I’m OK, You’re OK
The book, by Thomas A. Harris, was titled even more simply than Berne’s: I’m OK, You’re OK. And it was much bolder. In I’m OK, You’re OK Harris aimed to change the world for the better—and chose OK as the instrument of change.
It was an inspired choice, and a memorable one. In the entire history of OK, it is the only use of OK worthy to be included in a collection of famous quotations. The title has in fact eclipsed the book to take on a life of its own.
I’m OK, You’re OK has sold even more copies than Games People Play —at least seven million, by a conservative estimate. Nevertheless, not too many people nowadays know the details of transactional analysis presented in I’m OK, You’re OK. But on its own, the simple idea that title expresses has made OK a powerful voice for multiculturalism and diversity. Indeed, it could be argued that with I’m OK, You’re OK as a catalyst, in the twenty-first century OK became a whole two-letter American philosophy of tolerance, even admiration, for difference.
Harris writes with the assurance of one who rests his conclusions on scientific evidence. Electronic probes of the brain, he reports, have demonstrated “that the brain functions as a high-fidelity recorder, putting on tape, as it were, every experience from the time of birth, possibly even before birth.” It is these memories of our earliest years, he assures us, that put in our heads the submissive Child, the dominant Parent, and the rational Adult. Like Berne, Harris explains that we employ one or another of these when we interact with others.
And then Harris goes further, to assert that people often assume an emotional stance not just in individual transactions but throughout life, based on those mental tape recordings from childhood. Here is where he introduces OK:
Transactional Analysis constructs the following classification of the four possible life positions held with respect to oneself and others:
1. I’M NOT OK—YOU’RE OK
2. I’M NOT OK—YOU’RE NOT OK
3. I’M OK—YOU’RE NOT OK
4. I’M OK—YOU’RE OK
…
I believe that by the end of the second year of life, or sometime during the third year, the child has decided on one of the first three positions.… It stays with him the rest of his life, unless he later consciously changes it to the fourth position. People do not shift back and forth.
As Berne’s book demonstrates, Transactional Analysis has no need to be expressed in terms of OK. But it was Harris’s brilliant idea to reduce the different attitudes toward life to the simplest elements, OK or not OK. With that inspiration, Harris added a new meaning to OK, one that took it from being merely utilitarian to a way of looking at life and the world.
Harris could have used some other expression to characterize his four life positions. In so doing, he would have followed the example of earlier architects of assertiveness and avoided OK because of its potential weakness. Harris could have chosen “I’m good—you’re good” or I’m wonderful—you’re wonderful,” to mention just two of many possibilities. He could have harnessed the power of “positive thinking” with affirmations like “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better” or, for that matter, Al Franken’s parody on Saturday Night Live, in the character of Stuart Smalley: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!”
The vocabulary for positive thinking goes on and on. To take a few examples from the website Success Consciousness:
My body is healthy and functioning in a very good way.
I radiate love and happiness.
I have a wonderful and satisfying job.
Wealth is pouring into my life.
The problem with such affirmations is that they can be too positive for their own good. They are likely to inspire doubt rather than assurance in people not convinced of the power of positive thinking. But OK, while clearly affirmative, avoids this difficulty. It is neutral concerning the degree of affirmation. The OK position therefore allows for a great variety of mental states, encompassing feeling great as well barely getting along. (Smalley, for example, uses OK to keep his spirits up: “Okay … for those of you who watch the show regularly, you know that I don’t have guests. I always do the show alone … and that’s … o-kay.”)
So by using the value-free OK, Harris can be convincing when he assures the reader that it’s possible to reach the desired fourth state, “I’m OK—you’re OK.” There’s a lot of room for imperfection in OK while still being on the right side.
Perhaps it is the low threshold of OK that makes Harris optimistic that it can change the world. Here is how he does it, in a chapter on moral values:
The Adult’s approach to the worth of persons … would follow these lines.
I am a person. You are a person. Without you I am not a person, for only through you is language made possible and only through language is thought made possible, and only through thought is humanness made possible. You have made me important. Therefore, I am important and you are important. If I devalue you, I devalue myself. This is the rationale of the position i’m ok—you’re ok.
Thanks to the flexible assertiveness of OK, Harris is able to stretch OK to make “I’m OK—you’re OK” the equivalent of “I’m important—you’re important.”
A little later he declares, “The American myth seems to me to be grounded in the we’re ok—you’re not ok position.” He argues instead, “If we see that i’m ok—you’re ok is at last within the realm of possibility, do we dare look for change, something new under the sun, something to stop the violence threatening to destroy what has taken millions of years to build? … We believe we have found an opening.” And so he had, thanks to the flexibility and ambiguity of the term he chose as his focus—OK.
Berne, in contrast, was a pessimist. He doubted that most people would give up the comfort of games for the better life of awareness, spontaneity, and intimacy, and concludes Games People Play with the declaration “This may mean that there is no hope for the human race, but there is hope for individual members of it.”
