[ originally posted Jan 17, 2010 @ 11:59 ]

This post is mostly unedited, because most of what I’ve originally said has proven to be true. One person, who shall not be named, managed to demonstrate all six of these in a single interaction.

Before I started writing this post, I had to think of a convenient name or acronym I could use to refer to certain kinds of people. Wayne Dyer once used the acronym NLP for what he called a “No Limit Person”, and women have the convenient term “weirdo” or “freak” for anyone who has a personality they don’t agree with. (Men have all kinds of terms for certain kinds of women.)

In the end, I opted for the acronym SCPP, standing for so-called positive person.

So-called positive people, or SCPPs, are poisonous and toxic people: they are actually what we’d call negative people in disguise. They’re those people who go around labelling others as either “positive” or “negative”, and usually claim to be “positive” people – while saying and doing arguably “negative” things. They differ from vanilla negative people (and negative thinkers) in that they have an unhealthily high regard for themselves, and a generally low regard for at least certain kinds of other people, if not everybody else.

SCPPs share exactly the same traits as “negative people”, but from my experience here are some traits that I’ve identified as being common among SCPPs.

Intolerance

SCPPs are generally intolerant of anything and anyone that falls outside of their sphere of acceptance. A “sphere of acceptance” is not only what they agree with, but what they themselves do.

I’m very sure that you’ve been in a situation where you’ve had issues with someone – perhaps at work, or in a social group – and someone ended up saying,

Well, that’s just the way they are.

I will bet you my monthly salary for the next hundred years, that those same people will also demand that you change yourself to suit that other person, or to suit the situation as a whole. You might even be threatened with being kicked out, or at least shunned, by those same people. That’s because the SCPP is basically condoning what that other person is doing, rather than trying to see both sides of the story.

Don’t get me wrong: accepting people for who they are and what they do is an important step in personal development. Contrary to popular belief you don’t have to agree with or like the person, or what they are doing – only accept that they are who they are, and those are the choices they’ve made. Only after acceptance can someone decide whether things ought to change or not.

An SCPP, however, insists that you do have to like that person, that you do have to like what that person does, and you have to like the situation… because after all, the SCPP does themselves. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be defending the other person or their behaviour so much.

Comparing

SCPPs love to compare. Most of all, they especially love to compare people.

Have you ever had an experience where someone was criticising you or your actions, and then they brought in another person as some kind of pinnacle of excellence?

Look at Johnny: he gets on really well with X and Y, he puts in a lot of work and always asks for help.

SCPPs use comparing as a weapon to beat someone down with, and to suggest they they are not good enough, compared to someone else or, more likely, a whole group of people. It’s basically a verbose form of, “Why can’t you be more like Johnny?”

In comparing people, SCPPs figure that, since all people are human, they have exactly the same capabilities and the same experiences and the same opportunities – which is very rarely true. They completely devalue the target’s personal experience, their opinions and their emotions, as well as their capabilities. If someone isn’t able to do something, it’s entirely their fault, according to an SCPP – nobody else in the entire universe is ever responsible for even a tiny thing.

And when they compare things or people, no matter what those things are, SCCPs conveniently sort them into two distinct categories: good and bad. In their mind, the “bad” things are absolutely bad, and the “good” absolutely good. There’s no in-between.

Hypocrisy

SCPPs are undisputed hypocrites, but you probably won’t notice unless you spend way too much time around them, and have at least some level of consciousness.

The definition of hypocrite – from the Princeton online dictionary – is:

a person who professes beliefs and opinions that he or she does not hold in order to conceal his or her real feelings or motives

Hypocrisy is basically the foundation of an SCPP: they want the “positive person” badge, without necessarily practising positivity at all.

On a more basic level, you will often find the typical SCPP dispensing their words of wisdom – words that they don’t actually live by themselves. The person who chants the mantra “get over it” is an excellent example: they expect other people to forget about things in an instant, but how often do you find they’re still holding something against someone else?

