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Pessimist NationSlate readers testify to the power of negative thinking.

By John GravoisPosted Tuesday, May 29, 2007, at 5:37 PM ET

The Secret Who knew? People are in love with the idea of seeing a killjoy sociologist from New Jersey on Oprah.

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A couple of weeks back, we wrote a letter to Oprah asking her to make amends for promoting The Secret, the self-help craze that says the universe takes orders from our thoughts. We advised her to clear a slot on her show for Karen Cerulo, a Rutgers University professor whose latest book, Never Saw It Coming, presents a nitty-gritty study of our national addiction to wishful thinking. And then we asked Slate readers to help our cause by testifying to the power of pessimism—or at least to the wisdom of preparing for the worst. We could not have envisioned a more positive response.

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Emily Yoffe used The Secret to will a brand-new kitchen floor into existence. In 1998, Seth Stevenson assessed Oprah and her empire. Chris Lehmann wrote about her book-club fatigue in 2002. Last year, Troy Patterson reviewed her grandiose apology over the James Frey affair. Henry Blodget suggested that investor pessimism might be a good measure of when it's time to buy a stock.

Hundreds of e-mails poured in from all over the world: On the virtues of contingency planning, we heard from an NPR producer in Baghdad, an outdoorsman in Oregon, a civil engineer in Pennsylvania, and a filmmaker on Long Island, N.Y. From a game designer in California, we heard about an online simulation called World Without Oil that harnesses the intelligence of thousands of players to help imagine and prepare for an oil shock. And from scores of sensible, regular folks, we received assurance that our cultural DNA is not all Pollyanna genes. Dozens of people advocated the timeworn motto, "Hope for the best and plan for the worst." And several others referred us to a piece of ancient wisdom "found in texts with yellowed pages and brittle covers," as one person put it. The wisdom: "Be prepared," from The Boy Scout Handbook.

All that said, most of our testimonials came from recovering Polyannas. A few readers professed that our letter to Oprah brought about a kind of conversion experience. "As an eternal optimist, I never ever envision negative thoughts," writes Leigh. "I see myself all over your article and realize that I am completely unprepared for the rest of my life (including my funeral). Oprah I agree with Slate! Please have Karen Cerulo on your show to discuss her book!" But probably the greatest portion of the testimonials came from people who recognized the limits of positive thinking too late.

Under the subject line "How too much optimism ruined me financially," a reader named Erik described his heavy investment in booming tech stocks throughout the 1990s. "I thought I was an absolute genius," he writes, "even though I read a lot of dire warnings that tech was vastly overvalued." Here's the saddest part: "In 1998, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and ultimately didn't make [it], dying at the beginning of 2000. I received $150,000 in life insurance money, and immediately invested it in tech." A few months later, Erik lost nearly all of the money, which he had hoped would pay for his retirement and college for his granddaughter.

We received a ton of e-mails like this one, from Lane: "Had I been of a more realistic mindset, I may not have assumed that I would be married forever (I wasn't), that my husband would be faithful (he wasn't), that he would pay his child support (he doesn't), etc, etc, etc. Twenty years after getting married (and 5 after getting divorced), while not overly suspicious, I'm now always on the lookout for reality!"

Several New Orleanians took us to task for discussing pitfalls of wishful thinking without ever mentioning Hurricane Katrina. (As a born Cajun with family in the flood zone, my apologies.) "An ongoing alarmist attitude in Louisiana about inadequate/never-repaired levees could have gone a long way to preventing flooding," writes Soph. And Susan reports that her 79-year-old father's pre-storm optimism nearly killed him. "He had planned to stay home and ride it out," she says, "figuring we had made it through Hurricane Betsy in 1965 when our home received 6 feet of water, and he had every faith that our government had provided adequate protection with the levee systems they had built since then." At the last minute, Susan and her sister persuaded their father to evacuate. When Katrina passed, she says, "his neighborhood was flooded with enough water to cover his entire house, completely over the roof."

While a huge number of the testimonials we received recounted tales of positive thinking gone (or nearly gone) awry, others gave a touching portrait of all the professional negative thinkers who work behind the scenes.