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Pessimist NationSlate readers testify to the power of negative thinking.

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

(Continued from page 1)

Patti, an air-traffic controller, theorizes that only people in an affluent, technologically advanced society, packed with fail-safes and conveniences, could be so susceptible to The Secret's brand of hubris. "Things usually work out for the best," she writes, "but only because someone somewhere is working hard to make it so. In my profession as an air traffic controller this is true every day. You expect and prepare for the worst and use all of your skills to keep it from happening; but when the worst happens, those controllers that imagined dire scenarios and possible solutions perform better than those that did not."

Thaddeus, a farming consultant from Minnesota, writes that American farmers are congenital gloomy Guses, constantly wringing their hands over weather, blight, and commodity prices. "The result of all this negative thinking," Thaddeus writes, "is the most stable, secure and inexpensive food supply in the history of the world. Farmers worry about dry weather, so they install irrigation systems. They worry about wet weather, so they install tile lines to drain their fields. They worry about diseases, so they vaccinate their cattle and spray fungicides on their crops. They worry about cold winters, so they cut hay and silage for their livestock."

Jeffrey, an intelligence analyst in Baghdad, writes: "I am paid a very low salary to dodge mortars and predict how our enemies are going to try to defeat us." This may be "one of the ultimate examples of negative thinking," he writes. "And believe me, taking on the mindset of some of our enemies here is a horrible way to spend an evening. But it is critical to keeping the soldiers out there on the streets alive, to protecting the Iraqi people."

Timothy, an experimental nuclear physicist in North Carolina, waxes poetic about the armies of contingency planners in his line of work. "Some of my colleagues are employed solely to envision novel disastrous scenarios, spending their entire working lives imagining the worst," he writes. "Across this land, an army of pessimists—chemical pessimists, medical pessimists, nuclear pessimists, electrical pessimists, political and military pessimists, environmental and biological pessimists, computer pessimists, consumer safety pessimists, economic and financial pessimists—stand guard over America's babies. And at the end of our shifts, we have a couple of beers."

And finally, from a mother named Kris, we received a kind of domestic manifesto of negative—or maybe just humble—thinking.

"We bite our tongues rather than starting arguments that aren't worth having," she writes. "We assume a home-improvement project will take longer and cost more than our more optimistic estimates. We pay our insurance premiums, live in affordable homes and happily buy off-label clothes. Negativity is said to be about fear, and the positive thinking camp seems to consider fear a universal evil. But here on the Negative Side, there's such a thing as healthy fear. It's what keeps us from taking out sub-prime mortgages and accumulating credit-card debt. It's why we wear seatbelts and keep an emergency kit in the basement during tornado season. It's what prompts us to get the brakes fixed and the septic tank pumped. It's why we install smoke detectors, teach our kids how to get out of the house during a fire, get annual physicals. It's not that we never visualize a desired outcome. We just don't count on it."

That's the news from the negative side. We'll be sending these and all the other reader testimonials to Oprah later this week.

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John Gravois is a writer living in Washington, D.C.
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