Gaiman/Trump and the New Thought Behind the Abuse

In “Dream of a Thousand Cats”, a 1990 comic in The Sandman series written by Neil Gaiman and subsequently adapted in the first season of the eponymous television show in 2022, a cat tells a story to a crowd of other cats. Once upon a time, she says, enormous cats ruled the world and humans were their servants, pets, and sometimes food. But then one day a human, inspired by a dream, rose up and told the other humans that if only they believed, if only they shared the same dream together, then reality itself would change. In this new reality they dreamed into existence, humans would rule and cats would be pets, and it will have always been this way and no one would remember that it had ever been any different. And so, this cat tells her audience, “We could change things back. If we believed. If we dreamed.”

This of course can be seen in metaphorical terms, of people dreaming together to remake the world. But within the universe of The Sandman, the idea is meant literally. The notion that belief shapes reality isn’t original to Gaiman, but it’s one that defines his major works and that he did much to help popularize in fantastic fiction over his forty year career. In Gaiman’s works, old gods scheme for ways to get humans to believe in them again so that they might regain their former glory, while new gods come into being through human’s nebulous belief in things like technology or media. Gods take over small towns in order to make them into factories for their belief, franchise their image to corporations, and conspire to start wars and mass human sacrifice for their own glory and benefit.

Donald Trump has sometimes been called the first “postmodern” president, and much of this has to do with Trump’s, shall we say, loose grasp on the concept of truth. The long list of things Trump has said that are simply untrue is so vast it has it’s own Wikipedia page, but there’s a moment in a recent interview that I think illustrates something fundamental about how Trump feels about facts and belief. In an interview for ABC News with Terry Moran in April, on the subject of Kilmar Ábrego García, a man Trump’s own administration admitted was mistakenly deported to an El Salvadorian slave prison without trial or due process, Trump repeated a claim that the man had gang tattoos on his fingers. The main problem with this claim is that the picture of said tattoos is so obviously fake it looks like it was done by a Middle Schooler who just discovered Photoshop exists, as Moran pointed out with a scoff. And rather than address this objection at all, Trump simply moved to attack Moran as someone ungrateful for the opportunity to interview him, as a nobody he’d “never heard of” despite Trump also saying he personally selected him, and someone “not very nice”. Trump actually seems annoyed that the reporter won’t just admit that the untrue thing is true because he said so.

For Donald Trump, truth, it seems, is not some hard-and-fast thing that exists in objective reality. Instead, truth is a narrative. Those with status get to control the narrative, to tell people what to believe and they—at least enough of them—will believe it because of the status of the person saying it. The reporter didn’t have status, and therefore had no right to be questioning the narrative. Doing so was impertinent and showed disloyalty and ingratitude for the honor bestowed on him of the high-status person deigning to speak with him.

When Trump in 2016 sent his press secretary out to repeatedly claim the crowd size at his inauguration was bigger than any other, the overwhelming evidence contradicting this claim didn’t matter. The claim wasn’t about evidence. It was about Trump’s ability to overwhelm the media with his own version of the narrative, to create a belief, a new reality, out of sheer will. And when Trump at the beginning of August 2025 fired the commissioner of labor statistics, claiming his jobs report was inaccurate, it wasn’t because he had some kind of counter evidence that showed something different. It just didn’t accord with the narrative that everything under Trump is the BEST and the GREATEST and so now he can appoint someone who will tell him what he wants to hear while his base dutifully devolves into conspiracy theories about how the Deep State wanted to put out a fake jobs report without the slightest shred of evidence.

Trump, in a way, behaves like one of the gods in Neil Gaiman’s fiction, trying to shore up belief and worshippers in order to gain the power that bestows. If belief shapes reality, power goes to people who can most shape belief.

Like many, I was shocked when reports of Gaiman’s history of abusing women became public. I’d first encountered his comics when I was teenager and become a bit obsessed and I’ve read almost everything he’s published. Gaiman’s mix of detached intellectualism, literary references, fantastic and romantic conceits, and wit has always appealed to a certain kind of bookish person. I’ve even met him a few times at various events where he’d always been cordial and generous with his time and seemed to charm everyone around. I’m not going to go into depth on the revelations about his behavior and the way he preyed on and abused vulnerable young women over the course of decades, for that you can refer to Vulture’s excellent article on the subject. For the purposes of this piece, the important thing is that Gaiman’s mixture of charm, narcissism, and abuse, as well as themes throughout his work, shares certain family resemblances with a certain president (among others)—who it should be noted also has many credible accusations of sexual abuse, including with minors, not to mention the whole long-term association with the most famous child sex trafficker in memory—and that there’s a background and worldview that both them grew up steeped in different incarnations of, an ideological movement that tells its followers that what they believe deep in their hearts becomes real but is more often just a means for leaders to use and abuse those followers.

As I’ve discussed in previous episodes, as capitalism began to take shape, a new philosophical system emerged to explain and justify both the new social order and the new understanding of the world. This was called the Enlightenment, and while its valorization of reason and evidence would begin the process of transforming what was then known as natural philosophy into what we now know as science, the process was hardly smooth and seamless. Key scientific figures like Isaac Newton (1643-1727), for example, was an avid practitioner of alchemy, and the visions of the divine recorded in scientific detail by Swedish scientist Emanual Swedenborg (1688-1772) would, on publication, became a sensation that transformed him into a celebrity and led to whole new denominations springing up in his name.