Harris took the opposite view, to say the least. He proclaims in his preface:
If the relationship between two people can be made creative, fulfilling, and free of fear, then it follows that this can work for two relationships, or three or one hundred or, we are convinced, for relationships that affect entire social groups, even nations. The problems of the world—and they are chronicled daily in headlines of violence and despair—essentially are the problems of individuals. If individuals can change, the course of the world can change. This is a hope worth sustaining.
Nearly half a century later, the world hasn’t changed quite as Harris envisioned. Neither the whole world nor the whole country has gone en masse for transactional analysis therapy. But it turns out that therapy wasn’t necessary to effect a change in attitudes. At the start of the 1960s in the United States, law and custom were quite different from what they are today. Discrimination against minorities and women was not only widely practiced but widely accepted. Today acceptance and indeed affirmation of differences have become pervasive, in law as well as in practice, and those values persist despite the encouragement to xenophobia caused by the threat of terrorism.
To say that “I’m OK—you’re OK” is the cause of the change would not be OK. But to say that it has taken hold as a kind of mantra that everyone knows, even to parody it, would be OK indeed. It’s a little harder to hold on to prejudice when you know it means taking the attitude “I’m OK—you’re not OK.”
Popular psychologies, like popular diets, come and go. Transactional analysis is alive and well but not nearly as well known to the general public as it was forty-odd years ago. Unless we’ve studied or taken part in TA, we don’t remember its complexities. But the simplicity of Harris’s title lives on; we remember the simple message “I’m OK—you’re OK.”
And so in the twenty-first century we find ourselves in a world that is, or ought to be, OK. “I’m OK—you’re OK” has led to
the corollary “It’s OK to … “ We, and our children, can read books like Todd Parr’s It’s Okay to Be Different (2001) and its sequel, The Okay Book (2004), where we learn that it’s OK, among other things, to be missing a tooth, to need a seeing-eye dog, to be adopted, and to have big ears (like a bunny).
Actually, to listen to various authorities, sometimes it’s OK to be … whatever: “It’s OK to be a tightwad for the holidays,” the Los Angeles Times assured readers in 2008.
J. Jill advertised in May 2009: “Now through Sunday, May 17th: It’s okay to wear white! Take $10 off our summer white denim.”
An image consultant tells boomers, “It’s OK to go gray” (gray-haired).
Marie Osmond tells People, “It’s OK to be alone.”
Nutritionists say, “It’s OK to go a little wild about nuts.”
The author of Fixing Your Feet says “It’s OK to go barefoot; in fact, it is fun and refreshing and makes your feet happy.”
The Lifehacker website has a lesson for Small Business 101: “It’s OK to be clueless.”
And Frank Bruno declares in a book published in 2004, “It’s OK to be neurotic.”
This is the self-empowering OK, a mantra of tolerance and acceptance unprecedented in our history. Unlike existentialism, phenomenology, humanism, pragmatism, and other isms, OK-ism (as we may term it) has developed without any assistance from philosophers, without any discussion among the literati or cognoscenti, without even an entry in Wikipedia. But it exerts a strong influence on us and our twenty-first-century world. OK has made tolerance more tolerable.
Nowadays a whole campaign can be built around this positive sense of OK:
P.E.O. Record readers may recall the eye-catching banners and call-outs appearing in 2005 that proclaimed simply “It’s OK.” These messages were developed to serve as teasers for what was to come.
Upon arrival in Vancouver, delegates and guests at the 2005 Convention of International chapter of the P.E.O. Sisterhood encountered more “It’s OK” announcements. From hotel room key holders to signs and placards, the message “It’s OK” appeared everywhere! Later the rest of the message was revealed: “It’s OK to Talk About P.E.O.” …
Because the “It’s OK to Talk About P.E.O.” message and campaign was so enthusiastically embraced by our membership, in 2007, a sequel communiqué was unveiled: “OK … LET’S GROW!” (P.E.O. Record, Sept.-Oct. 2009)
Of course, not everyone is happy with every new OK. Columnist Ellen Goodman protests the movie Juno ’s acceptance of teen pregnancy:
Whatever the cost to actual teenage mothers, it isn’t paid by their stars. The only one paying a price for [Jamie Lynn] Spears’s pregnancy is OK! magazine, which reportedly put up $1 million for her pronouncement. (I’m OK! You’re OK! Even if you’re 16 and pregnant.)
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THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
Je pense qu’il n’y a pas, dans le monde civilisé, de pays où l’on s’occupe moins de philosophie qu’aux États-Unis. [I think that there is no country in the civilized world where less attention is paid to philosophy than in the United States.]
—Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, Tome II (1840)
TO THIS DAY, ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE’S OBSERVATION REMAINS true. Except in a few obscure corners of academia, Americans still do not trouble themselves about philosophy. But without stopping to philosophize, Americans were busy then, as now, exemplifying a philosophy of pragmatism. And that philosophy found its perfect expression in the two letters OK, coincidentally created almost at the same time Tocqueville’s treatise on democracy in America was published.
