How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America

Barbara Ehrenreich is not the kind of person you're likely to find brandishing a sign reading "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade"; you're more likely to find her picketing the vendors, demanding a more varied and tasty supply of fruit. If you're thinking of picking up any of her books, be prepared for Ehrenreich's typical trenchant and skeptical (but never cynical attitude to be applied to whatever topic she's tackling. In this case, that is the whole universe of the phenomenon known as positive thinking, which she debunks with gusto and flair.

In the past, Ehrenreich has sometimes gone out to encounter her stories; in this case, the subject for her book came to her, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and found herself uncomfortably sharing her new world with people so eager to put a positive spin on a horrible phenomena that even women facing a terminal diagnosis were bullied into labeling themselves breast cancer "survivors", since 'victim' was simply too negative a word to be used. Dissenting from this perspective is a kind of treason, she writes, and apt to provoke the professionally-sunny tempered to suggest that she somehow earned the cancer by not being upbeat enough. More important than her personal observations and experiences, however, are the broader conclusions she draws from this experience. "The effect of all this positive thinking is to transform breast cancer into a rite of passage," she writes, "not an injustice or a tragedy to rail against but a normal marker in the life cycle, like menopause or grandmotherhood."

That's the important message of this book -- that by being relentlessly upbeat (to the point of becoming self-delusional) we miss out on what is authentic. Although neither a scientist or theologian, she is competent enough on both fronts to debunk the 'positive thinking' industry's fuzzy arguments based on quantum physics (she points out the gaping scientific flaws in the pseudo-scientific comments) and to point out how little the message of positive thinking 'pastor-preneurs' like Joel Osteen has to do with the uncomfortable core message of Christianity, which revolves around sacrifice and service to others, not wealth and feeling good about oneself. Indeed, the thread that runs throughout this book (although it's not as explicitly developed as it could have been) is that the positive thinking movement is essentially a very selfish one. Positive thinking is all about oneself: I am good at what I do, my worth will be recognized, I will receive all the wonderful things -- money, love and tangible goods -- that I desire; all with the subtext of a sense of entitlement. As Ehrenreich points out, the focus is never on others, or on broader society. "Other people are not there to be nurtured or to provide unwelcome reality checks. They are there only to nourish, praise, and affirm."

The problem with this blithe approach is that sometimes, ignoring reality can be dangerous. I became self-employed seven years ago, and know first-hand the importance of putting forward my most upbeat, can-do attitude when talking to potential employers, and the need not to be downcast when people say 'no'. On the other hand, simply being cheery, upbeat and entitled, isn't the answer, either; I need to be aware of the reasons people are saying no (it's not that I'm not upbeat enough; it may be that my skills aren't up to date or the proposal I presented didn't measure up). Ehrenreich tackles the real-world problems this attitude creates for all of us with her timely look at the impact of positive thinking as a contributor to the subprime mortgage debacle and the subsequent credit crunch; she hits the nail squarely on the head when she points out how the positive thinking-inspired sense of entitlement helped convince homebuyers or homeowners to take out mortgages that sober, realistic second thought should have told them they couldn't afford, while throughout the financial system, those providing the capital that fueled the credit bubble were equally susceptible to such magical thinking and focused on the short-term positives rather than the long-term risks.

While Ehrenreich's goal is to sound the alarm rather than provide counter-nostrums, she does urge us all, collectively, to step back and think about our lives and the society in which we live in realistic rather than idealistically selfish ways. She emphasizes the importance of critical thinking, which requires skepticism, and points out that most human advancement stems from that; at the same time, she makes a plea for us to step back from focusing on ourselves and what we want to our society and what it needs.

This is more uneven than some of Ehrenreich's books. At its best -- when she is making careful and well-reasoned points about the need to be realistic rather than draw smiley faces all the time -- this is an excellent book. (Do we really want airplane pilots who fail to plan for what might go wrong because that would be negative thinking? She doesn't mention Sully Sullenberger's name, but it's hard to escape the analogy.) She also points out the extent to which Americans delude themselves about their real position, and what that means, and introduces some data points likely to shock anyone willing to pay attention, such as the fact that while we prize the ideal of social mobility and assume (positive thinking at work again!) that it's there for us to grab if only we work hard enough at it, the French, the Scandinavians, the Germans and the Canadians are all more likely in fact to move upward from their socio-economic position at birth than we are. I would have been more impressed with the book, however, had Ehrenreich been able to distinguish between those who want to wear blinkers to screen out unpleasant realities and those who simply want a return to civility in public discourse. (After finishing this, I ran an errand and watched as someone bumped into another person on the sidewalk, and turned and verbally abused the person he had just nearly knocked over, screaming and shouting -- and this was a well-dressed individual.) Those who would like a civil 'civil society' may use some of the same language, but they're not advocating 'positive thinking' at all costs, just good manners.

In some cases, the arguments repeat those Ehrenreich has made in her previous books, notably the excellent Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, in which Ehrenreich spent many months living exactly the same lives as America's working poor, doing the same jobs they do and trying to make ends meet without s safety net. That stands as her tour de force for me, since she reported the lives led by people on the margins not as an outsider looking in, but as someone living that experience herself -- it's a five-star book that Ehrenreich draws on heavily for those parts of Bright-Sided that deal with job losses, employment laws, etc.

The various strands that make up this book -- the positive-thinking brand of Christianity, the wishful thinking in the subprime meltdown, etc. -- are none of them new or surprising to anyone who has been keeping up with essay-length articles in publications like the Atlantic, Harper's or The New York Times Magazine (among others). What Ehrenreich does here is pull those strands together and provide a framework for thinking about them as part of a trend that may be dangerous to our society in the long run. I'd recommend this to anyone as an intriguing read, although I strongly suspect that few of those she's hoping to reach will listen. They are more likely to criticize her for not thinking positively about the world -- if she did, I can almost hear them say, society would be so much better...

I think this book has merit in potentially making people think- and that is something I feel the author could have done more of.

Instead, she relies on a heavy use of ironic "air quotes" to indicate a lack of substance to....whatever she personally concludes, lacks substance, or whatever she doesn't really understand. A quick look at the overall reviews of many of her books shows divided and far flung opinions about - well, her opinions.

There is also a fair amount of outdated information here. Manifesting, creating abundance, improvement- are all now recognized as requiring the work, study, and effort needed to fulfill various modest dreams. Moreover, there is a growing awareness now (moving past her references to 1995, 1997, and turn of the previous century, and the century before that, movements) to be happy and positive and grateful for what you DO HAVE- shelter, clothing, decent food, safety, friends, opportunities for creativity and leisure. There is great merit in "being" positive, and cultures all over the world- are.

This book seems to be more about her consistent theme- Capitalism and the craziness it can bring....than about efforts to sort through one's personal comportment/attitudes, and decide to be more positive. ON a positive note, you can probably pick this book up for a few bucks and read it in a very short time- but please don't make the mistake that because somebody wrote something, it's true.

Finally! Validation for reason over blind optimism. The week after I found out I had breast cancer almost everyone I knew said just stay positive and you’ll be alright. So if I'm negative it’s my fault if I don’t fair well? When a friend told me about this book I breathed a sigh of relief. The more I read the better I felt. I highly recommend this book.

Ehrenreich is an insightful and funny journalist whose "Nickeled and Dimed" book demonstrated the impossible plight of the working poor. In this book, Ehrenreich examines the history and effects of the self-help, positive thinking ethos of American culture. She argues that it was a reaction to the far more pessimistic Calvinist philosophy of early America and has by now thoroughly infused our culture. But in its insidious form, it is manipulated by business and powerful interests to legitimize prevailing hierarchies and to keep peoples noses at the grindstone. After all, if you are not successful in this the best of all possible meritocratic worlds, it must be your fault, right? And if I obsess over my own happiness, how can I ever find true insight?

Ehrenreich is very funny and absolutely skewers what she views as the happy idiocy of contemporary culture. She does not of course recommend much of an alternative and perhaps misses the point that in this life, hope is all we really have. But this is a very worthwhile book.

Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the most perceptive, innovative social critics writing in the English language today. Bright-Sided illustrates the flaws in "positive thinking" (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and documents the long, dull, and usually wrong history of that braindead philosophy in the United States. Psychologists and sociologists have been pointing out the logical flaws in blind optimism for the last 25 years, but the people who are most easily fooled by happy-talk are not readers or thinkers.

The Great Recession was the result of bubble-headed optimists believing in this kind of light-weight thinking; imagining that as stupid as their "investments" and as flawed and half-hearted "research" was, the worst couldn't happen to them or even in their lifetimes. Reality, as always, has a liberal bias and they should have learned something from the global economic disaster they created, but optimists rarely learn anything complicated.

"Bright-Sided" is my first exposure to Barbara Ehrenreich and her writing. If what I read here is a good indicator of the rest of her work, it will not be my last.

I identify very closely with where Ms. Ehrenreich is coming from. And I believe I understand exactly what she is saying. Positive thinking, in and of itself, is not a harmful thing. In fact, she makes clear that positive thinking in its proper context can be a very helpful and powerful thing when it comes to dealing with life's difficulties. But her contention is that blind optimism has become the greater hazard to our society.

Ehrenreich's criticisms of Christian ministers like Creflo Dollar and Joel Osteen, who preach what is known as Prosperity Gospel - that is, God wants you to be rich and you will be rich if you give me some of your money - while not new criticisms are similar to criticisms that have also been leveled at state-run lotteries. Lotteries, of course, play on peoples' desires to become suddenly and fabulously rich, and playing such games is a matter of blind faith that you will be a big winner. But Ehrenreich goes even deeper to look at the effects of unfettered optimism in the economic crisis of 2008, for which I had a front-row seat as an employee of a company that very nearly collapsed in the wake of the crisis. (I can also make the case that she could've expounded on how blind optimism played a role in the dot-com bust.)

And then there is how this blind optimism has played a role in the breast cancer movement. To me, that was the biggest eye-opener. As someone who has done walks and other activities in support of breast cancer, it never occurred to me that there could be anything negative about it. Ehrenreich makes it clear, though, that a culture exists that seeks to quash normal emotions to having such a serious disease. It makes me wonder that if women have to put up with this perpetual bright-siding what a man who has breast cancer would face. (One of the most famous breast cancer advocates was Rod Roddy, the announcer for the game shows "Press Your Luck" and "The Price Is Right", and many men get diagnosed with the disease every year.)

In a world where there are so many books on how to be happy and positive, it is very refreshing to read a book that encourages people to be real with themselves and the world around them - that it is okay to not paint on a smile when things aren't going your way and to be disappointed, discouraged, and angry from time to time. The perpetually positive will not like what Barbara Ehrenreich has to say in this book. But those of us who think otherwise will find some gold in this book. It's very much needed gold, too.

I have been fed up with the whole positive thinking thing for years and years. A large part of the reason my wife and I no longer attend church is because of the prosperity doctrine (the religious take on positive thinking) and its prevalence in the modern church. It actually makes me sick. Entering the writing world, now, I'm experiencing the positive thinking movement from a whole new angle, and it's not making me any happier than previous brushes with it in other venues. From that perspective, I think this may be an important book for writers to read. Despite claims from popular psychology that if you just stay positive, you will get what you want, most research actually shows that having a realistic view point is healthier and more likely to get you where you want to go.

Let me just say, though, that, if you are someone that believes in positive psychology, you will hate this book.

She starts with her own eye-opening experience with positive thinking. As a cancer patient. There is a notion in the cancer community, especially the breast cancer community, that the way to beat cancer to is "stay positive." If you stay positive, the cancer can not win. And, if it does, it was because the patient allowed in enough negative thoughts that the cancer was able to win. From there, she details the original rise of positive thinking back in the 1800s and how it has evolved to what it is today.

Back in the 80s, when companies realized they could make money from down-sizing their employees, they needed something, anything, to keep the left over work force not just working for them but happy to be there working for them despite the fact that they no longer had any job security. The answer? Positive thinking. Large companies began bringing in positive thinking coaches to affirm the remaining employees that they were there because they were "worthy." The way to get ahead was to be a bigger fish and to work harder. The people that had been down-sized were down-sized because they just weren't good enough (of course, the actual truth of that is that most often the choices of who would stay and go were completely arbitrary, completely unrelated to performance).

All of this positive thinking in the work place resulted in the people at the top completely buying into it themselves. Good things, and only good things, come to those who stay positive. Some of the business scenarios she talks about are truly, truly frightening. And all of this positive thinking lead directly to the economic collapse we are all currently wallowing in. The direct tie-in to Nickel and Dimed? In the 60s, the average difference in pay between the lowest paid employee and the highest paid employee in a company was a mere ratio of 1:24. Yes, I say mere, although, to me, that seems a bit staggering. That difference today? Greater than 1:300. I can't even comprehend that. But the people at the top not only don't see anything wrong with this, they think they deserve it. By the virtue of their positive thinking.

There's a section on the rise in the prosperity doctrine in the church, too. The idea that God is nothing more than a vending machine. You put in your positive thoughts and God gives you stuff you want. I could rant about this for a while. How none of this is Biblical. How it's all just more life coach non-sense to raise money. But, you know, you can read the book. Or watch it on TV. There are any number of prosperity preachers you can tune into.

