Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan Books (October 13, 2009)
Last month, the front page of the New York Times style section ran an inadvertently depressing story about a group of young life coaches sometimes referred to as the “spiritual cowgirls.” These hip young women, who have lots of charisma but no professional qualifications, are setting themselves up as ersatz gurus to their questing peers. They charge hundreds of dollars for sessions that combine new age atmospherics with the kind of power-of-positive thinking nostrums that made a phenomenon out of The Secret.
“[N]ow there is a new role model for New York’s former Carrie Bradshaws—young women who are vegetarian, well versed in self-help and New Age spirituality, and who are finding a way to make a living preaching to eager audiences, mostly female,” reported the Times. One 31-year-old member of this eager audience is quoted praising her spiritual tutor Gabrielle Bernstein, a 29-year-old former nightclub publicist who lectures on using the “laws of attraction” to “manifest” one’s desires. “A lot of women look up to her,” the student says. “We need this guidance and we are searching for this guidance.” Bernstein’s audacity in marketing herself as a sage appears to be matched by the piteousness of her customers.
The Times story is evidence of the timeliness of Barbara Ehrenreich’s bracing, acidulous new book, Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. A broadside against exactly the sort of pabulum peddled by Bernstein, Bright-Sided reveals the historical roots and conservative uses of the positive thinking movement, showing how it encourages victim-blaming, political complacency, and a culture-wide flight from realism.
“The flip side of positivity is… a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must be because you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success,” writes Ehrenreich. “As the economy has brought more layoffs and financial turbulence to the middle class, the promoters of positive thinking have increasingly emphasized this negative judgment: to be disappointed, resentful, or downcast is to be a ‘victim’ and a ‘whiner.’”
It’s satisfying, in a cranky contrarian way, to watch a writer as smart as Ehrenreich take aim at something as universally revered as dogged optimism. Yet while America’s obsessive positivity might be risible, it initially seems like a stretch to describe it as dangerous. Nevertheless, Bright-Sided makes a surprisingly convincing case that positive thinking—which essentially teaches that one’s thoughts, properly harnessed, can control physical events in the world—is often delusional and sometimes actively dangerous.
Pentecostals call their version of positive thinking ideology “naming and claiming.” New age types call it the “law of attraction,” and business consultants peddle it in the form of quasi-mystical motivational exercises and paeans to visionary leadership. All of them promote a similar type of magical thinking, whose roots Ehrenreich traces back to the “New Thought” movement of the 1860s. “New Thought,” Ehrenreich explains, emerged as a reaction to harsh Calvinism: “In the New Thought vision, God was no longer hostile or indifferent; he was a ubiquitous, all-powerful Spirit or Mind, and since ‘man’ was really Spirit too, man was coterminous with God… The trick, for humans, was to access the boundless power of Spirit and thus exercise control over the physical world.”
From there, Ehrenreich shows how positive thinking evolved into a creed of capitalist motivation, largely by way of Norman Vincent Peale. She writes of the truly terrifying extent to which positive thinking is enforced in corporate America, where it seems to constitute a form of self-enforced mind control. In 2007, she points out, an employee at a Utah-based company called Prosper Inc., which specializes in corporate motivation, was waterboarded as part of a business exercise—his colleagues were urged to fight for sales as hard as he’d fought for air.
Rather than offering a refuge from the acquisitive creed of positive thinking, much of the evangelical world has embraced it, though not as egregiously as pentecostals have in the prosperity gospel, which holds that God rewards positive thinking with material riches. In one of the book’s most effective, maddening chapters, Ehrenreich travels to prosperity preacher Joel Osteen’s sprawling stadium of a church. For Osteen and preachers like him, she writes “success comes mainly through ‘reprogramming’ your mind into positive mental images, based on what amounts to the law of attraction: ‘You will produce what you’re continually seeing in your mind,’ Osteen promises.”
In a society with as much desperation and instability as ours, such promises are cruelly tantalizing. Hence the tremendous success of prosperity preachers, life coaches, and quasi-metaphysical self-help authors like Rhonda Byrne, author of the aforementioned positive-thinking bestseller The Secret. Byrne once claimed that disasters like the 2006 tsunami can only happen to people who are “on the same frequency as the event,” which appears to suggest that the victims brought catastrophe on themselves.
Positive thinking, then, employs sticks as well as carrots. “It ends up imposing a mental discipline as exacting as that of the Calvinism it replaced—the endless work of self-examination and self-control or, in the case of positive thinking, self-hypnosis,” writes Ehrenreich.
Indeed, such magical thinking extends to our perception of sickness and health. Bright-Sided begins with a chapter on the relentlessly insipid, pink-beribboned culture surrounding breast cancer, which Ehrenreich was plunged into after being diagnosed with the disease. Based on a widespread but flawed belief that positive thinking can improve one’s odds of survival, breast cancer patients are urged to eschew anger and find meaning and even uplift in the disease. “In the most extreme characterization, breast cancer is not a problem at all, not even an annoyance—it is a ‘gift,’ deserving of the most heartfelt gratitude,” writes Ehrenreich.