In addition, following the Enlightenment, the 19th century saw philosophical and artistic reactions against the new rationality, including Romanticism and Idealism in Europe and Transcendentalism in the United States. Likewise too the United States saw a reaction against the old Calvinism that had long defined it, a theological system that denigrated idleness and pleasure-seeking and proscribed unceasing labor and mental vigilance against sinful thoughts as the path to salvation. Fundamentally, as the means of production transformed under industrialism, there was an ideological transition, as described in Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920 (2001) by Beryl Satter*,* between “producer capitalism (with its calls for self-denial and strenuosity) to consumer capitalism (with its encouragement of spending and self-gratification)”.

On top of this all, the medical field in particular at the time wasn’t a source of great confidence in its science and rationality. To whit, in 1833, New England clock maker Phineas P. Quimby was given Calomel as a treatment for tuberculosis, after bloodletting and various other methods of emptying him of fluids proved ineffective. Calomel contains highly toxic mercury and as a result after a few months Quimby’s teeth had fallen out. It’s hardly surprising he began looking for an alternative. A friend suggested that horseback riding might help him, but he was too weak to mount a horse so rode in a carriage instead, only to find he had to run beside the stubborn horse to keep it moving. After he’d rested from this exertion he found that he felt better than ever. After that he continued to regularly exert himself and continued to improve.

Soon, Quimby saw a demonstration by a practitioner of “Mesmerism”, the hypnotic techniques of the German Franz Mesmer who would make “passes” with his hands over someone and press body parts in an attempt to heal them via “animal magnetism”, an invisible force permeating all living things. Quimby believed the healing effect of his exertions might have something to do with this “animal magnetism”, and he ultimately opened up his own “medical practice” for mesmerist techniques, for a time even employing a clairvoyant whom he would place into a mesmeric trance to diagnose illnesses.

However, Quimby came to find this “mesmerism” unnecessary. Patients seemed to get better on their own and it seemed the primary factor was simply the belief in their own healing. As one of his students would put it, “Faith is a force. … Believing that I have the thing for which I am praying causes me to have it.” Quimby expanded this into a belief system in which the individual and the divine were really one and the same thing, and therefore a person could correct any illness with the power of their own mind. Soon his treatment, per *Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America *****(2010) by Barbara Ehrenreich, “became a kind of ‘talking cure’, though which he endeavored to convince his patients that the universe was fundamentally benevolent, that they were one with the “Mind” out of which it was constituted, and that they could leverage their own powers of the mind to cure or ‘correct’ their ills.” He considered this “the science of life and happiness”, and proposed that the miracles of Jesus stemmed simply from him being able to leverage these sorts of human mind powers.

Now, at this time “science” was still not the professionalized realm of study we think of it today, and major scientific discoveries could still be made by people without much formal education, such as Michael Faraday (1791-1867), whose work revolutionized the understanding of electromagnetism. And the truth is, Quimby really had stumbled upon an actual scientific principle. It just wasn’t the one he thought it was.

The Placebo Effect is a phenomenon where people given a fake treatment for an ailment get a real result. For example, you have three groups of people in a study with some ailment, and one you give medicine, another you give a sugar pill that you tell them is medicine, and a third you give nothing at all. The placebo effect is when more of the people who received the sugar pill have their ailment alleviated than the people who received nothing at all.

The thing is, the placebo effect is widely misunderstood in popular media. There’s a sense in our culture that the placebo effect can cure anything, and proves some kind of underlying power of the mind over the body. However, as Ted J. Kaptchuk of Harvard’s Program of Placebo Studies told The Wall Street Journal in 2012, “Right now, I think evidence is that placebo changes not the underlying biology of an illness, but the way a person experiences or reacts to an illness.” Which is to say, the placebo effect doesn’t say cure the common cold or cancer but it can alleviate symptoms of these conditions and other psychosomatic issues. Other times, the Placebo effect is simply conflated with the body’s natural healing ability.

And certainly, compared to the brutal treatments that passed for mid-19th century medicine, Quimby’s placebos may well have seemed like genuine scientific revelation. No less than William James, the father of modern psychology, was taken with the work of Quimby and those who followed him. But then, like Isaac Newton, James held together a firm belief in both science and supernatural claptrap in scientific guise, suggesting, for example, that humans “habitually use only a small part of the powers they actually possess and which they might use under appropriate conditions,” a line that’s been seized on by quacks and frauds of all stripes for generations.

And it’s worth noting that the bulk of Quimby’s patients were not the impoverished masses dying of diphtheria but rather a clientele of the newly emerging middle classes who typically suffered from a melange of ill-defined nervous conditions classified under the nebulous diagnosis “neurasthenia”, exactly the sort of thing most likely to respond to placebos. The problem of course is that it’s one thing to note that a treatment helps an ailment, and it’s another to jump to the conclusion that all illnesses can be treated by the mind or that this reveals something about the true nature of God. But Quimby’s most famous student and patient would take framing these metaphysical leaps as science to their logical extreme.

Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, following her seemingly miraculous recovery from various conditions at the hands of Quimby and his methods, claimed divine inspiration dictated the content of her book, Science and Health with a Key to the Scripture (1875). In Eddy’s theology, the material world entirely was an illusion created by mind and spirit. Illness and want were merely temporary delusions that could be overcome through prayer and right thinking, and Jesus had come not to redeem people’s sins but to demonstrate these fundamental principles. “Sickness is a belief,” she wrote. Disease, she said, “is fear made manifest in the body.” Even death, she taught, could be overcome, and hinted in early works that mere sexual reproduction might be replaced by parthenogenesis. All things could come through divine supply. “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter,” she wrote. “All is infinite Mind, and its infinite manifestation, for God is All in All. Spirit is immortal Truth; Matter is mortal error.”