The last section deals with the rise of popular psychology. Also a money making scheme. I have always, since I was a kid, held science as something close to sacred. Scientists were objective. They looked at the data. They didn't make emotional decisions about the data or try to skew the data to prove their point. They didn't hold those kinds of beliefs. Because science isn't about what we believe, it's about what is. Right? I wish I could still believe that. However, we continue to get news about how this scientist or that research team falsified data to support various claims. This goes back decades. As it turns out, positive psychology has no data to support any of its claims. Some data may suggest correlations, but there is no research that actually shows that any of what positive psychology says is true is, actually, true. Because I don't have the book in front of me (it's out on loan), I'll paraphrase what one positive psychologist said to Ehrenreich: "The research/science hasn't caught up to the claims (of positive psychology)." In true positive thinking form, though, they fully believe that some day their research will bear fruit and prove their claims.

America is obsessed with being positive. Workplaces, schools, books (who doesn't remember the runaway success of The Secret a few years back?), movies (The Pursuit of Happyness (Widescreen Edition) which stars Will Smith and his son and has a brief mention in this book) counselors, coaches, cancer treatment, and more all push the same message: be happy and your life will get better. But does it?

I like being positive and happy as the next person, and I do think that looking at life positively makes life a bit more bearable than being a grump. However, sometimes too much is too much. And that's what Barbara Ehrenreich's message is.

Ehrenreich starts the book with a chapter about her experience with cancer and the cult of positivity. She reacted as many might, with skepticism and anger at her circumstances, and was somewhat surprised at how breast cancer survivors diligently continued the idea that being positive and happy helped cure cancer.

From there, Ehrenreich takes a look at positivity's influence in business (Yup, I got a copy of "Who Moved My Cheese?" from work), its history (I didn't realize that Christian Science's history was intertwined with Calvinism!), the un-science of positivity (seriously, QUANTUM PHYSICS FAIL!!), the rise of the prosperity gospel (which particularly rubs me raw), and finally the crash of the economy.

I was very impressed with the smart, intelligent, yet somewhat humorous manner of writing Ehrenreich uses. What I particularly like in my non-fiction, I've come to find, is authors who can deliver their message succinctly, with intelligence, references, and light-hearted (or at least not too "dense"). Ehrenreich strikes this balance. She has thoroughly research her topic, attending events, interviewing subjects (her helter-skelter interview with Seligman was one of my favorite parts), and yet not being a "drag" or "boring" or a smarty-pants.

Two chapters away from the end, I did begin to worry. So positivity was bad, as Ehrenreich says. So...if we aren't to embrace the Positivity Cult, then what WERE we to do? In other words: what was the point of the book? Sure, it's good to realize that positivity all the time, no matter the circumstance, is wrong, but what is the alternative? Fortunately, Ehrenreich solves this problem by using the final chapter to tie everything together. Being positive isn't bad, but a healthy dose of skepticism and pessimism is NOT bad.

A great read, "positively" enjoyable. I definitely recommend to those that might have developed a bit of skepticism about the endless positivity surrounding us.

Brought to you by:
*C.S. Light*

I live in the city with the most church attendance in the country. I find this view of the prosperity gospel and focus on one's "personal relationship" with Jesus all makes so much sense now. All these mega churches have followed corporate culture which is the dominant force and culture nowadays. This emphasis on self fulfillment and hating victims really follows this. Instead of liberation through ascetism people just are iniated into a sort of internal alchemy which is purely myopic and dumbed down. One point she makes which is disturbing is of certain people viewing the devil as doubt and negativity. This somehow gets twisted into people who are victimized by the system as people to ignore. Amazinggly twisted.

As far as other reviewers are saying about how she basically makes a one sided diatribe: I think that is something to keep in mind. By that I mean it's a little like reading Dawkins or someone else trash mystical thinking in general. However in the last bit of the book she addresses this and quite well. She suggests that sometimes optimism is a good thing. She's basically saying not to have too much magical thinking and that critical thinking should not be viewed as "negative" thinking. She has a damn good point, but sometimes victim is a state of mind and sometimes one does need to think optimistically in order to get through tough times in ones life. I think honestly she understands that perfectly fine, but focuses more on exposing these people who have been around I'm American culture for a long time, and just more recently have managed to screw things up for the rest of us big time.

Positive Thinking’s Negative Side

Positive thinking has become an all-pervasive American philosophy in recent decades, dominating our religion, politics, and popular culture. We find it all around us–in television programs like “Oprah” and books like “The Secret,” in the ministries of “prosperity gospel” evangelists like Robert Schuller, Kenneth Hagin, Joel Osteen, T.D. Jakes, and Joyce Meyer, in political slogans like Ronald Reagan’s “nothing is impossible” and President Obama’s “Yes, we can,” and in our endless proliferation of motivational speakers, “life coaches,” twelve-step recovery programs, and New Age seminars, as well as the continuing popularity of the older self-help classics of Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, and Norman Vincent Peale, alongside newer gurus like Marianne Williamson and Steven Covey.

Is this all good for America? Or can too much positive thinking have negative consequences for our politics, economy, and social attitudes? Social critic Barbara Enrenreich cogently described positive thinking’s possible dangers in “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America” (New York: Henry Holt, 2009).

Barbara Ehrenreich's “Bright-Sided” contains perhaps little that is truly new. However, she did an excellent job of tying together two topics usually treated largely in isolation--the history of American popular self-help literature, "psychobabble," and positive thinking, and also their function in contemporary American society. She traced them from their origins in "New Thought," a mystical-tinged 19th century healing philosophy, to their current role as a dominant, almost compulsory American cultural and ideological attitude. Her “Bright-Sided” is a worthy sequel to Wesleyan University historian Donald Meyer's classic “The Positive Thinkers” (1965, 1980, 1988), to which she paid explicit homage.

Especially, she argued, positive thinking and mandatory optimism have been ardently embraced by the business community, which uses it to "sell" the American people on increasing economic inequality and insecurity. on growing poverty and unemployment. Positive thinking, she believes, is an excellent way to ignore poverty, disease, and unemployment, to rationalize a social and economic order where all the rewards go to the people on top. It dismisses the poor, sick, and jobless as "whiners" who are just not thinking positively, who have no one to blame but themselves.

However, she also emphasized, the refusal even to consider ominous warning signs and negative outcomes, like mortgage defaults, contributed directly in her view to our current economic disaster. The "relentless promotion of positive thinking," her subtitle declared, "has undermined America," and she devoted a whole chapter to describing "How Positive Thinking Destroyed the Economy" by our compulsively unrealistic optimism and obliviousness to danger signs. In sum, Ehrenreich stressed the downsides of positive thinking, like personal self-blame and national denial of unpleasant realities.

Barbara Enrenreich explored the connection of positive thinking to Calvinism. She portrayed it as beginning in a 19th century revolt against grim, pessimistic Calvinist moralism and fatalism in the "New Thought" movement pioneered by Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy, and yet paradoxically perpetuating many Calvinist attitudes and practices. Just as Calvinism attributed poverty, failure, and illness to laziness, so today's successors to "New Thought" blame them on "poor attitudes," to a lack of gung-ho workplace enthusiasm and/or of faith in magical "prosperity thinking" and the "Law of Attraction." Calvinism encouraged perpetual morbid guilt-ridden scrutiny of one's conscience and spiritual state, with fears of eternal damnation. Likewise today's "psychobabblers" and positive thinkers preach a relentless obsessive-compulsive self-monitoring of a self that must be worked on and another self that does the work, with ubiquitous rules, worksheets, self-evaluation forms, and exercises. "New Thought" was partly inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson's optimistic faith on the almost boundless potentialities of the human spirit freed from the shackles of dogma, authority, and tradition. However, she felt, "Reciting affirmations, checking off work sheets, compulsively rereading get-rich-quick books are not what Emerson had in mind when he urged his countrymen to shake off the shackles of Calvinism and embrace a bounteous world filled with 'new lands, new men, and new thoughts'"

Ms. Ehrenreich documented at length how pop psychologists, positive thinkers, popular self-help writers, motivational speakers, and "life coaches" these last few decades have promoted the spread of "blame the victim" attitudes toward poverty, unemployment, and illness among nearly all segments of American society. She portrayed the growth of a huge positive-thinking and attitude-adjustment industry--naming dozens of authors, speakers, and organizations--hired by corporations to brainwash employees--both white-collar and blue-collar--into responding "positively" to layoffs and downsizing by working harder, longer, more "enthusiastically," more desperately, into "constructively" welcoming"change" (the corporate euphemism for layoffs and downsizing) as a source of "opportunities," and as a stimulus to "growth," instead of "whining."

She portrayed the diffusion of "positive thinking" into almost all segments of American life. Evangelical megachurches, and televangelists like Robert Schuller, have abandoned Calvinism, hellfire, and the traditional Christian emphasis on sin and redemption, preaching rather the "prosperity gospel" that "God wants you to be rich, and to have what you want." The medical profession prescribes positive thinking for its presumed medical benefits. Citing her own bout with cancer. Ehrenreich particularly emphasized the relentlessly upbeat and sentimental "pink ribbon" culture of breast cancer patients, treatments, and survivors. Even academia, supposedly a haven of curmudgeons, contrarianism, critical thinking, and suspicion of popular illusions, has made room for new departments of "positive psychology" and the "science of happiness--though, as "happiness psychologist" Martin Seligman realized, "grouchiness" is "endemic to the academic world."

Oprah Winfrey, perhaps the best-known contemporary positive thinker promoter, is herself what most people consider a liberal. Many positive psychologists, however, lean to the right, especially Martin Seligman, elected President of the American Psychological Association. Until Seligman's ascendancy in the psychology profession, "positive thinking had gained no purchase in the academy." In the 1950's, "intellectuals mocked at Norman Vincent Peale," and "four decades later academics tended to dismiss his successors as pop cultural ephemera and stuff of cheap hucksterism." Seligman's rise, however, helped make positive thinking and "happiness psychology" respectable and even fashionable among academic psychologists.

Seligman, Ehrenreich noted, is "impatient" with "victims" and "victimology," as in a 2000 interview with “emotional intelligence” guru Joshua Freedman where he said that "when things go wrong we now have a culture which supports the belief that this was done to you by some larger force. as opposed to, you brought it on yourself by your character or your decisions." Of course the view that individual fates are largely determined by large impersonal collective social, economic, and historical forces has been very widespread among academics, especially historians, sociologists, and many psychologists, as what historian H. Stuart Hughes (“Consciousness and Society,” 1958) saw as “the unstated major premise of contemporary social science” and sociologist C. Wright Mills called “The Sociological Imagination” (1959). Of course. academics may be more aware of such broad collective forces than most of us, and the best of them are more interested in the pursuit of knowledge than in the crasser forms of wealth and business success. Ehrenreich herself noted that "a certain contempt for wealth" is "not uncommon among academics."

"Even the academy, which one might think would be a safe haven for cranky misanthropes," Ehrenreich noted, was "seeking the inroads of positive thinking, making room for new departments of “positive psychology” and “the science of happiness,” though, as Martin Seligman realized, “grouchiness" is “endemic to the academic world.” In early 2007, the administration of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, was "alarmed by a marketing study finding the faculty 'prideless,'" though conservative critics have often attacked academics for being inordinately proud of their superiority to "mere money-making" and William James' "Bitch-Goddess, Success," a pride many administrators would find "arrogant" and "snobbish." The Carbondale administration brought in a motivational speaker to convince the "glum professors"of "a positive attitude” as “vital for improving customer satisfaction," the "customers" being the students. However, "only 10 percent of the faculty bothered to attend the session." Most of the professors may have felt that the whole thing was "cornball" and "Mickey-Mouse." They could have found it supremely irrelevant to their own very real concerns about salaries, teaching loads, and "publish or perish" requirements.

Many academics and "cultural elites"might find something a bit "cornball" or "Mickey-Mouse" about motivational meetings, pep rallies. and "attitude adjustment seminars." As Barbara Ehrenreich documented, such motivational sessions and pep rallies are endemic and a very big business in today's corporate world. One company, she noted, that works particularly hard at instilling enthusiastic positive thinking in its sales force, through compulsory pep rallies and other gimmicks, is Amway, the purveyor of cleaning products, cosmetics, and water purifiers. She quoted an Amway salesman describing a sales rally somewhat resembling a rock concert, where groups on opposite sides of a room reciprocally shout "Ain't it Great!" and "Ain't it Though!" In a regional event, thousands flicked propane lighters in unison, whirling the flames in a circle to symbolize the mystical force of the company's sales plan. Slogans and circles were flashed on a huge video screen at the front of the amphitheater, strobe-light style, in time to the music.

In the Summer of 1991, I myself was visiting a friend for a week in her home town, Greenville NC. One day, we drove over to Chapel Hill and Durham, to visit the UNC and Duke campuses. At UNC in Chapel Hill, we watched a slide show on the life of Albert Einstein in the Morehead Planetarium. Later, we stopped for dinner at the dining room of a local hotel. As we ate, an Amway "attitude adjustment seminar" was taking place in the ballroom next to the dining room. The tables, dishes, glasses, and silverware in the dining room literally shook every few minutes as the several hundred Amway salesfolk next door shouted in unison at the top of their lungs, "GO FOR IT! YOU CAN DO IT!" Having just seen the Morehead Planetarium slide show on Einstein that afternoon, I couldn't help but compare the quiet, contemplative scientist to the screaming Amwayers next door. I also couldn't help wondering what Einstein himself would have thought of that "attitude adjustment seminar." It might have reminded him of the Hitler Youth rallies that prompted him to flee Germany!