Those who can’t or won’t adopt such a sunny attitude may be ostracized or browbeaten. “[T]he sugar-coating of cancer can exact a dreadful cost,” she writes. “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 great convenience for health workers and even friends of the afflicted, who might prefer fake cheer to complaining, but it is not so easy on the afflicted.”
At this point, it’s easy to protest that there’s a difference between superficial cheer and, say, a hard-won self-acceptance, or a sustaining hope for the future. The biggest flaw in Bright-Sided is that it fails to distinguish between different kinds of optimism, to differentiate positive thinking from the healthy cultivation of mindfulness or gratitude. Instead, Ehrenreich tends to write as if all work towards improving the self is a diversion from the real work of improving society. “The threats we face are real and can be vanquished only by shaking off self-absorption and taking action in the world,” she writes.
That’s true to some extent, but the division between internal and external change isn’t entirely neat. Some variant of determined optimism, after all, is needed for social change. How else could Gandhi believe that he could get the British to leave India, or Martin Luther King convince himself and his followers in the possibility of winning racial equality? Barack Obama became president in part by imbuing millions of individuals with the wild hope that they could change the world. Isn’t that also a kind of positive thinking?
Clearly, Ehrenreich is not counseling a widespread embrace of despair, but it still would have been useful to see her explain how galvanic, inspiring varieties of optimism vary from the willful self-delusion she decries. It’s delicious to watch her demolish the smug pieties that rationalize so much American injustice, but even a committed pessimist can see that not all positivity is negative.
Tags: evangelicals, joel osteen, optimism, positive thinking, prosperity gospel, the secret, tsunami
It's good to be optimistic, but we had better be realistic too. It is optimistic to think that we can reduce or reverse climate change. But with what has been done, or promised, in CO2 reduction it is not going to happen. Reducing population to slow climate change and reduce poverty is optimistic. But it doesn't seem even a remote possibility. Good thoughts are important, but we had better be prepared with comprehensive education. Then we had better work hard to make our dreams happen. There were many people with positive thoughts about the U.S. real estate boom. Their optimism brought many of them to bankrupcy.
Amway has refined positive thinking motivation into a negative pyramid where over decades millions of recruits have lost a total of billions of dollars. Amway has arenas full of businness owners hyping themselves up to believe it is the best business in the world. But they are not in the business they think they are in. They are not selling, they are selling to themselves. Amway's own numbers say most of the product is consumed by the pyramid of distributors themselves, and when you look closely at the numbers it appears the reality might be 95% of the product is never sold outside the pyramid. The little bit of bonus money that the pyramid makes from distributing product (to other than themselves) may not even cover the fees that the distributor pyramid is paying Amway for their distributorships so the pyramid is losing money not counting any of the billions of dollars that those people attending the conventions are paying their "mentors" to give them motivation. The result is over half of the distributors get tired of this and quit every year, and so an intense recruitment campaign is needed to keep the thing going. Those people losing all that money that the Amway corporation and their mentors are making are also putting in the time required to recruit their own replacements, and this is far more time consuming than running the product distribution pyramid could ever be. Most who quit still think Amway was a great business, they think they just weren't good enough themselves to be successful at it.
There is a distinction between hope and optimism. When one looks at the numbers there are no grounds from optimism. For example, there are billions of people in the world without clean drinking water. The national unemployment rate is more than 10 percent. Leading scientists say 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. In 2009, we are around 380. And on and on. The positive thinkers seem wholly blind to such realities or worse blame the victims, as Ehrenreich rightly points out.
It is ironic how much new agers as well as positive thinkers resemble the harshness of Calvinism, what Max Weber called "the religion of unbrotherliness," particularly when new agers dismiss "organized religion" and describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious."
In any case, without a collective conversion, so to speak, the future is bleak indeed. But pessimism or optimism aren’t the only stances. Hope is a third way, as President Obama might put it.
In the difficult dilemmas in which we find ourselves due in part to the destructiveness of technology, the difference between optimism and hope has to do with optimism as the idea of progress while hope is a quality of character and virtue of mind directed toward the future rather than in confidence (Christopher Lasch quotes Glen Gray on this distinction in The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, 1991:536).
In other words, as Robert Bellah said, hope is not our own creation. The collective conversion to a just and sustainable way of life will come as grace or not at all. To think we don’t need grace and can control the world through money and power is a fatal, tragic flaw. Yet hope does not mean passivity. Hope requires, as Ehrenreich emphasizes against self-absorbed new agers, responsibility – something very different from control. (Bellah, “Progress and Poverty,” Journal for Preachers, 14, 2, pp. 16-21).
"The collective conversion to a just and sustainable way of life will come as grace or not at all. To think we don’t need grace and can control the world through money and power is a fatal, tragic flaw."
Religious teachings which require a deity to rescue human beings from themselves run the risk of perpetual infantilization of said human beings and a socially irresponsible life as a people. I think the Baptismal Covenant in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer is onto something when it asks its members a series of questions beginning with traditional faith understandings and ending with vows to respect the dignity of all human beings. For each question, the response is "I will with God's help." This is as it should be - human agency and responsibility and a recognition of and need for divine presence in those endeavors. While I don't sense that we Episcopalians are particularly adept at living into that endeavor, I do think the order of individual and social responsibility to grace is realistic.
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