Barbara Ehrenreich: The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

By Emily Wilson, AlterNet. Posted October 10, 2009.
http://www.alternet.org/belief/143187/barbara_ehrenreich%3A_the_relentless_promotion_of_positive_thinking_has_undermined_america/?page=1

The author talks about how a plague of positive thinking is permeating our society, from medicine to business, and is even contributing to our financial crisis.

EW: Anything else you want to say?

BE: You could say, "Well, but it feels nice to be positive. I do all this work on myself and become more positive, and I feel better." And I say, "You might feel better if you stopped doing all that work on yourself."

This is a burden people take on. Just put that aside. Don't fuss all the time about your mood and your attitude. Try to deal with the world itself.

One of the major sources of misery in the world is poverty. We can do one of two things. We can tell poor people they need to change their attitudes, and there's a whole industry of that kind of thing -- motivational speakers that tell people to get over their bad attitudes towards wealth so it will just come to them.

Or we can say, "What's the cause of this? How are we going to get together and do something about it?" And I come down on that side.

Longer interview at link

[div class="excerpt"]"It's a brilliant system of social control. When bad things happen to people you say, 'Well, it's really your attitude that has to change.'"

"The second big place where I encountered all this was in the kind of motivational services that are offered to laid-off white-collar workers, where every networking event or seminar you get the same message about how it's really your attitude that is going to determine if you're going to get a job and probably has something to do with why you lost that last one."

"This is an ideology that takes away all the indignation there might be about extreme economic polarization."

"How about a little realism? How about not seeing the world so totally colored by our own wishes and emotions? For the positive thinker, that means everything looks rosy and everything is going to be all right no matter what, so you have to block out the little warning signs."

"When I tried to dissent on a message board, I was told to run, not walk, to therapy."[/quote]

When we first came back here, the doctrine of "you create your own reality with your attitude" was probably the most consistent and pervasive theme and the source of most of the stubborn resistance to what we were saying.

That is "a brilliant system of social control" and that social control has a political impact. Liberals and progressives are not only embracing this doctrine, they are aggressively promoting it and attacking any who dissent from it.

What did the author encounter when she questioned the idea that people have cancer because of their bad attitude, and that having a good attitude would cure her? "You are deranged and dangerous and need therapy." That is the modern version of "you are possessed by the devil and are a witch."

This "think positive" idiocy, backed up with the "you are nuts" and "you are not welcome in good society" attacks leveled at all who object to this doctrine, is the main method being used for the suppression of dissent, the sabotaging of the political Left, and the stealth dissemination of libertarian and reactionary ideas. We should confront it and call it for what it is as it comes up - a method of social control that suppresses dissent and advances right wing politics.

"Positive thinking" and its cohort, "personal responsibility," are everywhere. Hell, the president of the United States was just awarded the Nobel peace prize for nothing more than having a "positive attitude" and thus "changing the tone," and the health care proposals from the White House feature much chatter about the people being to blame for the crisis because of their "bad choices."

Same thing I thought.

:rolleyes:



http://www.newthoughtgeneration.com/power-of-positive-thinking.jpg

that all of us here have been badgered, often relentlessly, for our 'negative attitude'.

All I can say is, well, tough shit.

Americans, Their Smiley-Face Facade, and Reality
by Robyn Blumner

Whenever I think of the smiley-face icon, I think of Wal-Mart because of its once-ubiquitous ad campaign. And when I think of Wal-Mart, I think of crappy wages and insecure employees who probably live paycheck to paycheck. That metaphor -- the happy face fronting a world of worry -- is the subject of a new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America , by social commentator Barbara Ehrenreich.

Ehrenreich's bout with breast cancer and the cloying "pink ribbon culture" that surrounds this dreaded disease (she was urged to see her cancer as a "gift") made her explore our cultural obsession with being happy. The book's point is that realism is being elbowed out of the way by all the life coaches, self-help books and prosperity gospel preachers like Joel Osteen who tell us that a positive outlook will lead to success, riches and the fulfillment of all of life's desires. These heaping helpings of sunny optimism are subtly diverting us from grappling with serious social and economic issues in ways that can truly bring about change.

The Secret became a runaway best-seller by telling readers that they could have anything they wanted just by imagining it. The book was obviously unadulterated bunk, but it sold madly as people grasped at any chance to better their lives.

One has to wonder if such magical thinking would have been so popular if people felt they had temporal power to change the conditions of their work and prospects.

The reason that so many Americans have jobs that don't pay enough is not that they didn't channel enough positive energy into getting a better salary, but that wages have been stagnant for 30 years. And the reason that wages have barely budged is that America's wealthiest households just kept slicing themselves a larger piece of the income pie.

Between 1979 and 2007, the top 1 percent of American households saw their share of all pretax income nearly double, while the bottom 80 percent had their share fall by 7 percent. Ehrenreich quotes The New York Times , saying, "It's as if every household in the bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent."

Every working stiff in the bottom 80 percent should be outraged and politically motivated to force change. But if everyone is convinced of the convenient nostrum that our own attitude controls how much we are paid, then workers won't band together to demand a larger share of our national prosperity.

This positive-thinking message is a kind of opiate that has been particularly effective on the white-collar corporate workforce. Ehrenreich documents how corporations hire motivational speakers to convince laid-off workers that their job loss is "an opportunity for self-transformation." Somehow, she says, white-collar workers have accepted positive thinking as a "belief system" that says a person can be "infinitely powerful, if only they could master their own minds."

On the surface, prosperity gospels and positive-thinking companies appear harmless with their treacly "Successories products" of posters and coffee mugs, but they have subversively helped make each of us an island. They have convinced Americans that each individual has control and power over the conditions of their life, when that is largely not the case. Access to decent health care at a reasonable price is not a matter of individual effort. Neither is securing decent wages, pensions, safe working conditions or job security. Workers demanded those rights through collective action in the 20th century, and we are losing them now by taking an "every man for himself" approach to work.

The ultimate irony is that even with the booming positive-thinking industry, Americans are not among the happiest people.

International surveys put us behind places such as Denmark and Switzerland, where the social safety net is stronger.

It seems that happy thoughts don't alter the reality of American life, with all its attendant risks to middle-class living standards. Behind the smiley-face facade, we are privately worried, and we have reason to be.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/20-2