Consider this: OK is practical, not sentimental. It means that something works. It doesn’t imply or demand perfection, nor does it imply disappointment. It’s just … perfectly OK.
Even its form is just right: one word consisting of a mere two letters, almost as short as an expression can be. Best of all, it exemplifies imperfection successfully overcome, blatant misspelling not holding it back from becoming America’s most successful invention.
And that’s just the half of it. Thanks to the accident of the now-faded fad for transactional analysis, “I’m OK—you’re OK” has become the American philosophy of the new century. We really believe that “I’m OK—you’re OK” is the best way to treat ourselves and others. We want ourselves to be OK. We are concerned with building self-esteem and are concerned when someone doesn’t have it. Religion sometimes calls us sinners, even miserable sinners—but we have learned to get over it. I’m OK, thank you!
And as for you, you’re OK too. Not just OK, you’re AOK. Even, or especially, if you’re different from me.
Nowadays not only do we allow others to be different, we celebrate diversity. We have laws that require us to respect differences, and we have admonitions to rejoice in them. And we teach “I’m OK, you’re OK” to our children, for example in Todd Parr’s first Okay Book (1999): it’s OK to be short, it’s OK to wear what you want, it’s OK to come from a different place, it’s OK to be a different color. OK is not merely toleration but celebration.
In an arena quite different from psychology, a whole course can be built around the “I’m OK—you’re OK” theme. The World History Association, in partnership with the Woodrow Wilson Leadership Program for Teachers, features on its website an interdisciplinary course in world history and literature for high school students with the title “I’m Okay, You’re Okay: Teaching Tolerance Through World Religions.” The teachers of the course, Pat Carney and Anne Wallin, explain:
Religion is an important aspect of historical and literary studies. No universal agreement exists about religion. To encourage norms of acceptance and tolerance in classroom discussions, we examine the vocabulary of intolerance, such as ethnocentrism and xenophobia. We study various belief systems to learn about these and to understand others. Our purpose is not to proselytize. We recognize that there are many views.
Perhaps thinking along these lines, a majority of Americans in 2008 decided it was OK to elect a president with a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas.
So today we have two influential OKs: OK the embodiment of down-to-earth pragmatism and OK the voice of tolerance. Not bad for just two letters.
Forget the other American inventions: telegraph, telephone, typewriter, television, computer, smart phone, not to mention electric lighting, the hula hoop, variable-speed windshield wiper, and trick-or-treat. These merely influenced our lives; OK influences our thinking. It could be argued that OK is America’s greatest invention.
I confess to a fondness for OK—so mighty yet so humble. Unconventional, but mild-mannered. Too humble even to show itself in grand speeches and declarations. We ought to celebrate OK Day every year on its birthday, March 23.
INDEX
Note: page numbers in italics indicate illustrations
abbreviation craze, 36–38
“Abraham’s Vision,” 72–73
A.B.R.S. See Anti-Bell-Ringing Society
AC, 77
acronym, 12
Adams, John Quincy, 60–61, 65
Ade, George, 19, 135–37
adjectives, 9–10, 15
Adult ego state, 186–88
adverb, 10–11
advertising, in Boston Morning Post, 33–34
aesthetics, of OK
appearance, 76–79
sound, 79
affirmations
neutral, 13–17
positive, 191
African languages, 92
Alcott, Louisa May, 124, 126–28
Aldrin, Buzz, 102, 168–69
“Alibi Ike” (Lardner), 138
all right OK v., 24
origin of, 39
Americanisms (Schele de Vere), 69
American Mercury, 149
American philosophy, 196–98
American Sign Language, 167
American Society of Marine Engineers, 150
American Speech, 84, 166–67
Anglo-Saxon Theory, 93
Anti-Bell-Ringing Society (A.B.R.S.) background, 32–33
in Boston Morning Post, 28–35, 29
Providence Journal and, 33
AOK, 35, 167–68
apples, 89
Appletons’ Journal, 119
Arizona Territory, 108–9
The Arkansas Traveller’s Songster, 130
Armstrong, Neil, 102, 168–69
army biscuits, 88
art exhibit, 92–94
Astor, Jacob, 74
Atlantic cable, 101
Atlantic Monthly, 101–2
Aux Cayes, 90–91
Aux Quais, 91
Babbitt (Lewis), 141–42
bakery, 115
ballot, OK, 106
Baltimore, 119
Baltimore Republican, 42
barbershops, 113–14
baseball, 167
Beals, William, 34
Beamer, Todd, 2
Beath, Paul, 166–67
beauty salons, 114–15
Belknap, William W., 102–3
Beloved (Morrison), 162
Bennett, James Gordon Harrison and, 64
Jackson and, 62–63, 75
Ole Kurrek perpetrated by, 63–71, 75
Berne, Eric, 20, 185–89, 193, 197
Bible, 21–23
The Big Sleep (Chandler), 159
The Big Town (Lardner), 139
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