[Peace-discuss] Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

[C. G. Estabrook]

	"Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking
	Has Undermined America" (Metropolitan Books, 2009)
	by Barbara Ehrenreich (author of "Nickel and Dimed")

Reviews:

“We're always being told that looking on the bright side is good for us, but now 
we see that it's a great way to brush off poverty, disease, and unemployment, to 
rationalize an order where all the rewards go to those on top. The people who 
are sick or jobless -— why, they just aren't thinking positively. They have no 
one to blame but themselves. Barbara Ehrenreich has put the menace of positive 
thinking under the microscope. Anyone who's ever been told to brighten up needs 
to read this book.”—Thomas Frank, author of The Wrecking Crew and What's the 
Matter with Kansas?

“Oprah Winfrey, Deepak Chopra, Andrew Weil: please read this relentlessly 
sensible book. It’s never too late to begin thinking clearly.”—Frederick Crews, 
author of Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays

“Barbara Ehrenreich’s skeptical common sense is just what we need to penetrate 
the cloying fog that passes for happiness in America.”—Alan Wolfe, author of The 
Future of Liberalism

“In this hilarious and devastating critique, Barbara Ehrenreich applies some 
much needed negativity to the zillion-dollar business of positive thinking. This 
is truly a text for the times.”—Katha Pollitt, author of The Mind-Body Problem: 
Poems

“Unless you keep on saying that you believe in fairies, Tinker Bell will check 
out, and what’s more, her sad demise will be your fault! Barbara Ehrenreich 
scores again for the independent-minded in resisting this drool and all those 
who wallow in it.”—Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great: How 
Religion Poisons Everything

“In this hard-hitting but honest appraisal, America’s cultural skeptic Barbara 
Ehrenreich turns her focus on the muddled American phenomenon of positive 
thinking. She exposes the pseudoscience and pseudointellectual foundation of the 
positive-thinking movement for what it is: a house of cards. This is a 
mind-opening read.”—Michael Shermer, author of Why People Believe Weird Things: 
Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time

“Once again, Barbara Ehrenreich has written an invaluable and timely book, 
offering a brilliant analysis of the causes and dimensions of our current 
cultural and economic crises. She shows how deeply positive thinking is embedded 
in our history and how crippling it is as a habit of mind.”—Thomas Bender, 
author of A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History

Product Description [sic]:

A sharp-witted knockdown of America’s love affair with positive thinking and an 
urgent call for a new commitment to realism

Americans are a “positive” people—cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: this is our 
reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being 
positive, we are told, is the key to success and prosperity.

In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich 
traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal 
nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost 
mandatory, cultural attitude. Evangelical mega-churches preach the good news 
that you only have to want something to get it, because God wants to “prosper” 
you. The medical profession prescribes positive thinking for its presumed health 
benefits. Academia has made room for new departments of “positive psychology” 
and the “science of happiness.” Nowhere, though, has bright-siding taken firmer 
root than within the business community, where, as Ehrenreich shows, the refusal 
even to consider negative outcomes—like mortgage defaults—contributed directly 
to the current economic crisis.

With the mythbusting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the 
downside of America’s penchant for positive thinking: On a personal level, it 
leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out “negative” 
thoughts. On a national level, it’s brought us an era of irrational optimism 
resulting in disaster. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best—poking holes 
in conventional wisdom and faux science, and ending with a call for existential 
clarity and courage.

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