Optimism

Somewhere is the past few months I heard a talk about the desperate state of affairs. It was porbablly climate change but maybe it was the meltdown or the mideast. In any case he was asked if he was optimistic. He said something like that optimism was the only attitude which leads to effective action so it is our obligation to be optimistic. Fake it 'til you make it.

.

Fake it 'til you make it

New to my collection of FITYMIs from Rebecca of Sunny Brook Farm:

you may understand how the adoption of the outward and visible sign has some strange influence in developing the inward and spiritual state of which it is the expression.

From here

Later:

The first, on an individual level, is as a kind of cognitive therapy or as a way of generating rules of conduct: if you believe certain propositions, or try to make yourself believe them, the world becomes more tolerable and your behaviour better adapted to it. This need not be because they are simply grand untruths. It might be because they are needed to balance other grand untruths generated by default by other bits of my mind.

Later:

..., I knew on one level that my fears were ridiculous, and that there are in fact no lions on Swiss alps, no wolf-packs in the lake district and no giant carnivorous elk anywhere. But the only thing that made them go away was to behave as if I were not frightened and to summon up images of my spiritual self as a larger, more dangerous beast than anything to be found around me. Propositional truth did nothing for my fears. Propositional falsehood worked.

Acid, quenelles, teleology
Andrew Brown (again)

or

Fake it 'til you make it

or

Perform the acts of faith and faith will come

Loyola, Exercises (1548)
From Dawn to Decadence page 39

Assume a virtue, if you have it not,... For use can almost change the stamp of nature

Hamlet to his mother (1602)

So with faith, if it does not lead to action, it is in itself a lifeless thing.

James 2:17

we need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real

William James
Principals of Psychology Chapter 21 (1890)

Helen blushed, and Sister Teresa seemed to read her thoughts. "In the beginning, we all feel a bit like imposters in our capes and veils and being called 'Sister.' But don't worry about it - just act like you think a nun should when you're not sure what to do, and you'll find that through grace and love, you become one."

Lying Awake
Mark Salzman p83

Brain scientist also tell us what we�ve always known, that practice makes perfect. Repetition of an action actually strengthens neural pathways, which James Austin calls, �long-term potentiation.�[40]

Wesley vs. the God Module:
Can Wesley Help a Nonreductive Physicalist Post-Modern Theology of Religious Experience?
Cliff Guthrie

I see that I found several of these here (pdf).

10/24/04 - Lot's of good stuff in Remembering the Future, Imagining the Past: Story, Ritual, and the Human Brain by David Hogue. There's even an index entry for "living as if".