Positive thinking, Ehrenreich also noted, often incorporates a great deal of pseudo-science and magical thinking, and devoted a whole chapter to "The Years of Magical Thinking." The "Law of Attraction," touted in recent years in films like “What the Bleep Do We Know?” (2004--produced by a "New Age" sect devoted to the "channeled" teachings of the 35,000 year old Atlantean warrior spirit "Ramtha") and books like Rhonda Byrne's best-selling “The Secret” (2006), is but the latest incarnation of belief in mystically attracting wealth or poverty, success or failure, health or sickness through one's own positive or negative thinking going back to the earliest days of 19th century "New Thought." One of the most famous and still popular American positive thinking classics, Napoleon Hill's “Think and Grow Rich!” (1937), declared that "thoughts. like magnets, attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with [them]," hence the need to "magnetize our minds with intense DESIRE for riches." Ehrenreich described the infatuation of positive thinkers and "Law of Attraction" gurus with quantum physics and magnetism, quoting the skeptical comments of scientists and well-informed science writers. Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann dismissed the "science" in Rhonda Byrne's “The Secret” as "quantum flapdoodle," Skeptical writer Michael Shermer likewise mercilessly debunked the "quantum" verbiage of “What the Bleep Do We Know?”

Ehrenreich discussed the traditional success and positive thinking classics like Mary Baker Eddy's “Science and Health,” Dale Carnegie's “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” Napoleon Hill's “Think and Grow Rich!,” and Norman Vincent Peale's “The Power of Positive Thinking,” as well as more recent masterpieces like Rhonda Byrne's “The Secret.” I found it a bit puzzling, however, that she completely ignored Werner Erhard and EST, so popular in the late 1970's and early 1980's as a PERFECT illustration of positive thinking's magical thinking and self-blame raised to an almost lunatic extreme. However, EST has almost totally disappeared from the American scene in the last 20-odd years--which may be why she felt it can be ignored.

Finally, we should note that there have been some attempts to suggest a more modest, more socially responsible form of positive thinking than that of the pro-corporate victim-blaming motivators, happiness psychologists, and “Law of Attraction” gurus criticized by Barbara Ehrenreich. Tarcher/Penguin Vice-President and Editor-in-Chief Mitch Horowitz, has proposed such a reformed positive thinking in “One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life” (New York: Crown Publishers, 2014–see my own the store.com review). Horowitz, a writer and speaker on alternative spirituality, has explicitly acknowledged and endorsed Ehrenreich’s criticisms of much recent positive thinking literature, especially its blithe ignoring of the social forces weighing in people’s personal and economic lives, and particularly repudiated the “Law of Attraction.” Still, in a modest, cautious way, he believes that positive thinking can and does work-- sometimes.

With "Bright-Sided" Barbara Ehrenreich delivers the same sharp assessments she delivered in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, in this case a trenchant look into America's obsession with presenting a "positive" image at all times and at all costs. Spurred by her own reaction to a bout of breast cancer Ehrenreich came face-to-face with the near obsessive culture of positivity, which led to her questioning not only what purpose it serves, but how it came to exist. While Americans like to project a "positive" cheerful, optimistic and upbeat image we seldom reflect on why our culture insists upon this particular norm. Ehrenreich traces the origins of this "cult of optimism" from its origins in 19th Century American life up to the present prevalence of the "gospel of prosperity" in churches, "positive psychology" and the "science of happiness" in academia and in literature. Ehrenreich points out it is most pervasively rooted in business culture where the refusal to deal with negativity (potential and real) has resulted in a rash of negative outcomes, from the S&L crisis of the 1980s/1990s to the current mortgage led economic downturn. As with "Nickel and Dimed" Ehrenreich revels in not just mythbusting but in exploring corners of society seldom plumbed or contemplated. For Ehrenreich this lack of introspection and dealing with negativity in an appropriate manner has led us individually and as a society to "irrational exuberance" and now near disaster. Ehrenreich is at her best poking fun at the pseudo-science of positivity and poking holes in positivist theory.

Obviously Ehrenreich isn't for everyone and certain some people who insist on positivity in their lives will simply refuse to read such a potentially negative book. But Ehrenreich isn't a "negative Nelly" as some would fear; she's speaking truth-to-power and to a certain extent satirizing society. She seeks to question why we are so relentlessly positive, even when that positivity is unwarranted, and to get us to see what the true cost is when we are too accepting and nowhere near critical enough. It you set aside your preconceived notions about positivity and positivism you might just find this a richly rewarding book!

As much as I enjoyed 'Nickled and Dimed', This particular book is a lot deeper in critical thought. Rather than a semi biographical story, Barbara shares some of her own family background, and draws a good connection between the rigors of 'Calvinism' and Positive Thinking, which so permeates the workplace and contemporary Televangelism. Enjoyable reading and a very plausible argument.
I am reminded of a scene from the movie "Animal House", where the pledge keeps telling his 'Upper Classman' frat superior, "Thank you sir, can I have another?"
I have to say 'amen' to her dry satire of the prosperity gospellers, as well as the cheerleader hype of the modern workplace, ie smile and look happy, even if you are not........or else, heads will roll.

Barbara Ehrenreich takes on the cultural phenomenon of "positive thinking" in this well researched, witty and insightful book. I listened to the 6-CD set which is read by the professional narrator, Kate Reading.

During a bout with breast cancer, Barbara encountered the relentless, mindless propagation of the "think positive" movement, which is especially prevalent during cancer treatment. Pink ribbons, pink bears, banners, cards, books, CD's, cancer walks, support groups, therapists - all promote the idea that just thinking good thoughts will get you out of this. The underlying subtext is that negative thinking is what probably what got you into this predicament to begin with. Among such incessant admonitions, there is no room and no comprehension of the need to just feel bad about the fact that you're suffering from painful surgeries, caustic chemo treatments and debilitating radiation. Cancer becomes a life affirming opportunity to think positive thoughts, rediscover what is important to you, and be inducted into the noble survivor's club.

Ehrenreich goes on to cite other examples of positive thinking gone wrong, heavily supported with research from scientific studies. The book bogs down at times with rather technical explanations and some conclusions that are difficult to follow. It might have been better to read the book in print, as that would have allowed me to go back and reread certain sections; but that's difficult to do on a CD.

She takes on the positive thinking brand of nondenominational Christianity espoused by the mega-churches, which exist largely to enrich the "pastors". She is especially critical of the mega churches that have huge staffs of up to 300 and multi-million dollar budgets. The tie-in between positive thinking and religion is big business.

Ehrenreich also cites the rash assumptions of perpetually positive prosperity that lead to the subprime mortgage meltdown. She exposes the ridiculous assertions that affirmations and positive thoughts can help you get what you really want as espoused by the book "The Secret" (such as cars, houses, expensive clothing and jewelry, etc.) These are all painted as huge scams thrust on the unwary, brainwashed positive-thinking masses. A huge industry of motivational speakers, seminars, self-help books, and the pseudo-science that has developed around positive thinking has sprung up in the past few decades. The author concludes that this non-stop bathing in "positive thinking" has weakened our ability to think realistically and prepare for the worst, rather than always expecting the best outcomes.

There is plenty of food for thought in this well written book.

Smile :) and have a nice day !

Barbara's fractally correct in every possible way here; one simply *cannot* choose to be happy. We would all be better off if we dismissed this blatant lie touted by Norman Vincent Peale. In her introduction, she addresses and clarifies the difference between hope (a natural, involuntary emotion we feel when things appear to be going our way, or, at the very least, appear to be improving) and optimism (a state of mind that can be cultivated through sufficient practice and expensive positivity seminars and/or prosperity gospel sermons). This is crucial - the positive charlatans of recent decades advocate forced optimism, not realistic, spontaneous, justified hope. This, obviously, would explain why on most happiness metrics, despite having a reputation has a "positive" country, the US scores deplorably. With an obscenely high poverty rate and prison population, this is hardly news to anyone living outside a cave. And, as Barbara astutely notes, positivity only works when it is not forced. Trying to impose happiness on oneself only leads to bitterness and a desire to rush home and switch off the Optimism Switch in one's head, for the culture of the US has been so polluted by positive thinking that many feel the only place they can be themselves (and realistic and/or pessimistic) is outside the gaze of others.

She shows how right-wing demagogues often cite pithy positive thinking platitudes as an attempt to blame those in perpetual poverty. And as we all know, those who fail to "will" the cancer away are never the subject of happy positive thinking books. And perhaps worst of all, positive thinking removes all motivation to improve societies and living conditions. External conditions are almost always dismissed by these gurus and charlatans.

Reading Smile or Die, I was reminded of a horribly callous sermon in Japan, where the pastor extolled the benefits of frugality and unequivocally spoke out against materialism. For his example du jour, he cited victims of the Haiti earthquake and how "happy" they were. Really? Is that the best they can do? If I lost everything and everyone I held dear in an earthquake, smiling might be the only way I could cope. It most certainly would not be a sign of happiness or satisfaction after going through such a grueling natural disaster.

Positive thinking has a horrible dark side that would lead to the instant dismissal of any doctor who prescribed positivity in lieu of radiotherapy for cancer. As anyone with any experience with the bile that Pollyannas spew forth on a daily basis, one of their implied mantras is "if you fail, it's your own fault." Spare me, please. On a personal note, I particularly enjoyed Barbara's mention of the Despair website, built around the idea of counter-optimism with its Demotivational line of posters, mugs, plaques, etc.

The author's research is impeccable. She unearths the deadly, fatalistic roots of positive thinking that came from the Calvinist branch of Christianity. Every word is enlightening and well worth reading.

Barbara ends this book with a clarion call to reason, citing some of the most cruel, heartless and ignorant consequences of positive thinking, including that of Rhonda Byrne, who claimed that tsunamis could only happen to those who are "on the same frequency as the event."

Everyone who has been deceived by positivity needs to read this book.

Ehrenreich's book is timely as it confronts the American "positivity" epidemic by surveying a number of venues in which it's become entrenched, including: Cancer therapy and recovery (Chapter One), Magical Thinking balone (Chapter Two), the dark underbelly of American Optimism (Chapter Three), The Business Positive Motivation hucksters (Chapter Four); the 'God wants you to be rich' hucksters (Chapter Five); the positive Psychology hucksters (Six) and how hyper-optimism helped destroy the economy (Seven).

In general, Ms. Ehrenreich delivers a sober treatment of all the niches from which a lopsided positivity springs, though I would say a much harder hitting book is Eric G. Wilson's 'Against Happiness.' Wilson bemoans the way so many Americans have sacrificed their right to express discontent and dissatisfaction with their government and their lives, which means of course, essentially sacrificing the ability to change them or, in accord with fundamentalist theology- allow God to "do his thing" when he chooses to. Barbara E. touches on the same in a number of stratedgic places in the chapters referenced above, but doesn't do the concentrated job on unjustified positive thinking and the happiness game Wilson does. Thus, I would recommend people seriously interested in this area get both books.

Chapter One, I will admit, was of particular interest to me and is perhaps Ehrenreich's best, along with Chapter Seven (a close 2nd). The reason is that as a cancer (prostate) survivor I can relate to Ehrenreich's fury when told that one needed to maintain a "positive, happy" outlook to confront cancer and look at it as an opportunity for self -improvement. She notes (p. 40) that psychologists call this 'benefit finding' - or invoking assorted ways to "feel positive about cancer."

Positive about it! It's a damned scourge! There's nothing "positive" about it! I still am suffering from the after effects of radiation (high dose) treatment received over a year and a half ago, and the burning pain on urination is so bad I can hardly bear it! So I was especially enraged as I read (on page 41) about some "cancer researcher" named Stephen Strum who declared (ibid.):

"Prostate cancer is an opportunity...it's a path, a model, a paradigm, of how you can interact to help yourself and another. By doing so you evolve to a much higher level of humanity."

Well, leaving out all the humbug, I can basically say I haven't "evolved" beyond what I was, But as Ehrenriech puts it, this is how the sugar coating of this disease exacts a dreadful cost, because in doing so it dismisses feelings of anger and fear and beckons the unwary and pie-eyed to replace them with "a cosmetic layer of cheer".

So good on Barbara for exposing all the codswallop asociated with bright-siding cancer!

In Chapter Two we learn how the 'gurus' advise dropping "negative people" (p. 57) and how in the world of all -out positive thinking others mainly exist to provide 'strokes' and affirmations, not reality checks. 'The Secret' and its mystical babble (p. 63) is an example, and Ehrenreich notes its similarity to 'sympathetic magic'. I'd even go beyond this and warrant most positive thinking self -help books are not original - merely regurgitations of earlier nonsense.

In the same chapter, pp. 66-73 Ehrenriech get into how the positive thinking culture has tried to hijack quantum physics, as epitomized in some movies such as 'What the Bleep Do We Know?'