One of my favourite hypocrisies in recent times: the SCPP who claims that “racism doesn’t exist”, who usually turns out to be a racist themselves. (Or at the very least, is ethnically/racially biased.) This is common among SCPPs who have either never experienced any kind of racial tension, or are actually a part of it.

And of course, there’s Mr/Mrs “I Don’t Care [What People Think]” – who blatantly does. Because, if it was true, they wouldn’t have to announce it.

But the best thing about SCPPs, with regard to hypocrisy, is that they are notoriously bad at taking their own medicine. They absolutely can’t stand it when certain others stand up for themselves, and particularly when someone repays them with something that they themselves did or said.

Ignorance

SCPPs can only see with their eyes. They tend not to use their brains. They don’t (or can’t) take what’s unseen, or what they don’t see, into account.

As we’ve read, SCPPs like to compare other people on the assumption that they are inherently the same mould; they completely disregard reality and mitigating circumstances. They insist that anything they can’t physically see as being a problem is being made up, or is used as a convenient excuse. Anything, from mental illnesses to real live discrimination.

Referring to Mr/Mrs “racism doesn’t exist” for just a second: they probably have that belief because they have no idea of the pressures someone faces due to their ethnicity or race. Mr/Mrs “racism doesn’t exist” likes to assume that, because they’ve never been turned down because of skin colour (for example), that other people are never ever turned down because of skin colour.

The media has played a monumental role in convincing society that having what’s perceived as a weakness makes someone a “weak” person, and that being “strong” means having no weaknesses, or at least a list of certain characteristics (such as a toned body, extroversion, a loud voice etc.). An individual’s “needs”, especially if they differ from a particular SCPP’s “needs”, are often seen as weaknesses. Of course, SCPPs demand that a person “gets rid of” these “weaknesses”.

Another way that ignorance is a habit of SCPPs, is that they are completely oblivious (or ignorant) to the effects of their actions on other people. It’s as if they’ve heard the New Age/motivational mantra “you are responsible for everything in your life” and adopted it as a convenient rule for telling other people why their life doesn’t work.
But they completely ignore the flip side of the coin: that people are responsible for what they put out. Whether you realise it or not, everybody’s actions have an effect on other people, whether it lasts for a nanosecond or an entire lifetime. Think of childhood abuse victims, who were abused because they weren’t big enough to fight back – some of them become capable of fighting back when they got older, and some don’t.

Martin Lewis of MoneySavingExpert once gave an analogy, during the bank charges fiasco, which kinda fits this point. He said (paraphrasing) that it’s up to a person to avoid being run over by a speeding car, but that doesn’t mean the driver has the right to be speeding. Heck no.

But of course, SCPPs don’t actually think about the long-term effects of their actions. They believe with a passion that they can go around “doing what they want”, and 999 times out of 1000 they do not take responsibility for what their actions at all.

Being Judgemental/Accusatory

SCPPs are very rampant judges. They’ll often make their judgements with very little evidence to back them up, and they’ll continue making those judgements until they can visibly see that they were wrong… and then they’ll never acknowledge or apologise for it, not genuinely anyway.

SCPPs tend to make accusations passed off as fact, again based only on what they can see physically. Whatever they decide has happened, in their mind, is actual fact – and they usually weren’t there to witness anything. Needless to say, these accusations are usually negative and highly dramatised, so that they try to convince the accused that they’ve done something terribly wrong and they’ve been called on it.

For example: my mom used to accuse me of sitting in the same place all day, when she went out and came back several hours later. It had never been true, but in her mind she equated me being in the same seat, when she left and when she came back, as having sat there the entire time without moving. Even when I had changed clothes!

And I’ll bet you’ve seen examples of people automatically believing what their friends tell them. I saw this a lot from high school to uni, and let’s face it: girls tend to automatically believe what their mates say most of all.

