Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America Book

Barbara Ehrenreich was first exposed to the dark side of the positive thinking movement when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Early into her cancer journey, she discovered that normal emotions such as anger and fear were being aggressively denied by those who believed that a positive attitude was crucial to survival. Cultural skeptic that she is, Ehernreich poured through the literature on the subject and found that, not only did science fail to support the hypothesis that a positive attitude contributes to healing cancer, but that those who failed to recover from cancer often experienced an especially cruel form of victim blaming at the hands of those who were convinced that it was their own faulty negative thinking that kept them sick.

This experience led Ehrenreich to explore in more depth the concept of positive thinking and how it is currently experienced in America today. She traces its roots back to the New Thought movement of the 19th century, a spiritualist reaction against Calvanism that gave birth to, among other things, Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science. Though nowhere near as depressing as Calvanism, these philosophies still heavily emphasized personal effort and striving, teaching that perfection was attainable if one worked hard enough and that problems in the physical body or external world were a reflection of work still needing to be done.

Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich) and Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking) helped to take these New Thought philosophies more into the mainstream. Though hungry salesman have often sought comfort in the promises of these sorts of speakers, Ehernreich explains how, over the last few decades, these kinds of ideas have deeply penetrated all levels of corporate culture. In a chapter titled "Motivating Business and The Business of Motivation," Ehrenreich details how corporations turned to motivational speakers to pump up workforces demoralized by layoffs and convince both those let go and those remaining that their attitude, and not the relentless pursuit of corporate profit, was responsible for their plight.

Though the recent phenomenon The Secret is a textbook example of how badly the idea of positive thinking can be misused in the service of personal gain, Ehrenreich also explores how certain Christian "prosperity" churches have gotten into the act, convincing their parishioners that God wants them to be rich and will help them get that way if they just show a little faith by giving money to the church. Her comments on how many of the devout poor were convinced the predatory mortgages they were being offered a few years back were a gift from God were particularly poignant.

One might think that psychologists who extol the virtues of positive thinking would be on firmer ground than those who have a more openly exploitative agenda, but in an entertaining chapter in which Ehrenreich describes her futile attempt to pin down positive psych guru Martin Seligman, it becomes clear that the science of happiness is much murkier than it has been presented in the press. While few would argue that being positive can feel good and many of us would prefer to be around "positive" people, how much we are actually able to control our reaction to circumstances and what effect that ultimately has in our lives is still significantly up for debate. Those who would argue that there's no harm in trying to be positive regardless of what the science says, however, would do well to read the chapter "How Positive Thinking Destroyed the Economy." The exhortation to cut out negative people from one's life was applied all too literally by CEOs who fired those who warned that they were taking on excessive amounts of risk.

As someone who was exposed early on to the fantasy that what you think can directly impact external reality, I am no stranger to the massive amount of internal stress caused by trying to control one's thinking to be only positive. I've spent the last few years deprogramming myself from these kinds of ideas and feel much happier now that I am no longer afraid of my own random thoughts and can experience the full range of emotions without the fear that doing so will somehow screw up my life. Despite my own early indoctrination into the cult of positive thinking, however, I was still very surprised to learn that these are not just fringe, New Age/self-help ideas but ones that have deeply permeated all layers of American culture. Americans are a uniquely positive people, more likely to believe they will move up in life than people in other countries do. This optimism is in direct contradiction to the fact that we are actually less likely to improve our station than more socialist-minded Canadians and Europeans. Yet the idea that anyone in America can succeed despite their background and that those who don't have only themselves to blame is regularly used to deny our less fortunate citizens benefits that are already the norm in other Western Democracies. Erenreich's discussion of this phenomenon, as well as how positive thinking is twisted to the service of repression by totalitarian regimes, was one of the most disturbing parts of the book.

Ehrenreich concludes her writing with a discussion of the importance of learning to realistically assess both potential positive and negative outcomes of our choices instead of just focusing solely on what we hope will happen. As she so thoughtfully points out, "We want our airplane pilots to anticipate failed engines as well as happy landings." Developing this kind of healthy realism will go much farther towards bringing us real happiness than carefully controlled positive thinking can ever hope to.