My main complaint here is that she's mixed up (p. 67) 'determinism' with reductionism. She writes of 'New Age' thinkers seeking to relase humanity from "the dull tethers of determinism" - but that's already been done, via quantum mechanics, and specifically the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It is potent in asserting one cannot simultaneously measure 2 observables (e.g. momentum and position) to the same indefinite accuracy. Reductionism reduces all of a phenomenon to is constituent particles, parts alone - and generally waves off any application for QM in the system.

Not recognizing this, Barb misapplies the Uncertainty Principle. The problem is that if the dimension of the synapse itself is 200nm -300nm it is within Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle dimensions (as noted by physicist Henr Stapp).The computation she cites (from Michael Shermer - but actually originating in a book by Victor Stenger) is meaningless. The reason is that one cannot accurately calculate v, x, or d (position in relation to v) at the same time.

The form for the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, say in one dimension is:

delta x delta p _x < h

Where delta x is the uncertainty in position in the x-direction and delta p_ x is the uncertainty in momentum in the x direction. We see immediately that mv = p _x or the momentum in the x-direction, and Shermer's/Ehrenreich's d variable is just x, the synaptic gap distance with delta x the associated uncertainty.

The stark reality is that as intent as Barb is on proving no quantum threshold for brain function, her calculation (like Shermer's and Stenger's) is amiss, because (under Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) one can't obtain simultaneously accurate values of both p and x (or in this case, mv and d) since if he estimates or knows one to perfection, he loses all information on the other ! Thus, rewriting the Heisenberg relation (in 1-dimension) to find the indeterminacy in momentum:

delta p_ x > h/ Äx

If d were really known to perfect accuracy (delta x = 0) then:

delta p _x > h/ 0 = oo

i.e. no momentum knowledge is possible because the indeterminacy in the position is now infinite.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the QM application to human consciousness is shunned by only one type of quantum physicist, i.e. who generally follow the reductionist ('particles only') model. But readers (and Ms. Ehrenreich) ought to be aware that another approach is adopted by physicist Henry Stapp's in his 'Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics' (1983) and more recently, in his book, 'The Mindful Universe'. In each case ultra-reductionism is shunned and replaced by a quantum-based model of consciousness.

The problem with the quantum "mysticism" bunch is not ncessarily their basic theory (so long as they adhere to the stochastic QM of David Bohm, e.g. as espoused in his Wholeness and the Implicate Order, or the revised Copenhagen approach of Henry Stapp.) but that they try to apply it widely before hard evidence exists to support it. In other words, Barb is overly dismissive, imho, of mind-QM connections. (Which I go into in great detail, including the limitations, in my recent book: 'Beyond Atheism, Beyond God'- available at the store.)

In her treatment of the 'Dark Roots of American Optimism" (Ch. 3) it would have been nice and apropos to single out the PR hucksters who have now taken over most of the corporate media. Where we once got hard news, it's now mainly 'airbrushed' PR - but the long term reader isn't fooled. This PR also contributes to the absurd 'balanced" or 'objective' portrayal of any and all news stories - which is nonsense. Once you adopt "balance", as in the case of stories on religions, market behavior or even NSA spying, you lose perspective. You become an enabler of the power mongers and their Neoliberal cohort.

Ehrenreich brought out more of this in her piece, "Pathologies of Hope" in Harpers, Feb., 2007. noting that American mass culture is saturated by a saccharine "cult of positivity," with children brainwashed from an early age that they can do anything, and adults brainwashed to believe if they just work hard and long enough they'll become super millionaires like Donald Trump. That no one has slain the insipid "Horatio Alger" myth up to now is really a testament to Americans' individualist hubris and false optimism. It is this false optimism bordering on the pathological that fuels the 'dark side' of positive mental claptrap.

But at the heart of much of it, as Ehrenreich points out (pp. 92-93) is the tie in to pseudo- religous overtones as embodied in works like Norman Vincent Peale's 'The Power of Positive Thinking' and Ernest Holmes 'Science of Mind'. In both of these, the person afflicted with disease or poverty or plain bad luck is informed it's his or her own mental attitudes that shaped their reality. Try telling that to the poor folks in Charleston WVa now treating rashes caused by chemically fouled water!

Thus, positive religion causes people - even well meaning- to lose sight of reality. It also militates against those of us who are non-believers. Take a culture of positivity- like the U.S. - imbued with Peale's nonsense, and no surprise many will perceive the atheist as an agent of irreversible depression, pessimism and negativity! After all, what could be more of a downer than the notion that all the fun ends once one's physical being expires? Or that most atheists uphold scientific Materialism which treats all special non-physical agents, forces and beings as balderdash. Factor into this the human brain's natural tendency and drive for optimism at any cost, and you have a ready-made cultural and biological axis to oppose atheism.

In Chapter Four, Ehrenreich's takedown of Stephen Covey's 'Who Moved My Cheese' malarkey (pp., 117-18) is spot on. Strange, but not even Covey recognizes he's offered humans a "rodent like" approach to life and any downsizing misfortunes. But this is all part and parcel of the general American corporate nonsense to do with "efficiency", "productivity" and that god awful "team building".

In Chapter Six I cherished Ehrenreich's skewering of the positive psychology nincompoops, such as embodied in Seligman's 'Authentic Happiness'. Happy people are "more successful at work"? Don't believe it and Ehrenreich will tell you why. (Those who dispute it should also read her book, 'Nickel and Dimed')

Chapter Seven, meanwhile, may have most import for Americans with any current financial stake in the markets - especially now as Bernanke and the Fed plan to end their quantitative easing program ($85 b a month pumped in to create a cheap money supply for the Wall Street bunch). As in the case of the 2008 housing bubble, which as Ehrenreich notes many people believed would go on forever, today's stock market captives are in a bubble. Nate Silver, in his book, 'The Signal and the Noise- Why So Many Predictions Fail But Some Don't ' noted the danger signals for a market crash (p. 347):

"Of the eight times in which the S&P 500 has increased at a rate much faster than its historical average over a 5-year period , five cases were followed by a severe and notorious crash, such as the Great Depression and the Black Monday crash of 1987."

For reference, in the last year the stock market shot up by nearly 28 percent, or more than 3 times what Silver defines as a 'bubble'. Will people wise up this time and bail before they lose most of their phantom money? Or will they obey the positive market mindset hucksters and "buy and HOLD"? Given how Ehrenreich documents Americans' penchant for optimism, especially in the financial arena, I wouldn't be surprised if many more seniors will be shocked at their coming mutual funds' meltdown and then having to get ready for cat food and working unti their 90!

Ehrenreich's book is timely as it confronts the American "positivity" epidemic by surveying a number of venues in which it's become entrenched, including: Cancer therapy and recovery (Chapter One), Magical Thinking balone (Chapter Two), the dark underbelly of American Optimism (Chapter Three), The Business Positive Motivation hucksters (Chapter Four); the 'God wants you to be rich' hucksters (Chapter Five); the positive Psychology hucksters (Six) and how hyper-optimism helped destroy the economy (Seven).

In general, Ms. Ehrenreich delivers a sober treatment of all the niches from which a lopsided positivity springs, though I would say a much harder hitting book is Eric G. Wilson's 'Against Happiness.' Wilson bemoans the way so many Americans have sacrificed their right to express discontent and dissatisfaction with their government and their lives, which means of course, essentially sacrificing the ability to change them or, in accord with fundamentalist theology- allow God to "do his thing" when he chooses to. Barbara E. touches on the same in a number of stratedgic places in the chapters referenced above, but doesn't do the concentrated job on unjustified positive thinking and the happiness game Wilson does. Thus, I would recommend people seriously interested in this area get both books.

Chapter One, I will admit, was of particular interest to me and is perhaps Ehrenreich's best, along with Chapter Seven (a close 2nd). The reason is that as a cancer (prostate) survivor I can relate to Ehrenreich's fury when told that one needed to maintain a "positive, happy" outlook to confront cancer and look at it as an opportunity for self -improvement. She notes (p. 40) that psychologists call this 'benefit finding' - or invoking assorted ways to "feel positive about cancer."

Positive about it! It's a damned scourge! There's nothing "positive" about it! I still am suffering from the after effects of radiation (high dose) treatment received over a year and a half ago, and the burning pain on urination is so bad I can hardly bear it! So I was especially enraged as I read (on page 41) about some "cancer researcher" named Stephen Strum who declared (ibid.):

"Prostate cancer is an opportunity...it's a path, a model, a paradigm, of how you can interact to help yourself and another. By doing so you evolve to a much higher level of humanity."

Well, leaving out all the humbug, I can basically say I haven't "evolved" beyond what I was, But as Ehrenriech puts it, this is how the sugar coating of this disease exacts a dreadful cost, because in doing so it dismisses feelings of anger and fear and beckons the unwary and pie-eyed to replace them with "a cosmetic layer of cheer".

So good on Barbara for exposing all the codswallop asociated with bright-siding cancer!

In Chapter Two we learn how the 'gurus' advise dropping "negative people" (p. 57) and how in the world of all -out positive thinking others mainly exist to provide 'strokes' and affirmations, not reality checks. 'The Secret' and its mystical babble (p. 63) is an example, and Ehrenreich notes its similarity to 'sympathetic magic'. I'd even go beyond this and warrant most positive thinking self -help books are not original - merely regurgitations of earlier nonsense.

In the same chapter, pp. 66-73 Ehrenriech get into how the positive thinking culture has tried to hijack quantum physics, as epitomized in some movies such as 'What the Bleep Do We Know?'

My main complaint here is that she's mixed up (p. 67) 'determinism' with reductionism. She writes of 'New Age' thinkers seeking to relase humanity from "the dull tethers of determinism" - but that's already been done, via quantum mechanics, and specifically the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It is potent in asserting one cannot simultaneously measure 2 observables (e.g. momentum and position) to the same indefinite accuracy. Reductionism reduces all of a phenomenon to is constituent particles, parts alone - and generally waves off any application for QM in the system.

Not recognizing this, Barb misapplies the Uncertainty Principle. The problem is that if the dimension of the synapse itself is 200nm -300nm it is within Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle dimensions (as noted by physicist Henr Stapp).The computation she cites (from Michael Shermer - but actually originating in a book by Victor Stenger) is meaningless. The reason is that one cannot accurately calculate v, x, or d (position in relation to v) at the same time.

The form for the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, say in one dimension is:

delta x delta p _x < h

Where delta x is the uncertainty in position in the x-direction and delta p_ x is the uncertainty in momentum in the x direction. We see immediately that mv = p _x or the momentum in the x-direction, and Shermer's/Ehrenreich's d variable is just x, the synaptic gap distance with delta x the associated uncertainty.

The stark reality is that as intent as Barb is on proving no quantum threshold for brain function, her calculation (like Shermer's and Stenger's) is amiss, because (under Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) one can't obtain simultaneously accurate values of both p and x (or in this case, mv and d) since if he estimates or knows one to perfection, he loses all information on the other ! Thus, rewriting the Heisenberg relation (in 1-dimension) to find the indeterminacy in momentum:

delta p_ x > h/ Äx

If d were really known to perfect accuracy (delta x = 0) then:

delta p _x > h/ 0 = oo

i.e. no momentum knowledge is possible because the indeterminacy in the position is now infinite.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the QM application to human consciousness is shunned by only one type of quantum physicist, i.e. who generally follow the reductionist ('particles only') model. But readers (and Ms. Ehrenreich) ought to be aware that another approach is adopted by physicist Henry Stapp's in his 'Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics' (1983) and more recently, in his book, 'The Mindful Universe'. In each case ultra-reductionism is shunned and replaced by a quantum-based model of consciousness.

The problem with the quantum "mysticism" bunch is not ncessarily their basic theory (so long as they adhere to the stochastic QM of David Bohm, e.g. as espoused in his Wholeness and the Implicate Order, or the revised Copenhagen approach of Henry Stapp.) but that they try to apply it widely before hard evidence exists to support it. In other words, Barb is overly dismissive, imho, of mind-QM connections. (Which I go into in great detail, including the limitations, in my recent book: 'Beyond Atheism, Beyond God'- available at the store.)

In her treatment of the 'Dark Roots of American Optimism" (Ch. 3) it would have been nice and apropos to single out the PR hucksters who have now taken over most of the corporate media. Where we once got hard news, it's now mainly 'airbrushed' PR - but the long term reader isn't fooled. This PR also contributes to the absurd 'balanced" or 'objective' portrayal of any and all news stories - which is nonsense. Once you adopt "balance", as in the case of stories on religions, market behavior or even NSA spying, you lose perspective. You become an enabler of the power mongers and their Neoliberal cohort.

Ehrenreich brought out more of this in her piece, "Pathologies of Hope" in Harpers, Feb., 2007. noting that American mass culture is saturated by a saccharine "cult of positivity," with children brainwashed from an early age that they can do anything, and adults brainwashed to believe if they just work hard and long enough they'll become super millionaires like Donald Trump. That no one has slain the insipid "Horatio Alger" myth up to now is really a testament to Americans' individualist hubris and false optimism. It is this false optimism bordering on the pathological that fuels the 'dark side' of positive mental claptrap.

But at the heart of much of it, as Ehrenreich points out (pp. 92-93) is the tie in to pseudo- religous overtones as embodied in works like Norman Vincent Peale's 'The Power of Positive Thinking' and Ernest Holmes 'Science of Mind'. In both of these, the person afflicted with disease or poverty or plain bad luck is informed it's his or her own mental attitudes that shaped their reality. Try telling that to the poor folks in Charleston WVa now treating rashes caused by chemically fouled water!