Eddy always claimed that Science and Health had been written under inspiration, “direct, final, complete” and formed an absolute dogma that should be not be subject to “interpretations”. And yet, in reality she had released several different editions with revisions, something that hadn’t escaped the notice of critics like Mark Twain. Further, her belief in “divine love” to always “meet every human need” didn’t prevent her from getting a morphine prescription for pain in her later life. Eddy was, in a word, a fraud. And one whose belief system has been responsible for an unknown number of deaths and debilitations, including of children, as Christian Scientists refused or delayed necessary medical treatment preferring to rely on prayer and faith-healing.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to grapple with the implications of Eddy’s belief system. In Christian Science, illness is the result of bad thoughts and beliefs. If you get sick, the blame is on you, and if you cannot get better then it’s your fault for not believing in your wellness hard enough. Now, the idea that illness and misfortune are the result of sin is not new, even if the theological conversation about “why bad things happen to good people” is long and complex and goes at least as far back as The Book of Job. In fact, Eddy’s imputation that her followers should monitor their thoughts for doubt and fear harkens back to Calvinist notions of constant vigilance against sinful thought, except now its not sin one must guard against but doubt and unhappiness itself, with this idea garbed in the language of science to lend it legitimacy.

And Quimby’s influence and this fundamental idea extended far beyond Eddy and her followers to a more general movement that gradually became known as “New Thought”. In 1889, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore began publication of the magazine Modern Thought, which became the foundation of what would become known as the Unity Church. Charles Fillmore instructed his disciples to “hold a thought” in their mind and repeat it in order to create “mental discipline”, describing his work as “lessons to be applied as one applies mathematical rules”.

However, by the end of the 19th century, modern medicine had begun to radically improve with the advent of new ideas like “germ theory”. New Thought’s focus in turn began to shift away from illness and the so-called “mind cure” and towards something more nebulous and financially rewarding—”prosperity”.

Of course, the New Thought promulgators had always held that material rewards were just as much a product of will and “spiritual magnetism” as disease. Fillmore, like Eddy, taught that aligning oneself with the divine and limitless “supply” of the universe would yield financial and spiritual rewards.

From 1886 until his death in 1891, journalist Prentice Mulford released pamphlets in which he would inspire what’s now known as “the Law of Attraction”, coining the soon-ubiquitous New Thought phrases “thoughts are things” and “the mind is a magnet”. For Mumford, one’s thoughts quite literally reshaped the world around you. “When you say to yourself, ‘I am going to have a pleasant visit or a pleasant journey,’” Mulford wrote, “you are literally sending elements and forces ahead of your body that will arrange things to make your visit or journey pleasant. When before the visit or the journey or the shopping trip you are in a bad humour, or fearful or apprehensive of something unpleasant, you are sending unseen agencies ahead of you which will make some kind of unpleasantness. Our thoughts, or in other words, our state of mind, is ever at work ‘fixing up’ things good or bad in advance.”

As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, a parade of titles by various authors found publication promising the secrets to material success based on New Thought principles, with one of the earliest and most influential being How to Succeed (1896) by Orison Swett Marden.

Marden’s recommendation for prosperity? Never admit defeat. Always feel powerful. Think success. Marden also warned strongly against what he called “overculture and wider outlook”, which is to say too much learning and education which risked a “weakening of self-confidence” and the “development of timidity”. Instead, one should simply “plunge ahead where the more cultured man would hesitate.” This despite the fact that Marden himself had a degree from Harvard.

Marden would be followed by examples like The Power of the Will (1907) by Frank Haddock and its sequel The Power of Success Through Culture of Vibrant Magnetism (1918), The Secret of Success (1908) by William Walker Atkinson (under the pen name Yogi Ramacharaka), The Science of Getting Rich (1910) by Wallace D. Wattles, and many others.

Meanwhile, in the 1890s, minister EW Kenyon was exposed to New Thought and brought its ideas into Pentecostal Christianity. The theology that emerged from this framed God’s desire to perfect rather than simply redeem his followers as a kind of legal contract, wherein belief and atonement granted one access to divine healing and material rewards, and as with Quimby, imagined they might allow one to access Christ-like superpowers. Those material rewards began to be referred to in terms like a person’s “rights and privileges” for what was owed to them by God, and Kenyon’s theology became known as Prosperity Gospel.

In Jewish tradition, as described in the Bible, Jews were commanded to give one tenth of the crops they grew to the priests (who were also effectively part of the governing body beneath the king) as a kind of tax, along with a second tenth meant to be given to the poor or, depending on the year, eaten at the temple or exchanged for money to spend on food at the temple. This is known as tithing. After the Jewish temple was destroyed in 70CE and the priest caste lost its obligations to it (rabbis are not priests), formal tithing was abandoned, though in many Jewish communities there’s still a tradition of giving ten percent of your income to charity.

However, at least as far back as the Council of Tours of 567, Christians have been instructed to practice tithing by giving to the Church. In Prosperity Gospel, this practice took on a contractual relationship, where by giving money to the church one could guarantee rewards returning to them manyfold over. Preacher A. A. Allen (1911-1970) took this to particular extremes, writing a story for example called “God Told Me to Mortgage My Home”, in which he described the tale of someone who mortgaged their home to give the money to Allen and in return was granted all manner of earthly rewards. Prosperity preachers took off in the era of televangelism of the 1970s, and amassed fortunes and commensurate mansions and private jets, the implication being that these are the rewards for their faith and not merely for convincing millions to send them huge amounts of their income on a prayer.

