The Greatest Human Achievement

Can Happen Right Now (copyright 2005)

By Peter Michaelson

Economist Jeffrey Sachs believes that world poverty can be ended in the coming decades. “I reject the plaintive cries of the doomsayers who say that ending poverty is impossible,” Sachs writes in his book, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (Penguin Press, 20005).

Indeed, it is a noble aspiration. Yet an even greater accomplishment is possible—the reduction of human negativity. Our negativity has been around since Cain murdered Abel. Given such endurance, we might not be able to eliminate it entirely, but human negativity can be dramatically lessened.

Religious authorities have tried to eradicate our negativity, which they identified as sin. On our behalf they offered up benedictions, petitions, and prayer, while humbly displaying imperfection’s upward mobility. Their investigations uncovered the Seven Deadly Sins. These were rated in the 6^th Century by Gregory the Great: Pride is really bad, envy less so, down through anger, sadness, avarice, gluttony, and—last and luckily least for legions of libertines—lust.

By the 13^th Century theology had become more precise. Thomas Aquinas, known as the “angelic doctor,” discovered that gluttony and lust (orality and sexuality) were very naughty too, and he declared that all of the seven sins were equally deadly.

In those days religious authorities tortured and burned “heretics” and “witches.” So it was wisely decided to keep hate, revenge, cruelty, and violence off of the list of sins, even though these appeared to the average heretic to be more deadly than overeating.

In our day psychoanalysis claims that sins are symptoms of conflict in the human psyche. Through inner conflict, we each concoct our self-defeat, our recipe for disaster. In this secular interpretation, it’s not so much about sin as about quality of life: Our unresolved negativity limits our capacity for happiness and brings on dire social and environmental problems.

Human negativity is a powerful component of our nature, and at any given moment we can color our experience in its stormy hues. Without always registering the inner choice we make, we begin to entertain and indulge in old unresolved emotions, which is our dark embrace of our negative side.

One obstacle to eliminating human negativity is the lack of agreement among mental-health experts concerning its causes and cures. Another obstacle is psychological and consists of the denial, resistance, defenses, and egotism found in the human psyche. Some “experts,” among them proponents of positive psychology, believe that we need only to wear yellow smiley-faces.

No mask of deception can cover up the fact that we are negativity-generating machines. Yet we decline to lift the hood to see this power plant in our psyche, let alone start unscrewing its nuts and bolts for closer inspection. If we’re willing to get our hands dirty, this is what we’ll discover:

1. Areas of our psyche are infused with negativity and have much more power in influencing our decisions and sabotaging our success than we want to believe.
2. We have unconscious resistance to accepting good and prosperity in our life, and to becoming emotionally independent and more loving.
3. One aspect of human negativity is self-aggression, an inner critic or tyrant to which we are held accountable and to which we act defensively. We absorb this negativity and pass it along to others in the forms of disrespect, disapproval, criticism, hatred, and violence.
4. Another aspect of our negativity is inner passivity. This creates an unconscious alignment with being a victim and with feeling overwhelmed and ineffective. We are tempted to blame our reactions to this passivity on others, on parents, on society, or on biochemical imbalances and bad genes.
5. In our relationships and careers, we can be compulsive about acting out our negativity, leading to a lack of emotional and behavioral self-regulation. We can easily repeat self-defeating as well as self-destructive patterns of behavior throughout our lifetime.
6. We have, as the essence of our unconscious negativity, emotional attachments to feeling deprived, refused, controlled, criticized, rejected, and so on. We even provoke others in ways that enable us to act out with them the misery associated with these negative attachments.
7. We transfer onto others the expectation that they are directing toward us the forms of negativity to which we are attached, and we project onto others the negativity we refuse to see in ourself.

If these seven points, call them the Seven Deadly Signs, received as much publicity as the Seven Deadly Sins, human negativity—and with it terrorism, war, violence, selfishness, and fear—would soon run out of gas.