Thus, positive religion causes people - even well meaning- to lose sight of reality. It also militates against those of us who are non-believers. Take a culture of positivity- like the U.S. - imbued with Peale's nonsense, and no surprise many will perceive the atheist as an agent of irreversible depression, pessimism and negativity! After all, what could be more of a downer than the notion that all the fun ends once one's physical being expires? Or that most atheists uphold scientific Materialism which treats all special non-physical agents, forces and beings as balderdash. Factor into this the human brain's natural tendency and drive for optimism at any cost, and you have a ready-made cultural and biological axis to oppose atheism.

In Chapter Four, Ehrenreich's takedown of Stephen Covey's 'Who Moved My Cheese' malarkey (pp., 117-18) is spot on. Strange, but not even Covey recognizes he's offered humans a "rodent like" approach to life and any downsizing misfortunes. But this is all part and parcel of the general American corporate nonsense to do with "efficiency", "productivity" and that god awful "team building".

In Chapter Six I cherished Ehrenreich's skewering of the positive psychology nincompoops, such as embodied in Seligman's 'Authentic Happiness'. Happy people are "more successful at work"? Don't believe it and Ehrenreich will tell you why. (Those who dispute it should also read her book, 'Nickel and Dimed')

Chapter Seven, meanwhile, may have most import for Americans with any current financial stake in the markets - especially now as Bernanke and the Fed plan to end their quantitative easing program ($85 b a month pumped in to create a cheap money supply for the Wall Street bunch). As in the case of the 2008 housing bubble, which as Ehrenreich notes many people believed would go on forever, today's stock market captives are in a bubble. Nate Silver, in his book, 'The Signal and the Noise- Why So Many Predictions Fail But Some Don't ' noted the danger signals for a market crash (p. 347):

"Of the eight times in which the S&P 500 has increased at a rate much faster than its historical average over a 5-year period , five cases were followed by a severe and notorious crash, such as the Great Depression and the Black Monday crash of 1987."

For reference, in the last year the stock market shot up by nearly 28 percent, or more than 3 times what Silver defines as a 'bubble'. Will people wise up this time and bail before they lose most of their phantom money? Or will they obey the positive market mindset hucksters and "buy and HOLD"? Given how Ehrenreich documents Americans' penchant for optimism, especially in the financial arena, I wouldn't be surprised if many more seniors will be shocked at their coming mutual funds' meltdown and then having to get ready for cat food and working unti their 90!

In this brilliant book, Barbara Ehrenreich shows how harmful the `positive thinking' movement is, how it means self-blame, victim-blaming and national denial, inviting disaster. She shows that it wrecks efforts for education, skills and reforms.

She cites a guru who said, "the mind is actually shaping the very thing that is being perceived." There is a long tradition in the USA of this kind of mind-over-matter idealism: it includes William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mary Baker Eddy (the founder of Christian Science), Norman Vincent Peale (The power of positive thinking), Dale Carnegie (How to make friends and influence people), Scott Peck (The road less travelled), Tom Peters (The pursuit of wow), Deepak Chopra (Quantum healing), Oprah Winfrey, and Rhonda Byrne (The Secret). Byrne evilly said that tsunamis only happen to people who are `on the same frequency as the event' - blaming people's personalities for their deaths.

In the field of health, `positive thinkers' tell us that being positive will help to cure cancer. But research has found no such link: see for example James Coyne et al, `Psychotherapy and survival in cancer: the conflict between hope and evidence', Psychological Bulletin, 2007, 133, 3, 367-94, and `Emotional well-being does not predict survival in head and neck cancer patients', Cancer, 2007, 110, 11, 2568-75. So, even if you believe, with Ann McNerney, that, "Cancer will lead you to God" (The gift of cancer: a call to awakening), `positive thinking' won't make you better.

The business world loves positive thinking. The US market for motivational products is worth $21 billion a year and companies use them against their workers. For instance, AT&T sent staff to a motivational event on the same day it announced 15,000 redundancies. The motivator's message? "It's your own fault; don't blame the system; don't blame the boss - work harder and pray more."

Ehrenreich presents us with this striking image: "a candlelit room thick with a haze of incense, 17 blindfolded captains of industry lay on towels, breathed deeply, and delved into the `lower world' to the sound of a lone tribal drum. Leading the group was Richard Whiteley, a Harvard business school-educated best-selling author and management consultant who moonlights as an urban shaman. `Envision an entrance into the earth, a well, or a swimming hole', Whiteley half-whispered above the sea of heaving chests. He then instructed the executives how to retrieve from their inner depths their `power animals, who would guide their companies to 21st century success'."

A third of British CEOs of FTSE 100 companies used such personal coaches in 2007. The debt crisis was built on runaway positive thinking. As Ehrenreich notes, "the recklessness of the borrowers was far exceeded by that of the lenders, with some finance companies involved in subprimes undertaking debt-to-asset ratios of 30 to 1."

The promoter of a master's programme in `positive psychology' at the University of East London saw `healthy British scepticism' as one of the `challenges' facing her. But we need to be sceptical, to see things as they are, not as we wish them to be. We need not `positive thinking' but real thinking.

Talk about swimming against the tide. In this book Barbara Ehrenreich launches a full scale assault against the tsunami of positive thinking that has been sweeping our country since the days of Norman Vincent Peale. The result is a thoughtful volume that, at its heart, is a plea for realism--seeing a situation for what it is, not better than it is, not worse than it is.

Ehrenreich draws on numerous examples to back up her points, including her own experience with breast cancer support groups, where the intense pressure to look on the bright side led one woman to tell the group that "breast cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me." Might want to re-think that one. The author also zeros in on pie-in-the-sky positive preachers like Joel Osteen and how overzealous positive thinkers brought about the subprime mortgage crisis because they simple refused to believe that anything bad could happen in this best of all possible worlds. In this regard she sights some incredible examples of CEOs who were so caught up in positive thinking that they fired anyone who dared voice a negative thought. All in all this a highly provocative read that challenges readers to reconsider some of the basic tenets of 21st century American life.

Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
Book Review by Richard L. Weaver II, Ph.D.

In this 235-page book with 16 pages of notes, Ehrenreich, author of 16 previous books and a previous columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine, offers a rich and compelling read about the false promises of positive thinking.

First, those reading this review must know that I am completely biased in Ehrenreich's favor--even though I am guilty of what she is accusing others of doing. Before supporting my bias, I have to admit that I have been lecturing to thousands of students a loud, clear, and upbeat message about how positive thinking (along with valuable communication skills, of course) is a well-paved, proven road to success. Also, anyone who reads my blog will know that many of my Thursday essays (and books of essays--see especially, You Rules--Caution: Contents Leads to a Better Life!) support a strong belief in positive thinking.

You might wonder, then, why I would be biased in Ehrenreich's favor, because, she thinks it has undermined America. But, if you read her book you will understand my bias. I delighted, for example, in the debunking she gave to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Robert Schuller, and, especially, Joel Osteen and his wife Victoria. The story she tells of visiting one of Osteen's services is truly interesting--even delightful.

Also, she writes about the etymology of positive psychology because of the publication and popularity of Martin Seligman's books (especially, for example, Learned Optimisim)--something I had only heard about previously and knew little about.) The unfolding of the Seligman story held my interest, and the details of her interview with Seligman was sheer delight, as was the connection of Seligman's Positive Psychology Center with Sir John Templeton (p. 166).

If you would take the time to examine our culture as closely as Ehrenreich has, you would quickly come to the same conclusion she has, that we have produced a huge supply of successful religious and secular charlatans who, under the guise of instruction, simply want to separate you from your money. There is a great Woody Allen line from the movie, "Hannah and Her Sisters," which says, "If Jesus came back and saw what they were doing in His name, He'd never stop throwing up."

In this book, Ehrenreich traces the origins of the "cult of optimism" from its origins in 19th century America through to the prevalence of the "gospel of prosperity," "positive psychology," and the "science of happiness" in academia and literature. We are amidst a society of "irrational exuberance," and it is precisely for this reason that Ehrenreich's book is a must read.

This book is not a downer at all. The question she raises, "Why are we so relentlessly positive?"--even when positivity is unwarranted--is a legitimate one. The bottom line for readers is worthwhile and should stop many dead-in-their-tracks: Are we not too accepting? Are we not critical enough?

Ehrenreich's scholarship is impressive, the stories are fascinating, and the book is badly needed, but it will be valuable only if it truly changes attitudes and shapes minds.

Great book. Sure, she can be irritating with the liberal bias at times. My biggest criticism is it is too polar to the extreme. Some of the positive thinking and wishing and even rituals have a good point. They can focus the person on their goals and perhaps enlist the unconscious. Optimism and such have some effect on outcomes. This may be a small effect, but a small pinkey on the passed football can stop the touchdown. Optimism may get the cancer victim to brave the horrors of treatment. The only other big criticism is that the corporate evils may be less stupid positive thinking and more screw everyone not in the plutocracy. From there this book was painful and enlightenling.

I could go on about many of the issues raised. First is cancer. This is a horrible disease. While some of the blame can be on the patients for smoking or such, nobody wills themselves to get cancer-or get cured from it.

This book nails so much of our modern society. You may not agree with her on everything, but she will make you think. If she does ot make you think (with any of her books), you are proboably so rigid you never really think deeply.

Ehrenreich came face to face with the subject of positive thinking when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Buried under an avalanche of pink ribbons, teddy bears, and bogus claims for the value of positive thinking in beating cancer (hence the title Smile or Die!) she began to look into the pervasiveness of positive think-ism in American society in her usual thorough, good humoured and insightful manner.

It is everywhere. There are "Christian" denominations that are devoted to it that offer a materialist heaven on earth - "God wants you to be rich!" Self help (or help yourself) manuals that claim that one has only to imagine wealth, have a picture board of desired consumer durables to worship every morning, and before you know it . . . In the workplace, personal relations and politics the power of positive thinking is privileged over rational and sceptical thinking.

Most disturbingly of all, the American Psychological Association is up to its neck in positive think-ism. The interview that Ehrenreich conducts with their president Martin Segilman is notable, in that her scepticism - which ought to be welcomed by a scientist - turns this guru of positive thinking into an ill mannered and ratty prima donna. His happiness equation, apart from its laughably unscientific nature, posits that someone's circumstances will have a minimal effect on their feelings of happiness or unhappiness: it is all in the mind. A cheap and cheerful solution, and no doubt a great relief to the rich who might think negatively about the implications for their tax rates of improving the social circumstances of the majority. Ehrenreich also covers the origins of this malign mania, and quite plausibly and with plenty of evidence, roots it in the Calvinist beliefs that would have been pervasive in Americans original northern European colonisers and migrants.

The self absorbed examination and policing of ones thoughts, the obsession with personal and often financial gain, the exhortations to cut all negative people out of your life (sceptics? a clinically depressed relative or friend?) seems to me to be essentially onanistic, insular and deeply pernicious doctrine. No need to think about wider economic, political and social questions either: just think positive . . . even fake it . . . and everything will be all right. Ehrenreich's brilliant book is the antidote to this nonsense, one that empowers you to think critically about positive thinking, that will make you smile too. It deserves a wide readership.

Barbara Ehrenreich is one of those people who just can't resist poking at the soft underbelly of American mythology. And there is so much to poke at in Bright-Sided--from the money-making motivational industry to the secular theology of multi-million dollar mega-church corporations. However, Ehrenreich's goal is not to skewer positive thinking, as some readers may think, but to expose the degree to which it has replaced common sense.

Although I enjoyed this book tremendously, Ehrenreich occasionally gets tangled up in her own myths. In her discussion of the 19th century illness, neuraesthenia (The Dark Roots of American Optimism), Ehrenreich makes the claim that when "male prejudice" barred women from higher education, "invalidism became a kind of alternative career." Here Ehrenreich falls into the very style of thinking that she deplores in the rest of her book. If positive thinking cannot make you well, then clearly negative thinking cannot make you ill. (Ehrenreich could claim that neuraesthenia was an imaginary illness, but then she would be ignoring the very real health problems caused by lung-crushing corsets, poor public sanitation and the common medical practice of dosing women with mercury.) Later, Ehrenreich makes a similar error when discussing lower back pain. You can't have it both ways. Either your thoughts control the real world or they don't.

Equally implausible was Ehrenreich's assertion that positive thinking has destroyed America's economy. While it's reassuring to believe that the CEOs of our major corporations are actually thinking, the reality is that unmitigated greed combined with an official economic policy of "don't ask, don't tell" (what Senator Byrd called the "plundering" of America) is what has led us to ruin. When Nero fiddled while Rome burned, he was not thinking positively. He was not thinking at all.

On the positive side (ahem), when Ehrenreich sinks her teeth into some cold, hard facts, she really shines. Her lambasting of the motivational industry, and how it connects to the errors of corporate decisions was enlightening. (And right in line with industry's "positive" response to failure, Toyota has recently put out ads proclaiming that it is "moving forward.") The chapter exposing the economic underpinnings of mega-church materialism and of the insidious spread of "secular theology" was truly inspirational.

On the whole, this was a pithy, cogent and well researched critique. Americans have, indeed, turned a blind eye to reality. As Ehrenreich says, "the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of critical thinking." Bright-Sided is a much needed step in that direction.