The destitution and desperation of the Great Depression gave New Thought fertile ground to work, with its promises of miraculous wealth and success without the need to focus on anything but your own mind. The most quintessential example and perhaps the most successful from the era is con artist Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937). Following a career marked by mail fraud and a scheme where he founded a so-called Automobile College that used students to assemble vehicles for a car company without paying them which, upon the bankruptcy of the car company, transformed itself into an early multi-level marketing scheme in which students would sell courses to prospective students in exchange for a commission, and then when that went bust, he founded an advertising school and immediately turned around and attempted to sell shares in the school for wildly inflated prices. Following that he opened a sham charity that supposedly sent educational materials to convicts (which turned out to be only his own books and courses). A Trumpian figure, in other words, if ever there was one.

After publishing a number of questionable self-help books, beginning with the eight-volume The Law of Success(1925), HIll finally hit paydirt in 1937 with Think and Grow Rich. From its opening, the book brims with outright lies, most notably the claim that he was given the “secret” of success by famed steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, a man he’d never actually met. But more striking to me are the things that anyone should have recognized as nonsense, like that President Woodrow Wilson passed on this secret to every soldier who fought in the First World War. Now the War had only been over for 19 years at that point, so there were plenty of veterans still around one could tap on the arm and ask if they’d even gotten such a thing.

Meanwhile, the actual content of the book is essentially a reheat of Mulford. “Thoughts are things,” Hill tells his readers, and then in all caps, “ALL IMPULSES OF THOUGHT HAVE A TENDENCY TO CLOTHE THEMSELVES IN THEIR PHYSICAL EQUIVALENT.” Why? “When faith is blended with thought, the subconscious mind instantly picks up the vibration, translates it into its spiritual equivalent, and transmits it to Infinite Intelligence, as in the case of prayer.” (The popularizing the notion of the “subsconscious” mind, new in the late 19th century, had quickly been picked up by New Thought practitioners and incorporated as part of the scientification of their ideas. Meanwhile, the notion of “vibrations” as a medium of transmission came from New Thought teacher Florance Scoville Shinn (1871-1940) and would likewise quickly became a ubiquitous feature of the movement and of the New Age belief systems that followed it, and was influential enough that folks today casually refer to people’s “vibes”.)

Hill’s prescription for success, like Kenyan, Marden, Mulford, and so on, took the form of training the mind chiefly through the repetition of affirmations and visualization. Hill told his readers to “hold your thoughts on … money by concentration, or fixation of attention, with your eyes closed, until you can actually see the physical appearance of the money. Do this at least once each day.” Another chapter Hill says should be read in its entirety aloud every night.

Think and Grow Rich is still among the bestselling self-help works of all time. However, the book that did the most to popularize New Thought and its credos of the power of ‘right thought’ was Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). A preacher by training, during the great depression Peale had tried to mix theology with psychology by founding a psychology clinic with psychologist Smiley Blanton. As a young man, Peale had been influenced by the New Thought book The Creative Mind and Success (1922) by Ernest Holmes (who referred to his teachings as “the science of the mind”), and become an avid reader of Napoleon Hill.

Hill had deemphasized New Thought’s association with Christianity, though he did credit his “secret’s” power to the “Infinite Intelligence” and made some obligatory rumination, like Quimby, on Christ’s miracles as a function of the power of his faith. Peale, on the other hand, put Christianity back at center stage. “God will do anything for you that down in your heart you really want him to do,” Peale wrote in 1938. In The Power of Positive Thinking, he clarified that you should, “Go about your business on the assumption that what you have affirmed and visualized is true. Affirm it, visualize it, believe it, and it will actualize itself.” Peale tells his readers to pray “big, deep prayers”, and there’s always a line of scripture handy for Peele to pull out of context, such as “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” (Philippians, 4:13). However, Peale’s Christianity wasn’t the standard version of sin and redemption, and in fact most of his writing was an effort to recontextulize scripture to fit New Thought rather than anything traditionally Christian (as some Christian theologians have pointed out).

And, like most New Thought practitioners, Peale emphasized belief’s power over reality itself. “Attitudes are more important than facts,” Peale wrote. “A confident and optimistic thought pattern can modify or overcome any fact altogether.”

The Power of Positive Thinking was a hit with Donald Trump’s father Fred Trump, and when he learned that Peale preached at Marble Collegiate Church in nearby Manhattan, Fred began driving the family on Sundays to worship there.

Donald Trump once called himself, with characteristic modesty, Peale’s “greatest student”. Trump and his first wife Ivana were married by Peale, and Trump and his second wife were married in Peale’s church by his successor. It’s fair to say Peale’s ideas were impressed on him at a young age and helped form the kind of person he became. The insidious lawyer Roy Cohn may have tutored Trump as a young man, but the only mentors he’s ever admitted to were his father and Norman Vincent Peale.

New Thought, meanwhile, has only become more popular since days when Peale admirer Ronald Reagan, in true New Thought form, on the subject of a system that depends on unlimited growth, said “There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.” This is less a theory of economics than a statement of wishful thinking as inspirational fact. Rhoda Byrne rehashed New Thought ideas to great success in the aughts with her mega-hit and Oprah bookclub pick The Secret (2006), which demonstrated how the movement would continue giving itself a veneer of science. Byrne would have you believe that String Theory’s ideas about matter being composed of subatomic vibrating strings somehow “proves” their ideas about thoughts creating vibrations that shape events (it doesn’t), or that Quantum Theory’s uncertainty principle which proposes that certain subatomic particles only have a steady state when they’re being “observed” “proves” that thought controls reality (it doesn’t). None of these leaps in logic are anything that would pass muster with a high school science teacher and represent fundamental misunderstandings or misrepresentations of scientific ideas. Not that any of that really matters, not that pesky things like facts and reality can get in the way of New Thought belief systems. It’s just another set of lines to add to the Gish Gallop down the path of embracing what you already want to believe.

