Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World

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This is often difficult for Europeans to understand. Americans are friendly extroverts who smile a lot; I'm a friendly extrovert who smiles a lot. Americans love their fizzy drinks and peanut butter; I love my fizzy drinks and peanut butter. Americans have bizarre, off-beat spiritual ideas and are (in comparison to Euros) very polite in public...again, can't say that isn't me. She pleads a case for realism, for not being distracted by fluffy, feel-good vibes from actual problems that need actual solutions. Not to be so relentlessly positive - or be required by your workplace, church or family to be so - that you refuse to see the wolves at the door. VIDEO: SMILE OR DIE (Barbara Ehrenreich - Sonríe o muere (subtítulos en español)) here, Ehrenreich talking and an artist illustrating, in English with Spanish subtitles, highly recommended: She also makes some very interesting mentions of the association of 'beauty' with breast cancer patients, even mentioning predatory plastic surgeons egging women on to get their one natural breast that is left a little "boost" to match their newly reconstructed one.

The disillusioned and depressed in their millions are forced to feign happiness at the workplace despite the rancid capitalist cancer eating out their souls and then be grateful for the chance to work at all. :) :) :) :)This is a 2009 review. I belatedly found some really embarrassing typos and couldn’t help myself. :0 In subsequent chapters, Ehrenreich shows how variations of the same belief, which is essentially little more than magical thinking, have taken hold in different aspects of American life, and different sectors of U.S. society. The popularity of books like "The Secret", the practice of advising people who have been laid off to "take control" of their situation through positive visualization, the explosive growth of the "motivational seminar" business, the rise of evangelical churches peddling the message that "God wants you to be rich" -- all are manifestations of the same fundamental belief, not just in the importance of a positive attitude, but in its ability to bring about change. Yes. I agree with this author, Barbara Ehrenreich. So how about a rant that supports her suspicion of the recent American fad with 'Positive Thinking?' Thank goodness for The Great Recession. It came exactly at the right time. And global warming too! For the last 40 years or so (but especially since the 1980s) Americans have absorbed the opiate of positive thinking. It's a happiness movement run amok across our culture. And we hope--the author and I--that the global financial meltdown has stopped it in its course.

That’s what early European settlers to America, adherents to Calvinism, believed. Calvinism is a strict, frugal form of Protestantism that stresses the importance of labor and frowns upon leisure, frivolity and excess. Reacting to their religion’s extremist beliefs, many children raised in Calvinist households eventually rebel, preferring a less forbidding God and developing new, more accepting spiritual attitudes. So what's the problem? It's that this entire book neglects to ask one basic question: why do people even want to think positively? And the answer to that is, quite simply, that it makes them happy. Thinking positively is a coping mechanism for many people. When you feel like you are not in control of some aspect of your life (your health, your job, your finances), thinking positively gives you that control. I'm not saying that thinking positively actually gives you what you want*, because it doesn't. But it changes the way you feel about what you want, which is sometimes all you have control over.

Realism

The book looks at a few of the places where New Thought made the most in-roads. Some reviewers found this somewhat repetitive, but it was interesting to me to see how New Thought was interpreted in medicine, finance, business, the media, the workplace, churches, schools and social services. But rather than provided emotional sustenance, the sugarcoating of cancer can exact a dreadful cost. First, it requires the denial of understandable feelings of anger and fear, all of which must be buried under a cosmetic layer of cheer... This is a wonderful book. The main idea behind it is that we have developed a religious (quite literally) fervour for positive thinking. The best bits of this book are when she talks about the Evangelical Churches in the US and how they have moved away from negative images (like Jesus on the cross) towards Jesus in a three-piece business suit with a smile to let you know just how much he wants you to be rich. I’m not a Christian, but I would have thought that this particular bastardisation of Christianity is so far removed from Christ’s message (sell all you have and give it to the poor rings a bell) that some Christians out there might even object to it. I mean, it would be like saying Lenin just wants you to be rich – but apparently Christians don't mind this new and updated message.

It's when writing about the cancer industry that she's at her most eloquent. When she got breast cancer, Ehrenreich found that not only did she have to confront a life-threatening illness but also a whole bunch of idiotic pink products, from proud cancer-defying sweatshirts and breast cancer candles, to a teddy bear with a breast-cancer ribbon sewn on its chest.

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For Ehrenreich Positive thinking is something like the inversion of Calvinism, the reaction as it were to the belief that God has predetermined everything and the only action is to stress and worry about his judgement is to belief to the contrary that nothing is determined and everything is open to the power of one's own mind, ie Milton's Satan taken at face value: The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. Traditional Calvinism was being flipped already in the mid nineteenth century by Christian Science, and a 'positive' gospel in which God has a plan in which you get to be rich. I couldn’t help wondering what kind of loony, officious moron would think that a lie told by a terrified, eight-dollar-an-hour service rep would be compelling to kids whose parents, in the age of deregulation, likely had one or more creditor’s hands at their throats. If they were listening at all, they would probably side with the salesman, whose foisting the blame on an industry responsible for so many of this country’s financial ills was less a character-damning lie than an act of resistance. This is the philosophy that gave us the smart bomb, the space programme, sub-prime mortgages, plenty of psychopaths and Sarah Palin. Every dumb American idea we've all had to stomach and die for can be attributed to this devotion to fantasy and self-satisfaction. Ehrenreich writes that America is unsurpassed in one area: "the reflexive capacity for dismissing disturbing news". Current American euphemisms for getting fired include "releases of resources", "career-change opportunities" and "growth experience". Instead of having to labour for nothing because you were damned to Hell from before your birth (Calvinism), God - in his guise of America - became a generous provider of all things. You weren't damned! You had a way out! Interestingly enough, I was reading this book at the same time I was reading Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety, wherein he argues that a lot of the unhappiness of the modern condition comes from thinking we deserve things (status, money, etc.) that previous generations would never have thought they could have. They may have lived more miserable lives, but that fit in entirely with their expectations, so they weren't especially unhappy about it. Knowing that you will never have all that you want, that even if you get what you want you will want more, the obvious solution is to stop basing your happiness on an exterior view of your life. This is essentially positive thinking, though not in the same way that Barbara Ehrenreich characterizes it.