Review: The Power of Bad
One of my New Year’s resolutions, in common with many people, dealt with an attempt to reduce negativity in my own life. So, when I heard about The Power of Bad, I felt like I had discovered an effective tool to help me achieve my resolution.
My mistake.
The authors, John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister, go to great lengths to discuss the power of negativity in life, but not as the personal individual concept I anticipated. They’re looking at it as a larger social concept.
Looking at the “power of bad” or negativity through things like education, parenting, on-line reviews, marketing, management, and motivation, the authors demonstrate the influence of “bad” as outweighing that of “good” in almost all aspects of life.
The outliers include language and song, where “good” words heavily outnumber “bad” ones, and the prominence of our “rosy” views of the past. Tierney and Baumeister recommend ways to redress the social implications of “bad” for a more positive outlook and point out how and why the negative carries such an overriding influence in our minds.
The only specific personal issue addressed concerns the Pollyanna Effect, wherein an individual chooses to find the good in everything they confront. The authors do give some hints as to how individuals can go about cultivating that approach to life but not at the barebones specific level I looked for.
The book ends with a discussion of the tendency to see life as one crisis after another, a commonly shared modern perspective viewed as a hallmark of our age. The authors argue this view as dominant throughout history. Tierney and Baumeister do not seem to recognize any legitimate crisis in the world today, but rather a broad negative outlook pushed into high gear by political and social groups using the outgrowth of fear for specific goals and purposes.
While informative and well-written, this book won’t help me keep my New Year’s resolutions.
What were they anyway?
The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It by John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and local booksellers. Published by Penguin Press, New York 2019. This article contains affiliate links.
Robin is a late bloomer. After serving as a full-time mother of four, she received her Ph.D. at age 49. A former college professor, she is a committed Christian and a political activist supporting causes on behalf of minorities and economic redress. At age 70, she is currently completing a biography of Julia Flisch and helping her husband of 40 years spoil their four Labrador rescues.