On top of this has been a quasi-scientific movement for “Positive Psychology”, led by popular psychologist Martin Seligman and in no small part funded by billionaire Peale acolyte John Templeton. This movement has made all sorts of radical claims based on thin or questionable evidence, including claims about the healing powers of positive thinking that get dutifully repeated in the media, which has led to things like cancer patients feeling like if they dare feel sad or angry about their cancer they’ll make it worse. (Shades here of Calvinist insistence on constant vigilance over ones thoughts.) (There is actually no good evidence that positive thinking helps the immune system or combats cancer.)

In Neil Gaiman’s The Books of Magic (1990-1991), a boy magician in training and his mentor magician John Constantine encounter a skeptic who’s spent decades debunking the occult. Constantine tells his protégé that for the debunker magic doesn’t exist. You have to choose for it to exist. In other words, rationality and reason are a choice and one you can reject in embracing magic and its power. That this particularly doesn’t make sense in the context of the comic (which explicitly takes place in the DC universe where figures like Doctor Fate and Zatanna are public figures and magical threats threaten to destroy the world about every other week) is irrelevant. The idea is that magic and the power it represents operates as a function of belief and anyone who explains the irrationality of this position has simply chosen not to see it. Reality itself becomes a choice. And so when you, say, buy things you can’t afford on credit you’ll never pay off, you tell yourself this is the universe manifesting your desires. What else could it be?

While child Trump was being a fed a steady diet of Peale sermons, elsewhere a prolific science fiction writer was formulating his own version of the “science of the mind”.

In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard’s essay “Dienetics: The Evolution of a Science” appeared in the science fiction magazine Astounding, edited by Hubbard’s close friend John W. Campbell who’d helped him formalize his ideas. Astoundingunder Campbell was a curious publication; on the one hand, Campbell made it at the forefront of what’s called “hard” science fiction, which is to say science fiction that exclusively extrapolated from known science fact and theories and didn’t trifle itself with things like, say, “faster than light drives” that had no theoretical justification. On the other hand, Campbell was utterly convinced of the reality of psychic phenomenon, and his magazine frequently featured telepathy and other hidden powers of the mind. Campbell said that the major influences of Dienetics were “Christian Science, Catholic miracle shrines, voodoo practices, native witch doctor work, and the witch methods of European tradition, as well as modern psychology,” and considering he was one of the new field’s most ardent believers, the implication was that Hubbard’s work had uncovered secret knowledge animating all these things.

Like Eddy, Hubbard claimed to have been an invalid who healed himself with his discoveries. Principally, Dianeticsand the religion of Scientology that grew out of it, teaches that the subconscious mind (or “reactive” mind, in Hubbard’s parlance) is bound by something called “engrams” that are created by traumatic events. By submitting to “auditing” with a practitioner using a device called an “E-Meter” that supposedly measures emotional reactions but in reality just measures the electrical conductivity of the skin (which can change with emotional arousal as part of the sympathetic nervous system), a person is told to recall traumatic experiences and through doing so banish their engrams and become “clear”. And, once becoming clear a person can, through a series of mental exercises, access and process engrams of past lives, ultimately banishing them as well to ascend to the level of an “Operating Thetan”, at which point they will command tremendous powers over the world around them. These included perfect recall, clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, healing, controlling others at will, or even the power to cut someone in half with a glance. A person could thus unlock all the supposedly latent superhuman abilities that Campbell believed in and far more. And this was, of course, because the physical world is merely an illusion created by the human spirit.

Much has been written about Scientology’s “Wall of Fire”, the level at which members learn the secret that apparently millions of years ago the space tyrant Xenu murdered billions of his people whose souls cling to humans as “body thetans”, causing all manner of ailment and distress. {south park} Fundamentally, though, this is simply the most outlandish part of a system of thought designed to take heaping doses of New Thought, psychotherapy, and various sorts of spiritualist nonsense and reframe it in science fictional terms. Even the “E-Meters” are very much a science fictional contrivance, with only the thinnest relationship to actual science. Hubbard himself seemed to suffer from paranoia and perhaps schizophrenic delusions, with one judge in a lawsuit against him characterizing him as a “pathological liar”, charismatic and inspiring but also subject to “egoism, greed, avarice, lust for power, and vindictiveness and aggressiveness against persons perceived by him to be disloyal or hostile”. In other words, another essentially Trumpian figure.

In the 1960s, David and Sheila Gaiman converted to Scientology and gave up their jobs to move a mile away from the English headquarters of the religion. There, David Gaiman rose to become the head of worldwide communications for Scientology and its public face in Britain. In that role, one of his chief tasks was maneuvering to undermine and discredit any of the religion’s detractors. He also began a vitamin supply business, which was convenient since many of Scientology’s processes call for huge intakes of vitamins, which resulted in the family earning a fortune. Their son, Neil, was reported as going clear in 1978 at the age of 17, and had reached the level of OT3 (the “Wall of Fire”) by his early 20s, highly unusual for someone so young. As an adult, Neil Gaiman has left Scientology, but he hasn’t made any public disparagements of it, which perhaps isn’t surprising considering his sisters, ex-wife, and three of his children are still heavily involved in the religion and speaking out against the religion gets one declared a “suppressive person” and cut off from family members and loved ones. His novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013) is his most autobiographical about his childhood, and while Scientology is notably absent from it, the father character at one point nearly drowns the child lead character in a bathtub while the nanny with whom he’s having an affair watches, something that appears to be based on a true event. Much like Trump, Gaiman seems to hail from a household with a father figure who was if not always physically at least emotionally and psychologically abusive. This is not, of course, in any way to excuse their behavior, merely to help explain it. Victims of abuse are more likely to become abusers themselves, but they are no less culpable and responsible for that abuse.

