Page 37 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

media. That fact would figure significantly in his later support of his second son at the expense of his first.
When Fred heard about Norman Vincent Peale in the 1950s, Peale’s shallow message of self-sufficiency appealed to him enormously. The pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in midtown Manhattan, Peale was very fond of successful businessmen. “Being a merchant isn’t getting money,” he wrote. “Being a merchant is serving the people.” Peale was a charlatan, but he was a charlatan who headed up a rich and powerful church, and he had a message to sell. Fred wasn’t a reader, but it was impossible not to know about Peale’s wildly popular bestseller, The Power of Positive Thinking. The title alone was enough for Fred, and he decided to join Marble Collegiate although he and his family rarely attended.
Fred already had a positive attitude and unbounded faith in himself. Although he could be serious and formal, or dismissive to people such as his children’s friends, who were of no interest to him, he smiled easily, even when he was telling somebody he or she was nasty, and was usually in a good mood. He had reason to be; he was in control of everything in his world. With the exception of his father’s death, the course of his life had been fairly smooth and full of supportive family and colleagues. Since his early days building garages, his success had been on an almost constantly upward trajectory. He worked hard, but unlike most people who work hard, he was rewarded with government grants, the almost limitless help of highly connected cronies, and immensely good fortune. Fred didn’t need to read The Power of Positive Thinking in order to co-opt, for his own purposes, the most superficial and self-serving aspects of Peale’s message.
Anticipating the prosperity gospel, Peale’s doctrine proclaimed that you need only self-confidence in order to prosper in the way God wants you to. “[O]bstacles are simply not permitted to destroy your happiness and well- being. You need be defeated only if you are willing to be,” Peale wrote. That view neatly confirmed what Fred already thought: he was rich because he deserved to be. “Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities!... A sense of inferiority and inadequacy interferes with the attainment of your hopes, but self-confidence leads to self-realization and successful achievement.” Self-doubt wasn’t part of Fred’s makeup, and he never considered the possibility of his own defeat. As Peale also wrote, “It is appalling to realize the number of pathetic people who are hampered and made miserable by the malady popularly called the inferiority complex.”