

of man has created, surely this one is the prize sample. It is

written with a limitless confidence and complacency, and

with a dash and stir and earnestness which often compel the

effects of eloquence, even when the words do not seem to

have any traceable meaning When you read it you seem to

be listening to a lively and aggressive and oracular speech

delivered in an unknown tongue, a speech whose spirit you

get but not the particulars

The core of both Christian Science and positive thinking

is the unshakable faith in the power of the mind to create

and mold the world. Only what the mind produces exists.

Reality lacks autonomy. In the most concessive of cases, the

external world is a pale reflection of the mental production.There were other followers of this kind of unbridled

Platonism; blessed beings who inhabited the world of ideas.

In the mid-20th century, Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993)

popularized the expression positive thinking. Peale was

even more prolific and widely read than Eddy, producing a

monumental pile of best sellers: The Power of Positive

Thinking, You Can If You Think You Can, Six Attitudes for

Winners, The Positive Power of Jesus Christ, and so on almost

to the point of abuse.

Napoleon Hill (1883-1970) provides the link between

Eddys time and Peales. An advisor to Woodrow Wilson and

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hill achieved celebrity with The

Law of Success in 16 Lessons, Think and Grow Rich, TheMaster-Key to Riches and Your Right to be Rich. Nowadays

there is such a host of positive thinkers that if their mental

emanations were put down in writing and posted on the web

it could cause even the most powerful servers to collapse.

The core of both Christian Science and

positive thinking is the unshakable

faith in the power of the mind to create

and mold the world. Only what the

mind produces exists. Reality lacks

autonomy. In the most concessive of

cases, the external world is a pale

reflection of the mental production


10/13

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52

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CENTRAL AMERICA

Positive thinking enters

the world of management

Although the religion-positive thinking link is perceptible

at its roots, and that connection was obviously solidified with

Peale and other authors, positive thinking has had a secular

development for winning over more followers, or at least one

not tinged with any ecclesiastical color. Its development in

non-religious arenas is palpable in the doctors who prescribe

positive thinking, adducing its supposedly beneficial effects

on health. It is even found in academia, which has created

departments of positive psychology and science of

happiness; and above all, of course, in the world of business,

full of lecturers and talks on motivation. There it is located

in the significant crossoveror crossoversbetween positive

thinking and the management culture, with its cult of

entrepreneurism and obsession with wealth.

Although at first glance it would appear that positive

thinking and managerialism are to be found at opposing

polesone in delirious irrationality and the other in

rationalism taken to its extremethere are multiple

crossovers between positive thinking and the management

culture. Lets start by mentioning that, according to

Marketdata Enterprises, the motivation industrysaturated

by positivitybrought in some US$9.6 billion in CDs, DVDs,

books and coaches fees in 2005. The International Coach

Federation calculated that estimated global annual revenue

for the profession was close to $1.5 billion in 2007. Its clients

tend to be businesses that are eager to produce highly

motivated employees, the best known of which include

Sprint, Albertsons, Allstate, Caterpillar, Exxon Mobil and

American Airlines.

The pioneers of New Thought and Christian Science did

not get to see just how lucrative their findings could be ifapplied directly to the world of business, where their

techniques could offer employers greater control over their

workers and their productivity. The first to perceive that

source were the editors of Norman Vincent Peales Power of

Positive Thinking, when they printed an ad with the following

eye-catching notice: EXECUTIVES: Give this book to

employees. It pays dividends!

Positive thinkers and

managers in the world of work

There are other obvious links between positive thinkers and

managers. In the commercial sphere, the best seller isconvinced of the benefits of his or her merchandise. The

techniques of positive thinking are placed at the service of

that conviction and are similar to the hypnopdia, or sleep-

teaching, ofBrave New World: repetitions, signs with slogans

and photographs to reach the subconscious, so that the person

assimilates without judging what is being assimilated.

In human resource management, the best personneladministrator will be the one who can best persuade the

employees and manipulate their craziest expectations. The

most successful CEOs cultivate an image of charismatic

leaders who make snap decisions based on the impulse of

positive hunches. It doesnt matter if the manager isnt

very knowledgeable about accounting or a conscientious

student of stock market fluctuations. Its enough to know

certain SWOT rudiments, say critical path in each

paragraph and launch encouraging speeches. The image of

the CEO has changed from being a responsible administrator

to being a motivating leader; more similar, in fact, to a

motivational speaker or a life coach.

An era in which many have predicted that the spiritualworld would be out of place in the rationality of business has

seen the emergence of guru managers and shamanistic

administrators. Magic has been technified in positive

thinking strategies and management has been magicized to

respond to a changing world in which all that needs be done

is to administrate the chaos of the global casino, its flight

capital and its volatile work posts.

