{"id":2079,"date":"2013-01-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-01-12T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/wptest\/2013\/01\/12\/a-critique-of-the-cult-of-willpower-and-positive-thinking\/"},"modified":"2013-01-12T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-01-12T00:00:00","slug":"a-critique-of-the-cult-of-willpower-and-positive-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/2013\/01\/12\/a-critique-of-the-cult-of-willpower-and-positive-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"A Critique of the \u201cCult\u201d of Willpower and Positive Thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Have the terms willpower and positive thinking become arbitrary labels which are used to explain success, failure or motivation when no other logical explanation presents itself? <\/p>\n<p>Is Lance Armstrong\u2019s fall from grace testament to this? <\/p>\n<p>What do we mean when we describe acts of bravery, like those of soldiers at the Battle of the Somme, as extreme measures of willpower? <\/p>\n<p>Smile or Die: has the self-help culture of the late 20th and early 21st century developed an attitude that positive thinking can overcome any problem, whether it be loosing weight, finding love, or beating cancer? <\/p>\n<p>What light does Friedrich Nietzsche\u2019s \u201cwill to power\u201d shed on contemporary ideas of motivation and success? <\/p>\n<p>Is humanity a struggle for dominance where the strongest willed individuals exploit the weak and the foreign through appropriation, injury, and overpowering? <\/p>\n<p>If \u201clife simply is the will to power\u201d do we actually have any way of controlling, training or improving our will? <\/p>\n<p>Does the answer to this question explain whether willpower and positive thinking have become arbitrary terms which have no tangible or practical meaning?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hew Rous-Eyre, 2013, Stage 2<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8792,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[609,22,128],"tags":[6,315,617],"class_list":["post-2079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-609","category-abstracts","category-stage-2-abstracts","tag-nietzsche","tag-psychology","tag-willpower"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8792"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2079\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}