That is not the issue at all, what it was is the “Power of Positive Thinking”. If you had that we believed that it would prevent many diseases, since the brain controls so much more of our body mechanics than we understand it could be right.
In any case the idea was not to dwell on what was bad, what was unpleasant and unavoidable. If you worry and worrying can find a solution then to worry is fine, but if you can not have a solution to a problem that way then you ignored it and hopefully it would improve. Remember that old saying your grandmom used to say all the time, “Every dark cloud, has a silver lining”. You ride out the bad days hoping you can hold the line, so that when it turns around you will be in a position to move ahead again.
Taken in the context of the time it was and is quite believable. For example under hypnosis you can control the flow of blood from your body and feeling pain. I suspect that in the way of the brain, it produced some anti-stress chemicals that somehow relieved the stress. Please, remember it was a differnt time 50 years ago and we didn’t have the same information about medications and diseases, or medical cures that were available.
But, even today what good does it do to dwell on and concentrate on the bad things instead of the better side. For example probably there were some civilians unfortunately in the wrong place. We don’t know if that was true, we have the word of the Taliban, and we know they lie.
The United Nations is not able to deliver food because they left Afghanistan, we can either dwell on the problems that creates or we can try to mediate the situation. We are trying to deliver food, isn’t that better than doing nothing at all?
Suppose we didn’t take any action, would the world be better off? Yes, we’ve been wrong before but was it a deliberate attempt to ruin the country or did we all hope it would work out better? Should we spend our efforts on what’s wrong? or what we that’s right?
The anxiety that you have because you can only see the wrongs cause the stress and irritations that break down the body and the mind. I remember the first lecture I had in college about psychotics. And, again before you jump down my throat remember this was a long time ago.
Anyway the concept of the problem was this, if someone imagined he was Napoleon, and he was happy being Napoleon did we have the right to fix it so he had to face the fact that he really was a nobody? Was he better off? Was he happier?
Essentially we all have defense mechanisms and some are more extreme and some are less extreme. In reality there is no such thing as “normal”, we all exist somewhere on the probability curve. The schizophrenic living in his world if he is happy with his defenses has every right not to be cured to be like the rest of us who are centrous on the curve. The only reason they are different is because there are more of us than there are of them.
OK! now you can really jump up and down and scream but remember these beliefs in the context of their time. If we find an aboriginal people somewhere that have been isolated from the progress of our time, should we alter them to conform? Should we insist they wear shoes and wear three piece suits?
