In The Return of the King, we hear the words spoken by the wise, “I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”
Comforted by our reading, we set the book down and re-enter a culture suffering in the death-throes of what Byung-Chul Han calls, “the cult of positivity.” There is room in Gandalf’s world for some tears, some pain, but not in our world. No. Here one feels the unbearable pressure to remain positive and to coerce all things into a forced positivity in which everything is both commodifiable and pleasing.
“I have to stay in a good mindset”, we are told, “don’t worry, be happy” we are told, “practice a little more self-care” we are told. We are like the girls in Cyndi Lauper’s song, we “just wanna have fun.” That’s all we really want. Everything is a commodity, every commodity pleasantly happy-making.
The obverse side of the positivity culture is the vent. When we finally break-down and “just wanna be real” with people. When the pressure of positivity caves-in we are left in a vacuum of inescapable despair.
These things are related. The despairing contemporary person who vents angrily and rages against the world often does so precisely because they still believe in a sheer positivity and are wounded that they have not attained it. This is not how things should be going for them. They were promised fun.
Escape from the cult of positivity is not found in the chaos often found in “venting”, which often amounts to little more than demanding to be brought back into the feedback loop of the cult positivity.
True freedom lies in the direction of true tears, for not all tears are an evil. I can let my days be difficult, I do not need to hold my days hostage to the demands that they are always pleasant to me. My days can be free from the pressure of positivity, and so can I. Some of my days will be merry, some will be painful. I can respond to the variety of my days without demanding a totalizing happiness from them. This liberating of my days from the cult of positivity allows them, even the painful ones, to be something beyond both happiness and sorrow: it can make them blessed.
Tolkien’s fantasy, as he always does, invites us less into the pretend and more fully into the Real. Specifically, Tolkien’s wisdom embodies the wisdom of the Letter of James. Freed from the cult of positivity I can truly and legitimately “count it all joy” when I fall into various trials (Jas. 1:2), for my joy has been unchained from the onerous yoke of “being happy”. And when my happiness is threatened by others, I do not need to fall into the despairing agony of rage. For what causes the fights and quarrels we have are the “passions that rage within us” which demand total pleasantness (Jas. 4:1-3).
There is something better than being positive, something better which being positive will in fact rob us of: being joyful.