The Power of Positive
This article first appeared in the Minden Times and Haliburton Echo in July 2025.
It seems we have been sucked into a world where criticism is the dominant discourse. Where holding accountable or being held accountable is the central job description of leaders of all sorts. Where every action elicits an equal and opposite reaction. The result is life unfolding like two teams fighting on a field while observers wear identifying jerseys and responds with competing cheers and jeers. Not life as it was meant to be. Not life as we would like it.
So what is the alternative? First and foremost it’s doing the hard work of figuring out what it is we DO want, rather than what it is we don’t want. We are encouraged to think that we have no choice, or that the choice we must make is self-evident. It’s restful to have someone else do the hard thinking for us. It’s also safe: doing what we’ve been told to do is an age-old defense. It is a developmental phase in the raising of civilized humans that many do not advance beyond. That failure is aided by social institutions that actively discourage learning and practicing the skill of independent thought – careless parenting, religion and education come to mind.
The slide toward Strongman leadership that we are currently experiencing is both an indication of and an encouragement toward abandoning our human obligation to be independent thinkers. Independent thought does not preclude coming to agreement with others, moving toward confluence (I would reject consensus) in assessment of our shared reality. The challenge, however, is coming to agreement on what Good looks like.
It's a challenge because it’s harder to share Good than it is to share Bad. We rather welcome sharing Bad. It could be argued that shared Bad creates healthy communities, especially if it’s a short-term crisis caused by factors outside human control – like weather. Less when it’s chronic and attributable to human choices and we take refuge in philanthropy. (Confusing when weather cum climate is a consequence of human activity.)
Sharing Good raises the spectre of fairness. We can sorta agree that no one deserves Badness, that there’s more than enough to go around, that no one is apt to claim more than their fair share. Not so with Goodness. We believe and fear that the supply is limited, that there will be competition, that it will not be meted out equitably, that we will have to justify there being winners and losers. We twist ourselves into moral and ethical knots trying to figure out the right way to share Goodness.
Why do we believe that Goodness is limited but Badness is boundless? That Goodness is a zero-sum proposition (what you get I don’t) but Badness is universally and endlessly available? Ainsley Hogarth, tucked into a NYT review of Stephen King’s most recent book, references ‘this insistence that the invention of truth is an inalienable right – sounds painfully familiar’.
Hmm, maybe aptly applied to the idea that Badness is omnipresent and Goodness is a present conferred by… who knows? God? A Strongman? Fate? Hard work? A meritorious life? Maybe that idea is an invention of truth that has been successfully marketed. The idea of original sin, that we are conceived and born in sin and need a Strongman to rescue us from the consequences of an act beyond our control (okay, I imported the Strongman bit), was Augustine’s gift to us in the second century and has been well protected against the erosion of time.
So maybe it’s time to turn it on its head (as our new Prime Minister Carney is fond of doing when the media ask him questions that invite him to be defensive, and instead gives mini-lessons that divvy his complex perspective into 1-2-3 points) and explore whether Good is or might become omnipresent. If we started with What does good look like? rather than What is bad in this situation? we might get to focusing on the creation of good rather than the eradication of bad.
Because agreeing what good looks like is just the first step (actually the second, the first being deciding to change focus): it needs to be followed by a collaborative and implementable plan to get from where we are to where we want to be. The magic word there is collaborative, which must be firmly grounded in the idea that goodness begets goodness and that there is therefore, inarguably, enough to go around.
Here's my 1-2-3 take-away: we should resist gawking at the carnage of what’s wrong with the world, figure out what we think good looks like and have meaningful conversations to identify others who share that perspective, and then implement every day in every way the tiny steps that lead toward that grand goal. It’s worth a try.