Hand in hand, birds of a feather sticking together through

many fights, positive thinking and managerialism have

united to deal a crushing blow to wage work. Ehrenreich hit

the nail on the head when she defined the role of positive

thinking in the world of wage work as follows: With

motivation as the whip, positive thinking became thehallmark of the compliant employee. The whip has a

structural extension: todays employers censure and fire

workers who file complaints and demands. It also has a

social extension: employees run from and censure their

Although at first glance it would appear

that positive thinking and

managerialism are to be found at

opposing polesone in delirious

irrationality and the other in rationalism

taken to its extremethere are multiple

crossovers between positive thinking

and the management culture


11/13

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53

may 2012

negative colleagues just as the pious previously anathema-

tized sinners. Even with the squeezes brought on by the

crisis and job contraction, if theres unemployment,

underemployment or bad working conditions, the problem

is attitude of the bad workers, of course.

one presented, but to refind such an object, to convince oneself

that it is still there. In other words, people clinging to the

pleasure principle build a reality that is satisfactory for them.

In Civilization and its Discontents,Freud explained how

this mechanism works: One can try to re-create the world,

to build up in its stead another world in which its most

unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others

that are in conformity with ones own wishes. But whoever,

in desperate defiance, sets out upon this path to happiness

will as a rule attain nothing. Reality is too strong for him.

Those who persist in banging their heads against reality, or

rather denying and substituting it, fall into psychosis. The

psychosis creates a new reality exempt from the motives of

dissatisfaction provided by the surrounding reality. The

psychotic person does not let him or herself be dominated

convinced or held backby reality.

In its most innocuous version, positive thinking takes

narcissism to its extreme: the actionsand even positive

thoughtsof others cannot upset the realization of ones

own desires. The others are no more than extras or puppets

in the long Hollywood movie in which each positive thinker

plays the lead. They are like the set ofThe Truman Show,

there to satisfy the desires of the positive thinker.

Positive thinking is the opiate of our times

The extreme of positive thinkingits most alarming

versionis to provide oneself with the perceptions that

correspond to the desired reality through hallucination.

Without always reaching the pathological extreme of

hallucination, positive thinking ends up producing the same

as psychosis: the loss and substitution of reality. From this

perspective we can say that positive thinking is the mixtureof militant hedonism with the impossibility of satisfying

expectations. Thats why it arises in a time of inflated

expectations with only unrealistic possibilities of realizing them.

Positive thinking emerges as a fantasy concealing the

unpalatable reality that we wage workers are falling down

the social pyramid with nothing to grab onto save the

innermost imaginative capacity to create hanging gardens

from rough crags. Positive thinking emerges where the

conflictive elements of social life are repressed or denied. It

denies the violation of rights, the blocking of success, the

decline of the world of wage labor.

Positive thinking keeps discontent, tensions and

conflicts repressed. Rather than a whip, its an opiate in theclassic Marxist sense. What was previously obtained from a

God whose favor was won through prayer and magical

formulas is now materialized through the sheer force of

desire.

We can say that positive thinking is the

mixture of militant hedonism with the

impossibility of satisfying expectations.

Thats why it arises in a time of inflated

expectations with only unrealistic

possibilities of realizing them

Positive thinking on the psychoanalysts couch

Although positive thinking dresses up as science, the element

of magic remains. The core of its proposal gives it away: its

enough to fervently desire an object or situation to produce

it. This is s pretty unsophisticated formulation of the ancient

faith in the omnipotence of ideas, one of the phenomena

most studied by psychoanalytic theory. In Totem and Taboo,

Freud defined it as a process in which man attributes

unquestionable efficacy to something intensely thought and

emotionally represented. Just like members of tribes with

magic cults, positive thinkers believe its possible to

transform the outside world with the power of their ideas

alone.

Freud sustained that its possible to trace thatomnipotence of ideas in human childhood. The first phases

of infancy are characterized by geocentricism, in which the

pleasure principle is everything. Maturing consists of the

principle of conservation, to guarantee the individuals

survival, replacing the pleasure principle with the reality

principle. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud stated

that we know that the pleasure principle is proper to a

primary method of working on the part of the mental

apparatus, but that, from the point of view of the self-

preservation of the organism among the difficulties of the

external world, it is from the very outset inefficient and

even highly dangerous.

In psychologies governed by the pleasure principle, theinfant psychology of the first years, The antithesis between

subjective and objective does not exist from the first. The

first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality-testing is, not

to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the


12/13

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54

envo

CENTRAL AMERICA

Witchcraft was responsible for obtaining the illusion

that positive thinking produces. Its non-primitive version

has produced a kind of technification of magical thinking,

more in line with the supposed managerial rationalism, in

which the old witchcraft has to rename its ancient resources

so as not to be out of sync. It thus talks in terms of laws (the

law of attraction, among others), self-persuasion tactics (no

more than ritual repetitions), life coaching courses (rites of

passage) and the six attitudes for winnersbehaviors that

keep away bad spirits?and master-keys for getting rich.

