by Todd Kashdan, Robert Biswas-Diener

This is a Self-help/Psychology book about embracing your 'negative' emotions and living in balance with yourself.

It starts with a great example of how to test how people deal with uncertainty and the role that primal anger plays in competition sports. It challenges Maslow's theory of the hierarchy of needs and postulates that our expectations of what will make us happy are often wrong, a theory which appears very plausible.

The book focuses a lot on the idea that those who are most able to deal with negative feelings are most happy, live longest and are most creative. On the surface I would agree with this idea, but some of the specifics in the theory as put forward in this book didn't quite fit with my own experience.

The book suggested that we as a species have become easily stressed because we have come to rely on comforts. It also had some interesting insights about how being comfortable externally can lead to discomfort internally. The problem was that it was presented as a universal condition and didn't allow for naturally happy people to roll with the punches when they come, while still enjoying all the comforts of modern life on a more regular basis.

One complaint I had was that it was very American centric, using phrases like "We as Americans" in an assumption that the book's readership would be exclusively American and not acknowledging that the theories would apply to most of the Western world until much later on. Even then there were only passing mention of countries "closest to American".

It did go into more diverse cultural differences and made some interesting observations of expectation of 'emotional state' between individualists and collectivists.

I have to say that I don't accept their justification for temper tantrums or the way they all but glorify anxiety. In my experience, people who are angry are not more efficient or creative, but miss things because they are too wrapped up in their emotional state to think as clearly as they need to in a crisis situation. Even in sewing lessons I learned long ago that if you're feeling angry, put the creative project away until later because you're going to make mistakes.

I also felt at times that they were mixing up definitions of happiness with goal achievements. Yes, achieving a goal is one road to happiness, but it is not happiness itself. Some of the phrases used like "Happy people can be too trusting" in regard to politics and detecting deceit and "Happy people are lazy thinkers" in regard to "paying greater attention to the gist, not the details" really made me question the authors' qualifications. Have they never been happy? Do they really believe that feeling happy makes someone go stupid and unobservant?

Perhaps in general, some of these ideas may have some truth behind them, but as a generally happy person who will become very alert the minute someone tries to tell me a lie and someone who experiences happiness most when working on creative things, I found the theories seriously flawed. Still, there were some interesting ideas and if nothing else, food for thought as to what really constitutes happiness and the way that differences in attitude affect how any given person responds to the bumps in life.

It's an interesting read, but I recommend maintaining objectivity while reading and questioning rather than taking it all at face value.

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Interesting in its own ways, and raising a lot of prompts to question oneself about how we define ‘evil’, if such definitions are actually applicable, what would make us think a person is evil, or whether we are all capable of evil (and if we are, then what prevents us from tipping that way). Most examples given I already knew (Hitler—obviously, or the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments), but it didn’t make the questions less valid, of course. Like many things, the ‘evil’ label can be applied in haste, as a shortcut, and there are times when I believe it is indeed valid, and others when evil has nothing to do with it. Times when we tend to use the label to mean something that is too different from our own experience for us to want to acknowledge it and not treat it as ‘other’.

And it is definitely a tricky subject. It is not so easy to calmly consider, say, the case of paedophilia, and try to see people experiencing these urges as people who need help rather than just as ‘evil people who should be castrated’ (note that I wrote ‘experiencing urges’, which doesn’t necessarily mean ‘acting on them’). Are those people ‘evil’? Are they more victims of something they can’t control? And what would be more productive: just labelling them, or trying to find solutions to help before something bad happens? Probably your mileage may vary here, but I get the point, and I agree with it, that pointing the finger is seldom a solution in itself—and that saying ‘it’s evil’ is basically useless anyway if all we do is say it instead of acting. Which raises other questions, obviously: what does ‘acting’ mean here? Does it mean punishing, killing (and committing a harmful act as well)? Does it mean helping?

Regarding this kind of reflections leading to more reflections, the book is clearly interesting, and tends to push boundaries and make one feel uncomfortable: none of us want to realise ‘hey, wait, but I also have such thoughts at times’, or think ‘if I don’t call a murderer evil, then people will judge me as bad and reject me’. There’s a lot of philosophical aspects to go with here, and opportunities for good discussions.

This said, I found the ‘science’ side more lacking. While many examples presented in it do rest on actual experiments and reports, and some clinical reasons are given for certain behaviours (such as studies trying to pinpoint if specific areas of the brain are involved in psychopathic behaviours, etc.), for me, it didn’t go far enough in the scientific department (such as neurology), which is why I liked the book in general, but didn’t love it. The author also adds her own opinions, and does say they are opinions (= not trying to pass them as facts), and to be fair, I do agree with them (I never once considered that mental disorders were ‘evil’…); still, that is not what I expected here.

To conclude, this one is a good read for delving into more philosophical approaches, confronting ourselves when it comes to what we consider evil, and trying to understand what the latter entails. It is much less an actual scientific book, though.

TITLE:  The Dark Side of the Sun

AUTHOR:  Terry Pratchett

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