When I first started reading this, even though I knew what it was about, I found it pretty depressing.

However, once I got past her personal cancer story (OK, I skipped it and went back after reading the rest of the book), I found it wasn't depressing but well-researched, very interesting and very true.

She traces the positivity movement to its roots in Calvinism, and the most interesting part is right at the end where she discusses the role of relentless optimism and positivity Soviet Russia and North Korea. Yes, not being allowed to be negative (or realistic) is a tactic of Communist dictators.

It was alarming to read of people being fired for not being upbeat enough, and how this attitude contributed to the Global Financial Crisis and other such events.

Intolerance of anything but maniacal positivism is dangerous, and this book provides the evidence. Nobody (least of all the author of this book) is saying people should be a downer, but blind optimism and smothering of all caution doesn't do the world any favors.

I happened to read this book just after an introduction to a category of human behavior new to me: irrational revitalization movements such as Pacific island cargo cults, the Native American Ghost Dance, and the Heaven's Gate UFO religion. The positive thinking movement that Ehrenreich describes is clearly another one, perhaps the most widespread in history. Just as the cargo cultists in the late 1940s built airstrips in the belief that this would bring back the airplanes loaded with cargos of gifts that had been part of U.S. efforts to recruit the islanders to the Allied side during World War II, practitioners of positive thinking believe that if they purge their minds of negative thoughts and their lives of negative people, keeping their focus on the brighter future they desire, that future will come to them, whether it means a new job, true love, massive wealth or recovery from a life-threatening illness. Positive thinking, under the "prosperity gospel" trademark, has even become the core teaching of some of the country's best-publicized churches, completely replacing the real Christian teachings about love in this world and salvation in the next. In business, and therefore in politics, the doctrine of positive thinking has been cynically mixed with Adam Smith's concept of free market self-interest to resurrect 19th-century Social Darwinist victim-blaming, even to the point of asserting that natural disasters such as the Asian tsunami don't happen to positive thinkers.

Not that Ehrenreich mentions Smith or Darwin or cargo cults. Her own upbringing in one of the last pockets of pleasure-hating Calvinism in North America have led her to see positive thinking as a kind of mirror-image reaction to Calvinism; both call for the believer to obsessively police his or her inner life, the Calvinist for sin, the positive thinker for negativity. She traces the birth of positive thinking to Phineas Quimby, an inventor and amateur metaphysician who cured himself of tuberculosis and became one of the first medical professionals to make use of what we now call the placebo effect, then from him through his patient Mary Baker Eddy, the New Thought movement, William James, Earnest Holmes, Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, and onward to the modern motivation industry, which she thoroughly skewers, along with positive thinking in medicine, religion, academia and, most pointedly, business.

Irrational revitalization movements generally come about when changed circumstances threaten people's values and sense of who they are. For American business leadership, the threat came from the instability and merger mania of the 1980s, which destroyed two fantasies: that corporate management was a science that could be mastered through training, and that a practitioner of this "scientific management" who reached a high-level executive job could count on remaining securely employed at that level until retirement. Once the old logic no longer applied, managers had to grope for some sense of competence and a basis for confident decision-making; a disturbing number of them settled on the same positive-thinking nostrums that they'd been using on the employees to try to keep up morale in the face of layoffs and falling sales. The result, as Ehrenreich sees it, was the irrational exuberance that led to the series of bubbles and crashes that have characterized the economy ever since.

One factor she seems to have missed, particularly in the business chapter, is the influence of cocaine which, according to some former insiders, became a fashionable drug in high financial circles. (Admittedly this must remain rumor; it's not the kind of thing that leaves clear documentation.) Cocaine is overconfidence in inhalant form. Much has been written about the effects of drug money as it was laundered through respectable financial institutions, not enough about the influence of the drug itself on the decision-making process going on in those same institutions.

I also wish she had more to say about the influence of positive thinking in government, particularly in the decision to invade Iraq. The unnamed "senior adviser to President Bush" who told the reporter Ron Suskind "we create our own reality" was clearly speaking from a positive thinking point of view. Ehrenreich has made a great effort to keep partisan politics out of the book, but those who know her earlier work can detect, between the lines, her dismay that large numbers of working people now look to positive thinking rather than workplace agitation and political participation to better their lives. While she has gone to some lengths to point out the weakness of the scientific case for positive thinking, one suspects that she would disapprove of it even if she thought it worked, simply because it focuses on individual rather than social betterment.

Finally, Ehrenreich is a materialist and a reporter with scientific training, predisposed to skepticism about spiritual claims as she is about the claims of politicians and corporate PR. For those of us who have some experience of manifestation and similar types of spiritual power, the attitude can be kind of irritating. However, given that in most of the positive thinking movement what is being taught is not any sort of real discipline but merely a dressed-up version of wishful thinking, I think a dose of good old-fashioned hard-headedness is just what's called for.

Barbara Ehrenreich is an author I admire, for her ideological commitment, the passion she brings to her writing, and for making me think. Her recent book, "Bright-sided", has much to recommend it: her usual willingness to question received wisdom and dig deeper for answers and her characteristically clear thinking, expressed in clear and forceful prose. Her central target in "Bright-sided" is a U.S. trait that is both a strength and a weakness - the uniquely American faith in the power of positive thinking.

In the opening chapter, which I found the most powerful in the book, Ehrenreich describes her experience as a breast cancer patient. There is an extensive, well-organized network to which someone just diagnosed with (breast) cancer can turn for support. One of the most prevalent messages promulgated within this "support" network is that maintaining a positive attitude towards one's disease is imperative. Ehrenreich argues persuasively that, in many cases, this rigidly enforced dogma of positive thinking (to the extent of asking patients to view their disease as a "gift"), is in no way supportive, and actually ends up making people feel guilty about a bad situation beyond their control. Nonetheless, the belief that maintaining a positive attitude can actually affect the course of one's disease remains prevalent, accepted unquestioningly by the majority of cancer patients, despite an almost complete lack of objective scientific evidence to support it.

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.

Ehrenreich believes (and I agree with her) that it's essentially a steaming heap of crap. The prevalent faith in positive thinking not only exaggerates its potential benefits, its effects can be actively detrimental. For instance, the amazing lack of outrage within the lower classes at the obscene excesses of the super-rich is due in no small measure to the belief that, with hard work and luck, anyone can achieve a similar measure of financial success*. This leads to a focus on the individual's own status, but works against genuine social change, of the kind that might make a real difference. And, of course, the recent financial meltdown had its origins in the exaggerated confidence that blinded investors to the (real and substantial) risks of subprime mortgages, or versions thereof, repackaged in the guise of assorted shady financial instruments. Throughout the book, Ehrenreich makes her case articulately and persuasively.

Why not five stars? Because I think the book is about twice as long as it needs to be. The point that Ehrenreich wishes to make is not particularly difficult, nor is it sufficiently important to warrant 225 pages of exposition. Much of the material in the middle chapters feels redundant - crowding in one more anecdote about yet another ridiculous motivational speaker, long after the point has been made. The phrase "methinks the lady doth protest too much" flitted unbidden across my mind, leaving me feeling slightly guilty, as Ehrenreich's books usually seem to do.

Though it's a little bloated, "Bright-sided" is nonetheless well worth your consideration.

* : In the words of a 1996 Brookings Institute study: Strong belief in opportunity and upward mobility is the explanation for Americans' high tolerance for inequality. The majority of Americans surveyed believe they will be above mean income in the future (even though this is mathematically impossible).

Another brave undertaking by an insightful sociologist who somehow never lost her ability to write convincingly and engagingly in grad school. Don’t bother trying to persuade others to read this book, though—they’ll ask you to repeat the title and assume you are trying to make them unhappy. In fact, Ehrenrich is arguing for empiricism, a dose of reality in a world in which many believe that wealth can be got by simply thinking about how you deserve it. News flash to the idiot mob: the world is a mix of good and bad news and you aren’t going to be very effective at your job or in your life if you ignore contrary evidence and ostracize individual thought. If you manage to magically manifest some dollars for yourself, buy this book.

Barbara Ehrenreich, in her superbly-written book "Bright-Sided" exposes what is one of the most callous, cold-hearted, and cruel pop-psychologies to come along: positive thinking. Its cruelty lies in the fact that on the surface it sounds nice, but underneath it is a philosophy that I feel has fostered the now-rampant attitude of uncaring and selfishness we see in today's society. "Positive thinking" is nothing more than a "blame the victim" philosophy. Homeless? It's your fault, because you weren't 'positive' enough" - it has nothing to do with unfair distribution of wealth. "Unemployed? It's your fault - you weren't 'positive' enough, so you didn't attract that job that is waiting for you." This is a philosophy that lets corporations and politicians off the hook when it comes to providing for America's citizens. And to see a large part of the scientific community, the politicians, the clergy, the corporations, and the brainwashed people who espouse and support this philosophy does not bode well for America becoming a more caring, happy nation. The philosophy of positive thinking fosters greed, callousness, and inhumanity and Barbara Ehrenreich deserves high praise for bringing this evil to light. This book should be read by everyone.

I've been to a few motivational seminars (usually mandated by my employer) and I often have the experience that, while listening to the speaker, I find myself thinking "yes, yes, yes!", but as soon as I walk out the door and out of the grip of the contrived enthusiasm, I think "no, no, no!" Unfortunately, that was my experience with this book.

This book could be described as "far-reaching." Or it could be dscribed as a "random hodge-podge." Barbara Ehrenreich bounces from one subject to another like a rocket propelled superball.

The first chapter after the introduction is actually fairly well focused. It is about Ehrenreich's exposure to the "cult" of positive thinking through her experience with breast cancer. Ehrenreich weaves her personal experience in with scientific explanations (in laymen's terms) of the biology of cancer and the immune system and scientific studies of the efficacy (and lack thereof) of positive thinking in the treatment of cancer. So far, so good.

The next chapter is also reasonably well focused - perhaps too focused. Ehrenreich traces the development of positive thinking to a nineteenth century reaction to Calvinism. She credits rather obscure historical figures such as Mary Baker Eddy, Phineas Quimby and Williams James with revolutionizing American attitudes and introducing the "cult" of positive thinking. Ehrenreich pulls a few threads from this bit of history and a few thread from that, but it leaves her with a rather thin tapestry with many holes. Interestingly enough, Ehrenreich's own roots include both Calvinism and Christian Science.

But from there on, all bets are off. Ehrenreich bounces recklessly from business to religion to politics to current events to the global economy, touching briefly on examples, anecdotes, articles and research to "prove" her "point" (such point being, I believe, the ubiquity and the destructiveness of this "cult" of positive thinking). If you went to your local library, checked out a random sampling of 200 or so books, magazines and journals, found a paragraph or even a sentence from each with which you either agree or disagree, and assembled them, along with your own thoughts and musings, into some sort of loose order, you might come up with something loosely like the last half of "Bright Sided".

Furthermore, Ehrenreich cheapens what points she makes with personal attacks and sarcastic snipes. For instance, she describes in detal an interview (or attempted interview) with Martin Seligman of "learned helplessness" and "positive psychology" fame, making no attempt to disguise her own contempt. Seligman does not come off positively in this portrayal, but neither does Ehrenreich. Also, Ehrenreich devotes a full paragraph to the physical appearances - not flattering - of Joel and Victoria Osteen, which makes her ensuing rant about the Osteens' vapid devotion to the prosperity gospel seem like simply a personal vendetta.

The book could also do with a good editor or even copy editor. Several times Ehrenreich begins to lay out what looks to be points in a coherent argument. She begins with "First," ... but there is no "second." It leaves the reader hanging and groping for the threads of her argument.

My final criticism with the book is simply that I'm not convinced the problem is as dire as she paints. The America I see is not drowning in positivity. "The Road" was one of the most popular books in recent history, along with the Harry Potter series, each book of which gets progressively darker. Violent and otherwise dark movies sell as well, if not better, than ever. Irony and sarcasm are alive and well in venues from "The Onion" to children's cartoons. Every worker bee in corporate America gathers to gripe at the water cooler. Sure, the corporate world is trying to sell us a vision of happy while they lay off our co-workers and multiply our workloads, but I don't see America as a whole buying into it. Sure, some unscrupulous "religious" types are trying to profit by selling a bill of goods, but I don't think today's market for religious hucksterism is any larger or worse than in previous generations.

I was disappointed in "Bright Sided". I really wanted to enjoy it. I agree with the basic premise and I'm certainly no fan of the positive thinking/motivation industry. But I just don't think Ehrenreich pulls it off. There's little depth to what she says and little that she says is new. There are moderately interesting parts of the book, and I think she's headed in the right direction, but the book needs a lot more focus to get there. If you have time on your hands, it may be worth checking out of the library, but save your money.

We're constantly inundated with advice to think positively, and people make fortunes by selling programs that promise endless happiness. So why are so many Americans miserable, desperately struggling to reach some vague, impossible goal of mindless bliss with a dazzling smile that's more of a deathly rictus?

Barbara Ehrenreich examines this American need for happiness in depth, beginning her her own experiences as a cancer patient, exhorted to be positive rather than angry & frightened. It didn't take long for many to start blaming her for bringing on & encouraging her cancer due to her negative attitude. This in turn led her to start delving into the American insistence on constant happiness, which usually ends in a denial of reality.

