Politics & Power Quote by James Bovard

Positive thinking, in Bovard's telling, isn't self-help; it's social control with a smile. The line lands like a shove because it flips an American virtue - optimism - into a transaction: the more powerless you are, the more you're expected to perform cheerfulness for the people holding the leash. That inversion is classic Bovard, a libertarian polemicist who treats political language as camouflage for coercion. If the system is asking you to absorb loss, risk, or austerity, it also wants you to narrate that absorption as character-building.

"Slaves' virtue" is deliberately incendiary, less a literal claim than a moral spotlight. Bovard is aiming at the culture of compliance: employees told to be "grateful" during layoffs, citizens told to "tighten belts" during policy failures, communities urged to "stay positive" while rights shrink or costs rise. Positive thinking becomes a prophylactic against anger, and anger is often the only fuel available for collective action. The subtext is that optimism, detached from agency, is a kind of sedative: it doesn't heal the wound, it numbs the pain long enough for the wound to be normalized.

His wording also suggests a con game with a willing participant: "something that people do to con themselves". That matters because it shifts blame from a single villain to a shared habit. Bovard isn't just accusing leaders of manipulation; he's warning that people internalize the script because despair is hard, and confrontation is costly. The quote works by making that psychological bargain feel shameful - a provocation designed to wake the reader up, not comfort them.