Audio and text from Lindsay's Radio Pacific Editorial, Monday Sept 3:

You’ve heard of the power of positive thinking. I’ve been reflecting on the staying power of wishful thinking, and the harm it does. Belief that something is true just because one wants it to be.

In our time, Christianity of the woolly Anglican kind is waning, but in its most blatantly irrational fundamentalist form is resurgent. The revelation in her newly-released letters that Mother Teresa felt she was praying to no one all those years might give some cause for pause, but most will rationalize her misery as a “long dark night of the soul” that just happened to be very, very long. They want to believe what Mother Teresa said she believed. Similarly, Kerry Packer’s testimony, after being dead for fifteen minutes, that “there’s nothing there” will never begin to compete with stories of seeing loved ones beckoning from the other end of a shiny white tunnel. The latter is what folk want to believe.

Meanwhile, as noted on this programme previously Islamic nonsense is also rampant, furnishing incontrovertible evidence of the link between wishful thinking and the committing of atrocities. Men in the prime of their youth blast themselves and those around them to bloody oblivion, thinking they’ll wake up in paradise being serviced by beautiful virgins. They believe that because they want to.

At the forefront of contemporary wishful thinking are smelly students and their lecturers. Name any current insanity … anti-Americanism, “Mordi” spirituality, New Age mumbo-jumbo, the Cult of Uncertainty, Ugly Wimmin’s Studies, Deconstructionism, Postmodernism, outright nihilism, Anthropogenic Global Warming, MBA courses … you name it, it thrives in academia and was probably spawned there. It has smelly students and lecturers all over it, wanting to believe it because it’s fashionable—and because it’s rubbish.

Am I then stricken with apocalypsia myself, believing that destruction born of stupidity and perversity is inevitable?

Not necessarily. Men have free will, and as one of the greatest men ever, Robert Green Ingersoll wrote, “It is a blessed thing that in every age some one has had the individuality enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions.”

And that’s not wishful thinking—it’s true.