Positive thinkers also connect with the traditional

religions. Ehrenreich demonstrated that the point of contact

between the old Calvinist religion and positive thinking is

their obsession with self-monitoring: Calvinists sought to

extirpate sinful thinking and laxity, while positive thinking

wants to eradicate negative thinking.

The poor are poor because

they dont think positively

The most delirious fantasies of positive thinking are not a

mere curiosity rooted in the marginalized wing of some

eccentric museum. They are acting here and now, in postwar

Central America. Their ideological creatures and their

deification of desiderative faculties would be innocuous were

it not for their impact on the transformation that Central

America has suffered thanks to their adoption by powerful

political actors.

Their power has an inequality-consecrating bias

inscribed in its corollary. Positive thinking builds a non-

conflictive reality that denies inequalities, structural

conditionings and the barriers to the social ascent of the

disinherited, non-connected and castoffs of today and always.In its idyllic vision, poverty and the existence of losers

simply reflect a lack of positivity. This means that the

individual is totally responsible for his or her social position

and achievements. There are no oppressive structures to

identify and dismantle.

Theres a novel turn in the inculpation of individuals, as

the wretched of the earth are no longer blamed for their

misery because theyre lazy, ignorant or sinners, but rather

just because they are negative thinkers. This world is

forcefully unequal because the distribution of positivity and

knowledge of the secret is unequal, as Bob Proctor stresses

in one of the quotes that buttress The Secret: Why do you

think that 1 percent of the population earns around 96percent of all the money thats being earned? Do you think

thats an accident? Its designed that way. They understand

something. They understand The Secret, and now you are

being introduced to The Secret.

Lets be like those mice

Among the most successful promoters of blindness to conflicts

elevated to the rank of cardinal virtue is Spencer Johnson,

author of books with titles as promising as The One Minute

$ales Person and The One Minute Mother. His masterpiece,

Who Moved My Cheese?, sold millions of copies. It was a

Trojan Horse that many bosses gave to their employees.

Emblematic in its promotion of terse thinking, removed

from conflicts, it uses the form of an allegorical childrens

tale to tell the story of two mice called Sniff and Scurry and

two littlepeople (beings as small as mice but who looked

and acted a lot like people today) called Hem and Haw who

one day arrived at Cheese Center C, where they normally

got their cheese supplies, only to discover there was no

cheese. While the littlepeople ranted and raved at the

injustice of it all, the two mice chose not to complicate their

lives and simply looked for alternative cheese sources: The

mice did not overanalyze things. And they were not burdened

with many complex beliefs. To the mice, the problem and

the answer were both simple. The situation at Cheese

Station C had changed. So, Sniff and Scurry decided to

change.

Humans are invited to be like mice, which do not

overanalyze or overcomplicate things. The books subtitle

announces part of its proposal: An amazing way to deal with

change in your work and in your life. The amazing way

consists of not complicating things: if your boss and the

system turn you into just another victim of the contraction

of jobs, you urgently need to avoid the pernicious human

tendency to overanalyze and complain. When you lose your

job, the best thing to do is to look for another. There will be

some delicious morsel of cheese waiting for you some place.

Protected in this blissfully serene cosmovision, employershave replaced the odious terms labor cuts or dismissals

with more amiable phrases such as alleviation of resources

and career change opportunities.

Positive thinking builds a non-

conflictive reality that denies

inequalities, structural conditionings

and the barriers to the social ascent of

the disinherited, non-connected and

castoffs of today and always


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CENTRAL AMERICA

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55

may 2012

Complaining was also frowned upon in Aldous Huxleys

Brave New World. Nonconformity was dangerous. In

response to the slightest nonconformity, the inhabitants of

that futuristic anti-utopia took drugs that produced a sense

of wellbeing.

The Central America of the seventies

and eighties offered the disobedient

exile and burial. Todays Central

America offers generous doses of

positive thinking

The Central America of the seventies and eighties

offered the disobedient exile and burial. Todays Central

America offers generous doses of positive thinking.

Immersed in a syncretic process, the Neo-Pentecostal and

other Christian churches are absorbing and promoting the

techniques and values of positive thinking and managerial

ways of acting. Their pastors are the organic intellectuals of

those tendencies of thinking.

In the next edition ofenvo, we will look at how

managerialism and positive thinking converge in the religious

arena to convince us that it is Gods will that we be rich.

Hallelujah!

Jos Luis Rocha is a researcher for the Jesuit Service for

Migrants of Central America (SJM) and a member of the

envo editorial council.

CA-The Third Horseman of Neoliberalism-may 12

Documents

Transcript of CA-The Third Horseman of Neoliberalism-may 12