Organizations like Scientology and movements like New Thought in part enable abuse by positioning their leaders as more morally “advanced” than their followers and therefore harder to question or report when such crimes are committed. (This is, of course, the same dynamic as with the rampant child abuse by Catholic priests.) Hierarchy is key to any such system and, as I’ve discussed at length in previous episodes, the reinforcing and defending of hierarchies is a politics of conservatism. Gaiman always painted himself as a progressive, and I don’t think there’s necessarily a reason to question his support of gay or trans rights or refugee rights and so on just because he’s also an abusive monster. These things can both be true. (Trump on the other hand seemed to once have courted Democrats as a matter of convenience in New York and Hollywood politics, and stopped as soon he began his own political career.)

Scientology, while officially being unpolitical, inherited Hubbard’s hatred of things like welfare (which he called ”rewarding downstats”) and his hatred of traditional psychiatric care and thus for any public healthcare that might fund it. And I don’t think it’s a big secret which politicians seem to be more friendly towards financial overtures from the Church of Scientology or which candidates major Scientologists are supporting or telling their members to support at the meetings they have to direct voting.

In its early days New Thought wasn’t necessarily associated with conservatism, and—in contrast to our time—neither was deep Christian belief, there being a long history of Christian socialism. Charles Fillmore, for example, dreamed of a future in which people would share things in common much as Jesus and his followers were said to. Other New Thought proponents have conscientiously positioned themselves as outside of politics, though doing so always in effect means endorsing the status quo. However, in general New Thought has aligned itself with right wing politics, and it’s no mystery why. As Ehrenreich points out in Bright-Sided, the flip side of the tenants of Positive Thinking are “a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must be because you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success.” Poverty, therefore, has nothing to do with larger systems or circumstances and is entirely voluntary; if people didn’t want to be poor they should have simply thought more positively and believed in their success harder. It’s easy to expand this to a politics where services for the poor are unnecessary and counter-productive (since they’ll enable them not to think themselves out of poverty), while taxes on the wealthy are unfair impositions on rightful gains. This all of course lends itself to the myth of meritocracy I talked about in an earlier episode, except where normal meritocracy assumes that the people at the top are naturally more talented (despite the reality that privilege has an outsized impact), positive thinking assumes that the people at the top are simply more aligned with the natural magnetism or vibrations or whatever of the universe, and therefore in some way more “in tune” with the divine. At its extreme, this can have psychotic implications, as when The Secret’s Rhoda Byrne, said that disasters like the 2006 tsunami can only happen to people who are “on the same frequency as the event”.

Meanwhile, figures like Peale have made no secret of their political affiliation. In 1938, Peale gave a speech at an anti-Communist rally that was also described as anti-Semitic and had in attendance the leaders of the pro-Nazi Ger man American Bund. In 1942, he was the chairman of National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, a group dedicated to opposing the New Deal policies of Franklyn Roosevelt. In 1960, Peale opposed the election of John F. Kennedy, saying “faced with the election of a Catholic, our culture is at stake.” Peale was personal friends with Richard Nixon and as noted Ronald Reagan was an admirer.

Further, New Thought gurus tend to encourage their followers to disconnect from the news and current events, which will only bring down their positive mindset. But, of course, this disengages people from what’s actually going on and their ability to make up an informed electorate. One might, for example, not know that Trump’s mass tariffs have been body-slamming the economy and just be impressed by how he projects himself and talks like a positive thinker. You become, in other words, vulnerable to grifters and charlatans, inclined to see their narcissism and megalomania as simply evidence of personal positivity and good vibrations.

And it’s tempting to believe this is all New Thought is, an elaborate grift designed to make people more susceptible to further grifts. A population of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” {meme} are going to be less likely to question their billionaire overlords, less likely to think maybe they shouldn’t have so much power in an ostensibly democratic society, more likely to accept that successful people always deserve their success and that some people’s dominance over others is somehow natural and justified.

As Ehrenreich notes in Bright-Sided, in the best-selling book Secrets of the Millionaire Mind (2005), author T. Harv Eker implores his readers to:

Place your hand on your heart and say…

‘I admire rich people!’

‘I bless rich people!’

‘I love rich people!’

‘And I’m going to be one of those rich people too!’

But again, I don’t think this is a conspiracy on the part of the rich and powerful, though certainly some must understand the implications and organizations like Scientology famously keep tight control on their members and ruthlessly punish those who step out of line. But as a thought system that tells successful people they deserve their success at a metaphysical level it’s actually easy to believe the people promulgating these ideas might honestly believe them. But then the best con artists are the ones who can convince themselves of their own con.

And With its emphasis on financial success, it’s no mystery why New Thought and positive thinking have been marketed to and popular in the business world. An early ad for The Power of Positive Thinking urged, “EXECUTIVES: Give this book to employees. It pays dividends!”

In the early part of the 20th century, in the era of Taylorism with its emphasis on efficiency, professionalism, and engineering a business like a rational machine, managers and executives were seen primarily as bureaucrats whose function was to study best practices, examine inputs and outputs, and find the most rational course of action for the business. And the business itself was seen as a kind of family for its workers who might work their way up from the mail room to become an executive themselves (as my own grandfather did), and were expected to work at the firm until retirement.

By the 1980s, this was all changing. As exemplified by Jack Welch, CEO of GE from 1980-85, loyalty towards workers took a back seat to pumping up numbers as Welch implemented mass layoffs and resolved to fire the lowest 10% of performers every year. As the New York Times reported in 1987, the new corporate order “eschews loyalty to workers, products, corporate structures, businesses, factories, communities, even the nation. All such allegiances are viewed as expendable under the new rules. With survival at stake, only market leadership, strong profits and a high stock price can be allowed to matter.”