She then examines the history of American positive thinking, as well as its social repercussions. As she notes, it often results in a refusal to examine the larger picture & recognizing the economic & ideological forces that shape our lives. Further, it distracts our attention away from dealing with those forces & instead looking so far inward that we reach the vapid poison of something like The Secret, which claims that we create reality with our desires & thoughts. In short, if your life is bad, you're to blame for it. Worse, if you persist in looking outward instead of accepting your guilt, you deserve to suffer.

What's both fascinating & frightening is the way in which genuine self-examination, with an eye to dismantling the purely selfish & self-involved ego in order to find deeper meaning, became transformed into a glorification of that ego. Religions & philosophies that urged us to find the sacred within us -- NOT to be confused with the individual ego -- turned into the deification of that ego. And the satisfaction of that ego's desire -- the search of unceasing happiness -- became the purpose of life, instead of being seen for what it really is: a flight from life & a flight from social responsibility. Society was about Me, not Us.

Ehrenreich covers a lot of ground in this relatively short volume, and I wish she'd spent more time on some areas of it. But as sharp, scathing introduction to the problem of positive thinking, it's a fine beginning & will get you thinking -- especially about why we believe that constant happiness is our right & our natural state of being, and why we resist accepting that unhappiness, melancholy, even despair are as much a part of the human condition. In the end, what she's asking us to do is develop as whole human beings, with all the complexity that entails, instead of settling for a shallow & illusory caricature of life.

Note: Ehrenreich is NOT simply a curmudgeonly killjoy & certainly not opposed to genuine happiness -- she previously wrote "Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy" -- she is simply saying that we tend to seek out "happiness" as an anodyne, an escape from the pains & disappointments of life, rather than experiencing it as it comes, more often than not of its own accord. It's a gift, to be taken as grace, rather than consumed as a palliative.

Recommended!

Now, I almost gave this book a three star because I kept falling asleep during chapter six about the gobblegooking psychobabblers. Anyone with half a brain should already hold the advice of their profession in suspect. And, I suspect the destruction of the economy, described in chapter seven had nothing to do with optimism, but that the actual destruction was sired by unbridled greed and meanness of those who rule over us who work for a living. However, there is a great deal to be said about the charlatans who, for money, tell both the employed and cast aside they need to be more positive and accept their demise as an opportunity. The postcript pronouncement (p.196) that seemingly
gold medal organizations can "sometimes" override realism and common sense was right on the money. Anyhow, the author's "Nickel and Dimed" was so great I could not give her a three. Ehrenreich ridicules the hogwash that positive thinking can overcome cancer. (And, brother am I sick of the pink stuff!!! I do not want my daughters to be survivors. I want them to not get the stuff!) The authors properly skewers motivational barons who prey upon the unemployed and unfortunate and the God wants you to be rich gobbledygookers. A good summary of the book comes from page 197: "All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend upon a relentless commitment to hard-noved empiricism..." An encouragement of critical thinking...

Based on the reviews that have already been written, opinions of this book are quite polarizing. I decided to read this book after having read "Nickel and Dimed" and "Bait and Switch." While Mrs. Ehrenreich comes off as a pesimist and appears quite negative, I think that she is just very demanding. In fact I think that this quality is quite good in a journalist, as they are suppossed to be "muckrackers." I do admit that at times she can be a little mean and petty, such as when she talked about Joel Osteen's hair and height, but most of the time she expresses dissapointments that she is bewildered that her subjects do not feel.

I think that those who criticize this book misunderstand what Mrs. Ehrenreich is trying to say. She is not so much criticizing being polite or positive as much as being delusional. Her point is that getting fired, sick or losing one's house is most often a difficult event and thus not something to be celebrated. When thousands of workers are being laid off for the benefit a few stockholders, she argues that blaming oneself is not only irrational but also counterproductive. Just as someone who refuses to buy any kind of insurance would be seen as being irrational, she argues that looking at certain negatives as a blessing is delusional rather than being positive.

In addition the view that one's thoughts can control their respective environment is also absurd. For example, if one applies for a job, it is assumed that he or she really wants the job. However, the decision to give the job is mostly outside of the applicant's control. If he or she is unqualified or does not present themselves well, no amount of "positive thinking" can overcome these faults.

Anyone who has gagged at teambuilding events, or who rolls eyes while listening to motivational spiels will love reading Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In her comprehensive account she describes how the purveyors of relentless positive thinking have led the ill to blame themselves for sickness, and have created the unrealistic mindset that any obstacle can be overcome through "right" thinking. Through multiple examples and historical context, Ehrenreich makes a compelling case that the emphasis on positive thinking has led to group and self delusion. She covers medicine, religion, politics and business with keen insight. Bright-sided is a call for a reality check, and a return to realism to make our individuals and our country healthier and stronger. Whether you're a pessimist or an optimist, there's much to learn and enjoy on the pages of Bright-sided.

Rating: Four-star (Highly Recommended)

As an admitted and longtime fan of Barbara Ehrenreich, I've been meaning to read this book for some time. Finally got hold of a copy and was not disappointed. Ehrenreich is a fine writer--always on point and possessed of a diabolically dry wit and pitch-perfect sense of irony. Her skillful take-down of positive thinking is a long overdue corrective to a peculiarly perverse American neurosis, i.e., that we always look for the silver lining, even when there obviously isn't one. Ehrenreich sagely argues that the opposite of positive thinking isn't pessimism or nihilism but rather realism. She also argues that positive thinking is the official ideology of an oppressive status quo and can easily lead to distorted views of reality that can, in turn, lead to irrational decisions and disastrous consequences (e.g., insane financial exuberance that causes things like the housing bubble).

What I find refreshing about Dr. Ehrenreich's books is that she was trained as a cell biologist and so understands scientific topics. Many critics of modern scientific fields such as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology are excruciatingly and maddenly naive. In this book, Dr. Ehrenreich artfully analyzes the positive psychology mania, placing it in historical perspective and evaluating its claims systematically. Because of her technical expertise, her critique is effective and weighty. She also reveals the crass materialism behind many manifestations of this pop psychology fad. Dr. Martin Seligman, the psychologist mainly responsible for this fad in academic psychology, is revealed as the same sort of hustler as other charlatans exploiting people's naivete. This book is important partly because of the practical importance in knowing that cancer cannot be alleviated by happy thoughts. More broadly, the book points out indirectly the ignorance of science and paucity of critical thinking that characterizes our society. We need all citizens to be better informed about science and the scientific method. One minor quibble: the immune system generally fights cancer rather than being helpless against it. T cells can identify cells afflicted with a virus or cancerous even though they are one's own tissue. T cells then induce self-destruction by these virulent cells.

I was disapointed by the book, it was really short....and mostly talks about cancer and her disappointment in how cancer is handled an treated....I was hoping for more scenarios, instead it drops off on scenarios when she starts talking about cancer.

"Manifestation" or positive thinking killed my sister-in-law over the years as she was under the control of her father's metaphysical New Age positivism and while being blamed by her own father for her own sudden and continuing kidney failure (3% function in each kidney), she was taken to incompetent homeopathic physicians who had no specialty in her condition. She was also told that her kidney transplant would not be rejected by her body if she just had faith and visualized it, etc. She would have no longer have a need for the medication that kept her body from rejecting (daily) the kidney her mother had donated to her, she was told by self-ordained positive "healers." Thus ended, at age 24, a struggle that started at age 14. What Ehrenreich speaks of has very real results, and not always "positive" ones. At threat are not just competent individual minds, but competent medical and psychological care. Compassion, Mercy, Common Sense, economic well-being, individualism, survival of the planet and our species are also at stake in the wake of overwhelming, willful, (and profitable, for some) positive and magical thinking. This multi-faceted book is long overdue.

This book debunks the positive thinking industry, and fans of the Secret with a dose of reality based thinking. If you have ever been force to attend a positive thinking seminar or a required magical thinking workshop through work, or been hassled by management for being a realist, this may be the book for you. Ehrenreich has put reality back on the menu where it seems to be an unpopular item. Many americans seem to be waiting for the universe to drop the pot of gold in their laps they ask for. The universe, god, a higher power, or some mystical force of say invisible energy, a vibration, or lets say elfs, are busy indeed providing everything the positive/secret seeker wants.

And they ask for a lot. Everything that comes to the believers like a cup of coffee, or a good parking space happens because they will it to do so, and in part because they ask the universe for it. Of course, if the coffee spills and they get a parking ticket in the same lucky spot, what then? Did they ask for that? Should they have a bout of personal shame and blame, and be mad at the universe for giving them a parking ticket? Is the label that says "Lucky" on their water bottle not working? Yes, the people who follow the secret put labels on their water bottle to drink what they want to attract.

If you like me, find this all a little strange, you might enjoy this book.

In books I've read on multicultural manners and information for international students, there is a truism repeated for readers: Americans act happy, but really aren't; they act friendly even when they are not your friends; they share lots of information with strangers and expect it in return. While I am grossly oversimplifying this notion, it does appear to be true. Ehrenreich asks why we are this way, if it's good for us, and offers solutions to irrational positivism. She traces the history of the "positive thinking" movement through America's early history, from Calvinism and the Protestant work ethic through to "The Secret" laws of attraction. Positivism starts as a religion, becomes a business, is fostered by science, and turns back into a religion. She taps into her various experiences (cancer, biology background, youth) to write and research this book, so it could just as easily be seen as a memoir as it could be seen as a social science investigation of the role of positive thinking in psychology, medicine, history, religion, finance, business, and politics.

Lest readers think that she is hopelessly pessimistic, she reminds us that "the alternative to positive thinking is not, however, despair." She goes on to discuss the importance of realism in all that positive thinking, emphasizing that realism is not the same as pessimism or depression. In this chapter, I wish she had researched and presented information about groups that have been doing this, namely those who make preparedness a part of their lives. Urban homesteaders, people living off the grid, and Mormons all make looking to the future and the present with a positive but realistic attitude of "plan for the worst, hope for the best," which seems to be what she wants from us.

This book is well researched and cited. Though she often jumps to overly-quick conclusions, she provides lots of well-marked citations that allow her readers to go straight to her sources and draw their own conclusions, a courtesy missing from many social science or pop psychology books.

This book is not for the faint of heart "positive thinkers" of the world. You have to go boldly into it and be willing to keep an open mind. But look out, cheerful Americans - you will not emerge unscathed from this brilliant writer's sharp view of the world. You might say that Barbara Ehrenreich is the Jonathan Swift of her day. Like Swift, she can be wickedly funny. No, she does not recommend eating babies to end the famine; she's more direct than Swift. But she does something else dangerous in these shaky times. She rips away the veneer of "positivity" that has seemed to keep many going through a choking economic drought.Oh, no! Now those people will have to face some bleak prospects without their rose-colored shades. Believe me, I did not want to read her book. I had a feeling I knew what was coming. I am definitely a "New Age'y" thinker, as she so insultingly puts it. However, she does something that I find bracing, stimulating (as she did in all her other great, great books) and, in the long run is edifying: she makes me examine myself and my times for what might be called "false-positives." Frankly, Barbara, you are right in saying that having a constant demeanor of gung-ho, can-do is exhausting. Sometimes it's OK to be what the motivational gurus call "negative" when you are contemplating the grave issues of the day, whether that "day" is yours or another country's that's just been earth-quaked. I am now fore-warned"and thus fore-armed. I WILL complain if cancer comes creeping around. I am not going to pretend it's something that will make me more feminine or "enlightened" and therefore be so "glad" I got it. And I am going to stop exhorting myself and others to make the proverbial de-tarted-up lemonade. "Just for today" I'm going to let myself droop, kvetch and wince when I feel like it, and dump my purple "complaint-free-world" bracelet in the trash. Then I'm going out for hot and sour.

Having just finished Bright-Sided (retitled as "Smile or Die" in Europe) and I have to say I found it a joy to read. It is impeccably well researched and written in a balanced, engaging way. The only point I would call referee on is Ehenreich's seeming conviction that antidepressants have been perfected and that talk therapy has been finally displaced by them.

As an instance of this, I quote her on page 149 (of my 2010 UK paperback edition) as saying, "Effective antidepressants had become available at the end of the 1980's and these could be prescribed by a primary care physician after a 10 minute diagnostic interview, so what was left for a psychologist to do?" She elsewhere acknowledges that the US currently consumes two thirds of the world supply of antidepressants (page 3). It's strange that she doesn't ask the obvious question: if antidepressants are so effective then why is the US not the happiest and most mentally balanced place on earth? Why, as antidepressants are been prescribed like sweets, are mental distress rates going through the roof in recent years? The jury is still out on the benefits and limitations of currently available antidepressants at the time of writing.

The corollary of this is the omission of an examination of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), as another reviewer has noted. CBT is a mainstream psychological treatment that is a lot older (dating to the 1970's) and much more influential (currently it is highly regarded by national and international health organizations) than positive psychology. It has a lot of empirical studies attempting to measure its effectiveness against other talk therapies and against medication for a variety of mental disorders. The cognitive aspect of it is heavily invested in thought monitoring and thought management. It seeks to identify and replace various 'negative' thoughts (which, according the theory, 'cause' negative feelings) with broadly 'positive', constructive thoughts. For instance, check out David D. Burns' "Feeling Good" to see this presented. Most crucially, it locates a person's mental problems in the person's own head, and places the burden on the patient to "work on" and "fix" their own "faulty" thinking patterns. Although CBT is more sophisticated than the more dumbed-down positivity streams, it bears some striking resemblances to this conceptual gene pool. This is right in the territory of Ehrenreich's book, but it is overlooked.

