Imagining New Cheese
Anne Barbeau Gardiner on a Psychology for Utopia
I was recently a guest at a meeting of women educators gathered to discuss a book that had enjoyed a long run on the New York Times best-seller list: Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese? In the discussion, these fifteen or so well-mannered women congratulated themselves on overcoming fear of change when their “Cheese” had been moved, that is, when they had faced new textbooks and classes, and they were surprised when I observed that the author had, under the guise of giving psychological guidance for success, actually written a how-to book for opportunists.
The book is a little fable about adapting to change. There are four small characters who live in a maze and require Cheese for survival: two mice and two little people named Hem and Haw. The mice have simple brains and look for Cheese by instinct, while the little people have brains stuffed with old “beliefs” that complicate their quest for Cheese—which for them also means security and success.
Throughout the book, “old beliefs” threaten their survival. They make the little people too secure at Cheese Station C, so that they build a social life around their Cheese and show off to friends until one day the Cheese disappears. While the mice run off in search of “New Cheese,” the little people are paralyzed with fear and anger, because of their old belief that they are entitled to Cheese. One of them later realizes he should have relied on instinct like the mice, expecting change and adapting on the spot.
Hem & Haw
In this fable, Hem never learns to cope with the Cheese having been moved because of his “complicated brain with its huge belief system.” He believed he would find Cheese at Station C if he worked harder, or else that someone would “put the Cheese back” if he waited. But Haw entered the maze and saw that he now needed “new beliefs” for “new behaviors.” Johnson uses the word believe four times on one page to hammer home the point that Haw had a simple choice to make between believing that change should be resisted and believing that change should be embraced. There were only two options.
How does Haw practice his new beliefs? He creates an “image of himself finding and enjoying the New Cheese” to replace his former “fearful beliefs,” and he often pauses in the maze to “paint a picture” in his thoughts, because “the more clearly he saw the image of himself enjoying the New Cheese, the more real and believable it became. He could sense that he was going to find it.” Reality is a mental construct: The clearer the fantasy, the more real it is; and the more real and believable it is in the mind, the more it is sensed that it will be found in the maze.
While explicitly denouncing old, “fearful” beliefs, Johnson introduces such new beliefs as the key to personal success. Again and again, Haw “used his imagination” to see himself “savoring New Cheese” and “envisioned himself—in realistic detail” tasting it, until (as in a fairy tale) he found New Cheese at last. He need not have gone through all that but could have moved instinctively like the mice. Eventually, Haw decides to imitate the mice in not letting old beliefs make him feel secure at the cheese station.
In this fable the author co-opts some of the good feelings associated with trust in Divine Providence, but he wants us to believe we can have such feelings while embracing unlimited change, with no underlying principles to guide us. He tells us that “going for it” in a maze full of blind and empty alleys produces joy, confidence, and exhilaration.
Besides new beliefs and New Cheese, Johnson seems to have New People in view. The first time Haw ran out into the maze, he was hampered by old, fearful beliefs, but he soon discovered “what nourished his soul. He was letting go and trusting what lay ahead for him, even though he did not know exactly what it was.” In Boethius, King Alfred, Dante, Chaucer, and other great authors, such trust would be called belief in Divine Providence, belief that the God who oversees all will provide for one’s preservation day by day in the journey through life. But Johnson wants us to believe that what nourishes Haw’s “soul” is the exhilaration of change itself: He realized “how much fun it was to go for it.”
In brave-new-world psychology, going with the flow is its own reward. One of Haw’s maxims is, “Be ready to change quickly and enjoy it again and again. They keep moving the Cheese.” So the moral is: Be ready to enjoy being the plaything of Chance and to rejoice at the freedom of being tossed up and down on the Wheel of Fortune.
Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the 17th century.
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