Executives themselves, including CEOs, were being churned in and out by dissatisfied boards. But at the same time, the new lure of stock options allowed executives to become fantastically wealthy. CEOs ceased to be viewed as administrators and came to be seen, and to see themselves, as charismatic visionaries. And with that, finding rational solutions through research and study became replaced with “trusting your gut” and relying on “revelations” produced by the leader’s inherent genius. Per Ehrenreich, as BusinessWeek put it in 1999: “Who has time for decision trees and five-year plans anymore? Unlike the marketplace of 20 years ago, today’s information and services-dominated economy is all about instantaneous decision-making”.

Steve Jobs famously said, “People don’t know what you want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on marketing research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” And this quote is often used as a cudgel on people who would question a leader’s decisions. Start-up founders stroll into the offices of Venture Capitalists less with figures and studies of market potential and sensible projections, but with elaborate fantasies of changing the world that feed the VCs dreams of not just investing in a successful business but in the next huge platform monopoly that will redefine society.

And there’s no bigger proponent of this, what we’ll charitably call “intuitive”, form of leadership than Donald Trump. “I play it very loose,” Trump says in The Art of the Deal, “You can’t be imaginative and entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.” He says he just, “wings it and things will work out.”

Positive Thinking became used by these positive-thinking enthused leaders as a way to attempt to sooth the impact of the harsh new corporate climate as they “fired every third person and then put up inspirational posters in the halls to cover the psychic wounds.” The motivational speakers hired by corporations to pump up their employees would tell them not to blame the boss or the system, it was their own fault if they didn’t do well. And the corporate world became flooded with such speakers receiving mind-boggling checks for telling their employees that a winning attitude was all it took to attract the job of their dreams. Insipid books like Who Moved My Cheese (1998) circulated in corporate circles and became best-sellers, telling the story of mice who learn not to get upset when outside forces move their cheese away but to visualize the cheese in their mind because “imagining myself enjoying new cheese even before I find it, leads me to it”.

Countrywide Mortgage, which found itself at the forefront of the 2008 subprime mortgage crash, was well known for a culture that punished negativity, like for example anyone saying that maybe there was a real estate bubble and their financial practices weren’t sustainable. Mike Gelband, the who ran the real estate division of Lehmen Brothers in 2006, voiced concerns about there being a bubble and that the company needed to change direction and was promptly fired. The company, of course, went bankrupt two years later.

And, of course, positive thinking wasn’t just encouraging the traders to take unwarranted risks. A 2008 article in Time Magazine suggested “Maybe We Should Blame God for the Subprime Mortgage Mess”, drawing a straight line between prosperity preachers and people taking on mortgages they couldn’t really afford.

But then we need no greater example about how the Peale mindset poisons business than the failed businesses and obvious scams Donald Trump has left in his wake. All his claims of being the “most successful” this or that, the greatest negotiator, able to secure the best deals, are things that only exist in his mind and in the minds of his marks.

But then, an ideology that tells you that you can have anything you want makes sense for people who really can have whatever they want.

There’s a tweet that’s become a meme where someone compares being a billionaire to getting kicking in the head by a horse, because your life is just a series of your own preferences, anything you want, anything you can imagine. I’d add to that the ability to massively change current events on a whim and tilt the political system and the cultural conversation to fit your personal beliefs and worldview.

As Neil Gaiman once told one of his victims, “I’m a very wealthy man. I’m used to getting what I want.”

Banking expert Steve Eisman suggested rich people have “hedge fund disease”. “The symptoms are megalomania, plus narcissism, plus solipsism.” “If you’re worth $500 million, how could you be wrong about anything? To think something is to make it happen. You’re God.” {Bright Sided}

Why shouldn’t Trump believe in the power of positive thinking? His strategy has proved teflon to multiple bankruptcies and literally put him in the White House twice. Why wouldn’t he believe that the universe is his to manipulate and the primary thing standing in his way are “nasty” people and their nettlesome negativity? Why shouldn’t he, say, draw a new path for an hurricane with a marker on a map if that’s where he thinks it should be going? Attitudes can overcome any fact.

Economist Thomas Piketty opens his book Capital and Ideology (2019) with “Every human society must justify its inequalities: unless reasons for them are found, the whole political and social edifice stands in danger of collapse.” This echoes something Karl Marx said, that “The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas.” In medieval times, people talked seriously of the divine right of kings, and English words like “noble” and “gentleman” descend to us from a culture in which the natural and rightful superiority of the nobility was taken as fact. As I discussed in “Elon Must, Wokeness, and the myth of Meritocracy”, today people refer to “meritocracy” and the genius of our wealthy elites with the same unthinking assumptions, the divine right of kings replaced by social Darwinism and a deference to special people and their special “gifts”. Conservatism is the name we give to the political tendency to defend these assumptions and the supposedly natural hierarchy they represent.

In no small part because of how well they reinforce these hierarchies, New Thought and Positive Thinking have mutated and matastisized throughout culture, helping the rich to believe they deserve their riches and for the not-rich to believe one day they might too. It’s adapted itself into to Christian fundamentalism, New Age spiritualism, Scientology, suburban, Oprah-watching housewives, and hyper capitalist, Social Darwinist tech and finance bros. You’ll find it everywhere from political speeches to your buddy telling you putting $20 in your pocket will “attract” more money. In the age of Trump, in many ways American culture has become a culture of positive thinking as we descend ever further into mass inequality and cultural enshittification.