I asked one such person why they chose to automatically believe what their friend told them, even though I knew full well that the friend was lying. (How? Because they were telling lies about me.) The person said: this friend was their best friend, and that they didn’t believe that they would lie to them.

An SCPP’s favourite kind of question is “why“. Why? Because “why” is never a question someone asks themselves: it’s a question that focuses on something else, and puts the responsibility and the burden on whatever they’re asking “why” about. “Why” also makes the assumption that said person or said thing is wrong.

And get this: SCPPs absolutely love to tell people what they did or didn’t do; what they did or didn’t say, feel or experience. Some even try to tell others what they were thinking. Have you ever had someone tell you that you didn’t do the two hours of work that you gave up your free time to do? Or have you heard someone twisting your words to suit their side of an argument? I sure have.

These kinds of judgements are designed to inject self-doubt into people’s heads. SCPPs know that, if they can get the other person to doubt themselves, they can “win”. In my opinion, there’s nothing more messed up than someone being encouraged to doubt themselves, to the point where they feel like everything they do or say is wrong.

SCPPs take the whole concept of “innocent until proven guilty” that many people like to claim is in effect, and reduce it to a meaningless, hypocritical bumper sticker.

Self-serving

The biggest difference between a “positive person” and an SCPP, is that while a positive person thinks of other people as well as themselves, SCPPs think only of themselves. Even when they do things for other people, they are more focused on how doing those things would make themselves feel, or usually how they could use it to demonstrate how “positive” they are.

Actually, you’ll often find that an SCPP has “all the answers” to life’s problems, and they’ll tell other people these answers whether they want to hear them or not. (Of course, these answers sound a lot like sentence solutions.) But it’s how an SCPP feels when dispensing this wisdom that drives them to do it. “Having the answers” gives someone a sense of power and superiority, as we’ve seen with so many [de]motivational speakers, celebrities and the like.

But while SCPPs are willing to give you a recipe, they’re not willing to help you make the cake.

SCPPs are people who, if you try to explain a problem you’re having, will scream “don’t take it out on me!”. They’re people who, when you’re having a bad day, week, month (or even year), are more concerned with their own happiness – and expect you to be happy for them!

SCPPs are those people that believe that someone has to be happy 24 hours a day, seven days a week, or there is something wrong with them. They are a lot like the guy who is proud of ditching anyone they perceive as being negative, as mentioned in one of Jeff Keller’s books. One thing you’ll be left wondering, if it ever happens to you, is just how “negative” those other people the SCPP has ditched actually were.

And as I’ve hinted a couple of times before, SCPPs are extremely happy to rob other people of their happiness, so they themselves can be happy. It can be as subtle as having a lack of responsibility (e.g. not being responsible for their actions, or letting someone else do all the work), and as overt as breaking someone down to build themselves up. (That actually happened to me after a certain event last year, when I’d been the happiest I’d been in months.)

SCPPs don’t have to do this, but in the paraphrased words of one such SCPP:

It makes me happy seeing someone so miserable.

But the worst characteristic of an SCPP, second only to robbing other people of their happiness, is their expecting people and things to change around them to suit them.

If you’ve ever been on the wrong side of an SCPP, you’ll have heard them demand that you stop saying this, stop doing that, be this, get rid of that, learn to do this and so on. All of these things are aimed at making the SCPP feel more comfortable around you, and often involves you compromising and giving up increasingly larger chunks of who you are as a person.

With all these demands, one would think that an SCPP can be asked to make some improvements of their own, right?

Wrong. They are awful at taking their own medicine. If you try asking them to change just one little thing that annoys you, they’ll either:

  • ignore you and keep doing it;
  • tell you they can “do what they like”/”I don’t have to change [because I'm happy]“;
  • insist that you leave.

It’s a little like being totally crazy about someone, only for them to turn around and say,

Nah mate, I don’t want you as a lover – do you want to be my slave instead?

Those are six habits of a so-called positive person, from my personal experience. I would like to hear your thoughts and comments about them, because these kinds of people really piss me off.