It is not easy to capture the absurdity and cruelty of Noel Edmonds’s remark on Tuesday, when he seemed to suggest that cancer can be caused by a bad attitude. But there’s a remarkable scene in the documentary Three Miles North of Molkom that comes close (you can watch it here). We follow a group of people attending a new age festival in Sweden. They entertain themselves with yoga, tantric sex, tree hugging and fire walking. They also learn a little-known martial art called yellow bamboo. The idea of this technique is simple. You use psychic energy to defend yourself.
The group stands on a beach, led by an instructor. “Breathe in and pull the energy down,” he says. “And push it out of your hands.” Two men stretch out their arms and gather as much psychic power as they can. When the instructor comes rushing towards them, they unleash their invisible power, like two superheroes, making the instructor fall to the ground. He remains on the beach for some time, his whole body is shaking.
Then we see a woman. She steps into place. She goes through the same procedure: pulling the energy down from the air, into her body, and then out through her hands. The close-up reveals her nervousness. She looks insecure, fragile. The instructor comes running forward at a fast speed. Something is not right. Bang. She falls to the ground, crying.
In case it wasn’t obvious: shooting out invisible arrows of psychic energy from your hands is not going to help you when a full-grown man attacks you. And the same goes for a positive attitude. Sure, we shouldn’t underestimate the placebo effect – it may make you feel a lot better. And I won’t deny that being positive is likely to make people around you more supportive. But combating cancer with optimism – no, that doesn’t work. It’s delusional. And a group of Australian researchers confirmed this, when they asked 179 cancer patients to complete questionnaires assessing their optimism. They found no connection between optimism and survival rate.
I have nothing against people who consult horoscopes or tarot cards, or others who hunt UFOs or Bigfoot. But the problem is that this vision – that optimism is a cure-all – is ultimately cruel. It is cruel because it says that we bring our own destiny upon ourselves.
This is what Barbara Ehrenreich so aptly showed in her book Smile or Die. The unrelenting focus on personal responsibility and positive attitude implies that all of the drawbacks that one might experience are not the product of a complex series of circumstances, but that they boil down to one’s own individual choices. In the case of illness, we are led to believe that surviving cancer is all about your willpower and whether you have adequately put your mind to it.
It is easy to find cruelty in the more extreme versions of positive thinking. In The Secret, Rhonda Byrne tries to explain her bizarre theory of the law of attraction, coming up with conclusions such as: “Illness cannot exist in a body that has harmonious thoughts.” If that were not enough, she also seems to suggest that people who die in natural catastrophes have themselves to blame. When pushed on the subject after the 2004 tsunami, Byrne explained: “By the law of attraction, they [the victims] had to be on the same frequency as the event.”
The insistence on personal responsibility fits perfectly into our current era of neoliberalism, with its stunning refusal to discuss the role of social and political structures. Yet, we should not forget that these thoughts are deeply rooted in western culture. In her book Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag traced them back to the late-19th-century physician Georg Groddeck, who declared that “the sick man himself creates his disease”. At the time of writing her book, Sontag had just been diagnosed with cancer. She noticed that people around her would express these views, which she called preposterous and dangerous, especially since the patients already had, in her words, an “enfeebled capacity for self-love”.
When reading Noel Edmonds’s words I cannot help thinking about Ehrenreich and Sontag, and the injustice they both had to go through when diagnosed with cancer. But more than anyone, I think of the poor woman on the beach. I can see her lying there, screaming in pain, while reminded that all of this discomfort could have been avoided, had she just adopted a better and more energised attitude.