In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, seven beings beyond gods embody core aspects of life and reality: Destiny, Desire, Despair, Delirium, Death, Destruction, and Dream—the titular Sandman. Of these, the only ones who seems to have any sort of empathy are Death and Destruction. Where another writer might have had one of these beings represent Love, Gaiman has no time for such sentimentality. Instead, in one issue he has a character tell us “Love is no part of the dream-world. Love belongs to desire, and desire is always cruel.” In a poem in his online journal, Gaiman once wrote “I don’t think I’ve been in love as such”, and ends with “For me, love’s like the wind, unseen, unknown./I see the trees are bending where it’s been,/I know that it leaves wreckage where it’s blown./I really don’t know what “I love you” means./I think it means ‘Don’t leave me here alone.’”

When the story of Gaiman’s misdeeds broke, much attention was paid to the story “Colliope”, in which a failed writer captures and repeatedly rapes a Greek muse in order to gain her power of storytelling. But this writer (who is ultimately horrifically punished by Dream) is perhaps far less interesting a lens on Gaiman’s psychology than Dream himself.

In perhaps the series most iconic storyline, Dream is made to feel regret for having condemned a woman to Hell for the crime of rejecting him thousands of years ago. He arrives in Hell to free her, only to find that Lucifer has let everyone out and is abandoning the place because he’s tired of all the torturing already. In the comic, when Dream and the woman are finally reunited, she screams at him and hits him but after he seems to apologize sincerely she says she forgives him and gives him a kiss (though still refuses his offer to be with him). The TV show, to its credit, is less far forgiving—when Dream says he still loves her, she says, “How could anyone who truly loved me do what you have done to me?”

By the end of the series, Dream finally leaves one too many corpses in his wake, finds himself betrayed by those he may have loved, and commits what might be described as a complicated form of suicide. “Sometimes I suspect,” Dream tells us, “that we build our traps ourselves, then we back into them, pretending amazement all the while.”

This is a story about how sad it is for someone to have immense powers over others and a kingdom at his feet where reality itself does his bidding, but still has to follow rules, has people who won’t do what he thinks is good for them, and has keenly felt desires that seem to always lead to suffering.

This is a world where desperate gods scheme for believers to shore up their power for power’s sake. Where Lucifer abandons Hell not because he feels any compassion for the damned but because he’s tired of their annoyance. And where often the only warmth you’re liable to find is in the arms of Death.

Belief may change reality in Gaiman’s universe, but belief in the end is just a function of how the powerful maintain their power over mortals. The powerful then use that power to abuse us as they wish, to cast us into Hell, or take our children, or murder millions. And there’s no question of whether this hierarchy of power is right or wrong, it simply exists. It’s just the way things are.

But then, what are laws, what are nations, what are corporations and institutions and norms but things that people have dreamed up and that we, on some level, all collectively agree to believe in. New Thought, in the end, is just another more drastic way in which the powerful try to convince us that things are supposed to be this way, that what happens to us is not only what we deserve but what we really wanted all along. But the truth is the power of belief, the beauty of it, isn’t about how it can attract material greatness for yourself. It’s how it allows masses to collectively change the world around them, to create together a world that is fairer, more egalitarian, more just, and less cruel and horrific, and not just one where some get to be humans and others mere cats, and not just one where some get to be humans and others merely cats. The powerful always owe their power to our acquiescence to it. And acquiescence granted can be retracted, when we realize how we were told things were, how we believed them to be, was just a dream from which we can awaken.

Thanks again for watching or listening. You can support this project at patreon.com/ericrosenfield where for as little as $1 an episode you get early access, ad-free videos, exclusive authors notes, and other stuff. The song your listening to can be found on the LiterateMachine Music YouTube channel and channel as a lossless downloadable file on Patreon.

You know, I’ve gotten comments on how I read so many books for these things, and the truth is its kind of a problem because I’ll just fall down a rabbit hole and the next thing I know I’ve read like seven books about positive thinking and New Thought. I just have a bit of an obsessive personality, and you all are the beneficiaries of that, but it’s also one of the reasons these videos are so infrequent. YouTube starts sending me emails like “hey, you haven’t uploaded a video in a while, your audience misses you”. Gonna try to get something out quicker with not so much research next for you all. I admit I’m keenly aware that coming out with videos more frequently helps your channel in the YouTube algorithm and such, but that’s also why creators are motivated to put out like three videos of shit every day and burn out (not calling out any specific channels here, to be clear). Anyway, ultimately I try to focus on quality over quantity (and also like I have a day job and kids and stuff so there’s only so much I can do), but I’m trying to find a balance of production. Anyway, over on my Patreon you only get charged when I release a video, so it’s really not that frequent, and thanks to Patreon backtracking on some recent changes thanks to Apple backtracking on some recent changes, it can stay that way. I’d like to thank all my Patrons. Thanks, your support means so much to me! See me next time!

Bibliography

Books, Essays, and Other Media

The Positive Thinkers: Religion as Pop Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Oral Roberts, Donald Mayer, 1965, updated 1980
Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America, Barbara Ehrenreich, 2010
Blessed: The History of American Prosperity Gospel, Kate Bowler, 2013
One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life, Mitch Horowitz, 2014
Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, Gary Lachman, 2018
Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920, Beryl Satter, 2001
Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, Alec Nevala-Lee, 2018
Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard, Russell Miller, 1987
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, Lawrence Wright, 2013
“The Energies of Man”, William James, 1907
Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill, 1937
The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale, 1952
The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump with Tony Schwartz, 1987
The Sandman series, Neil Gaiman and various collaborators, 1989-2015
American Gods, Neil Gaiman, 2001
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman, 2013
The Sandman, TV series, Netflix, 2022-2025
American Gods, TV series, Starz, 2017-2021

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Gaiman/Trump and the New Thought Behind the Abuse

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