Crucially, CBT typically balances the cognitive "thought monitoring/thought management" aspect with an action orientated behavioral therapy element. This is closer to where Ehrenreich sees the right location for one's energies to be targeted, albeit she would urge community-based collective action while CBT usually urges individualist efforts. A critical review of this topic and its place within her thesis would have been fitting, but we will have to seek it elsewhere it seems.

When Barbara Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000, she was surprised to see that not all members of the breast cancer community viewed the disease with horror and dread. Many sufferers viewed mastectomy favourably as a `makeover opportunity', and the thinking of positive thoughts in the battle against the cancer was believed to increase the chances of survival. On a cancer survivor website, she was taken to task by the cheerfulness vigilantes for being `negative'. This experience was Ehrenreich's first exposure to an ideological force in American culture that she had not been aware of before - `positive thinking' - a belief system that "encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate".

The `positive thinking' industry of life coaches, book authors and motivational speakers (including celebrities like Colin Powell, Bill Cosby and Rudolph Guliani) rake in the dough. People facing major illnesses, laid-off white-collar workers, those who want to lose weight, find a mate or strike it rich are the most vulnerable segments targeted in this multi-billion dollar market.

A big purchaser of the industry's products is American big business which uses them as tools to discipline the down-sized and demoralised white collar proletariat, turning them from complainant to compliant.

Dissenters from the new upbeat thinking within the corporate hierarchy are not tolerated. Those who warned that lending on sub-prime interest rates to low-income people was reckless, that housing prices were not resistant to gravity, that the bursting of the speculative property bubble would trigger off a global credit meltdown and recession were scorned for not getting with the program.

The flip-side of positive thinking, of course, was its "harsh insistence on personal responsibility". Failure in life means you aren't positive enough. Real-world problems such as long hours, low wages, unemployment and unaffordable medical bills are but mere excuses for a failure of mind.

The `prosperity gospel' movement, for example, offers a motivational message about getting ahead through positive thinking (oh, and tithing 10% of your income to the Church and its millionaire evangelists). 17% of all American Christians consider themselves part of this new corporate Christianity and 61% agree that `God wants people to be prosperous'.

For the more secular, there is the `science' of `positive psychology', a new discipline spreading like a weed through academia. The shift away from `negative', pathology-oriented psychology with its depressives and neurotics butting up against the hard edges of reality has opened up a huckstering, profitable line of "coaching the well".

The psychometrics of positive psychology gives this new `profession' an affinity with conservative values, measuring personal contentment with the status quo as its indicator of happiness. Business executives, too, like positive thinking for its conservative cachet - a happy worker is a hard worker.

`Positive thinking' promises happiness but doesn't deliver. A meta-analysis of a hundred self-reported `happiness' studies ranked the US, the mother-ship of `positive thinking', at a lowly 23rd, surpassed by even the "supposedly dour Finns" whilst anti-depressants are the most prescribed drug in the happy land.

Ehrenreich's latest book has her usual high quota of anecdotally-rich, theoretically-robust, humour-spiced, class-conscious sympathy for the underdog and antipathy for the overlord and their latest snake-oil of `positive thinking'. Ehrenreich's message is simple. Whiners Unite - you have nothing to lose but an unjust social structure.

Not many people would even think to write this book. But the author takes the same emperor-has-no-clothes realism she applied to the American economy in Nickel and Dimed and trains it here on the insidious and pervasive view that positive thinking will save us all. From everything. I knew Barbara Ehrenriech to be a skilled journalist and independent thinker, which is what prompted me to buy the book in the first place. I didn't know that she was also the holder of a PhD in cell biology and had suffered breast cancer. In fact, the latter seemed to prompt her initial examination of the positive thinking movement. She was outraged by the recent tendency to imply that patients who do not adopt a sufficiently positive attitude will worsen their prognosis, adding guilt to the burden of their diagnosis. Her scientific background allows her to credibly review the medical literature and debunk this view. This alone would have made for a ground-breaking and useful book, but she then goes on to peek behind the Wizard of Oz's positivity curtain in the realms of populist religion and corporate America, finding unsettling commonalities between the two. My only quibble is that she seems to be a little rough on Martin Seligman, one of the most prominent advancers of the positive psychology movement. He may have been prickly in his interview with her, but he does seem to mean well and be intellectually honest in admitting the limitations of his approach. Whether you agree with her conclusions or not, the questions she explores are eye-opening and ultimately hold out hope for a better society based on empathy, not wishful thinking.

Kudos to Barbara Ehrenreich for writing this expose on the silly nonsense that passes for positive thinking in our culture. If you've been forced to sit through a motivational speaker at work, then you'll enjoy reading Barbara's explanation of the root causes and genesis of the cult of positive thinking in our culture.

As for motivational speakers, it's not just the audience who can feel frustrated. I recently stepped away from a speaking business (where I was earning 5 figures for a single speech). In the past five years or so, I worked with many, many teams who wanted me to deliver a sloppy, shoddy message to their people based on this nonsensical positive thinking. I got into the speaking business thinking that audiences wanted to hear new ideas and thoughts. Many organizers only want sheer entertainment value.

I couldn't say the lies, so I have drastically cut back on the number of speeches I give each year.

Barbara Ehrenreich's book helped me to better understand the cultural shifts that have been going on.

Highly recommended.

Note: I initially purchased this Kindle book, then (sadly) spent money on the Audible version, hence the specific wording I used in the review.

First, because of all the support this book is getting from people who identify themselves as realists, I must say that I am rational to a fault and not a fan of the positive thinking approach so lauded by our society. In fact, I hate it. I flat out dislike approaches that favor "seeing abundance in the world" and the "I can do it because I believe I can do it." mentality. I don't find them useful, practical, or beneficial except for temporarily deluding yourself out of a rut. And everyone who liked this book is entitled to their thoughts on it, but I couldn't disagree more. I felt I had to contribute a dissenting opinion.

The author starts this book promisingly, with a number of examples of dangerous positive thinking, instances where just hoping something bad won't happen kept us from responding to danger signs that should have been taken seriously (such as 9/11 or the recent economic collapse). I completely understood her argument and hoped these were the kinds of issues she would elaborate upon for the rest of the book.

I admit that I couldn't force myself past the first section, where she discusses her experiences with breast cancer. It was so bad that I had to turn it off, so maybe I missed out on some actual wisdom later on. But about breast cancer, I get that it's a hard situation that you're not even sure you will survive. I lost my spouse several years ago at a young age (31), and I have some understanding of what the healing process from catastrophe might look like, though it's different for everyone. What I take serious issue with is that the ENTIRETY of what she had to say about it was a series of attempts to shame people who had supportive roles for her during this time. Through the entire chapter, she sounds like the incredibly toxic friend that you eventually just cut out of your life because you have run out of energy to expend on her. This is not commentary on unfounded and harmful positive thinking. It's an indictment against anyone who might dare to have ANY positive thoughts on the subject. She endlessly rails against people for (only perceived) motivations that are truly the worst possible, never giving anyone credit for any good intentions. Let me lay some of this out for you.

1) She takes issue with the doctor who told her she had cancer because he said "there is cancer" instead of saying "you have cancer." She says the wording of that sentence failed to recognize that she was a human being, and cut her out of the equation completely. Seriously? I'm a doctor, and guess what. Doctors are human beings who have different ways of saying things. Maybe the guy didn't have the greatest words to use, but could she take a minute to think maybe she's reading a little too much into his intended meaning?

2) She then complains about the stuffed bears that are used as tokens of support by the Susan G. Komen foundation, because she says they are representative of the infantalizing of women. Huh. Reaching a bit, Barbara? She goes on for a little while about this.

3) She then complains some more, because we don't have enough complainers in our lives, apparently. Next complaint is about women on the online support groups. She claims that some women who developed metastatic cancer were reportedly kicked off the groups because they had no hope of recovery. There is absolutely no evidence of this presented in any way. No stories from those women who were kicked off, no other story from whoever kicked them off, nothing at all. I find it very difficult to believe that a woman with cancer would get kicked off because her cancer metastasized. I have, however, met people who have toxic personalities who get eliminated from people's lives as a result, who then pretty much blame everybody else for their resulting solitude.

4) She tells of how she went onto an online support group and attempted to share her pain by discussing her side effects from chemo and how she has trouble with "those sappy pink ribbons." She then describes how women responded by telling her that she needed to work on having a better attitude, which rankled her. Did she ever consider that her judgemental and insulting comment about something that might be providing comfort to other women in the same situation might have been inappropriate, not to mention rude and cruel? What's the point of shaming women who find the pink ribbons to be helpful? I thought the replies of those other women were amazingly supportive in response.

5) She complains some more (surprise!) about women who claim that their lives have been improved by their experience with breast cancer. Now, what I find interesting is that these women were people who felt that the experience taught them about valuing their lives, experiences, etc, which basically means that it allowed them to see past the mundane events and feelings that drag us down otherwise. That's NOT positive thinking for the sake of positive thinking. That's seeing reality, but apparently these women have committed the heinous crime of seeing a reality that is hopeful, instead of being terribly depressed about it. What's wrong with that?

And I ask, how are ANY of these ladies with breast cancer "undermining America"? She never says. These are just people who are doing the best they can do with the cards they were dealt. If it doesn't work for you, just find something else that will. Why crap all over them? I haven't met anyone who is trying to develop breast cancer because some other woman said it "improved" her life, have you?

That was just one chapter, folks. That's where I had to hit the pause button and cut this toxic person out of my own life. I totally understand that the rest of the book might have been better, but honestly, by this point I didn't want to give this author any more of my valuable time. She is a troll, I'm not going to keep listening just to see if she has a tiny bit of wisdom buried somewhere in the sea of her personal misery.

Hilariously, insightfully, and at times painfully contrarian, this book was a joy to read and made me feel less alone in my beliefs about the cost of a culture that requires relentless positive thinking.

Ehrenreich's book is a brilliant criticism of a culture grounded in positive-thinking at the disservice of necessary social action. The most interesting part of the book was when she discussed her personal experience with cancer and the messages and support groups that promote positive thinking as the antidote. The second most interesting thing was when she discusses the history of Calvinism and how that ironically has served as the basis for the extremely optimistic and individualistic culture we have today. Fascinating!

This is certainly an interesting topic, and one that I’m sure you could find data to support the negative effects of an eternally optimistic attitude... this book has none of that. It’s mostly full of anecdotes where the author encountered positive people who annoy her. The book is neither informative nor entertaining, so I really don’t understand the point.

Happiness. Who wouldn't want that? Philosophers and spiritual leaders have examined happiness and prescribed habits of thought and behavior to achieve it - from Aristotle, who identified it with the practice of virtue, to the Buddha, who advocated the elimination of suffering by eliminating desire. In the middle of the 19th century there arose a movement in this country, in reaction to the suppressive Calvinist doctrine that hard work and a joyless life make for a saved soul. The movement originated with Phineas Quimby, who sought to heal people from their doldrums through the application of New Thought, using the powers of the mind to relieve the depression and despondency that seemed to spread among the American middle-class. This initial movement that taught that man could rise above his circumstances through the use of the mind evolved into what was labeled positive thinking in the middle of the 20th century.

So what could be so bad about positive thinking, which seems, on the face of it, inherently good? Accordingly to Barbara Ehrenreich, many things, both in what positive thinking tends to neglect and in the way it can be insidiously applied. As for the first, Ehrenreich claims, and I think accurately, that positive thinking tends to relegate reality to the background and, as such, distorts reality and the real possibilities for identifying the causes of problems and coming up with rational and practicable solutions. On a mundane level, if you have a throat infection, positive thinking is unlikely to make it go away. It may make you feel psychologically good on some level, but amoxicillin will probably make you feel both physically and mentally better faster than positive thinking will. In more serious circumstances, like cancer for example, positive thinking may give nothing but a false sense of hope, or even make you feel responsible for your own condition. As someone who had breast cancer, Ehrenreich provides an intimate account of how the positive thinking mindset made her feel alone and unable to share appropriately her feelings of anger and dismay. And this is one of her major insights about positive thinking: that it leads to the same suppression and self-monitoring of feelings and thought that it meant to overcome as a deviant from Calvinist moralism. This leads also to the second affront against positive thinking, where its insidious application leads to the alienation of those who dare to think negative thoughts if positive thinking is the expected and sometimes required mindset, as with corporations who hire motivational speakers to boost morale (and sales).

Overall I think that Ehrenreich rightly targets positive thinking nonsense, like the law of attraction, and distorted applications, like Joel Osteen's prosperity gospel (I am sorry, but Jesus did not die so that I could get a better parking spot, or a promotion at work). I am not sure whether her criticism of positive psychology is fully justified. I think that positive psychology is a sincere effort to focus the mental health profession on the positive side of mental health, to identify factors that could help people feel better in general. I think this is analogous to the effort in medicine to focus on preventive medicine and healthier habits, and not just on disease. If in fact randomized test show that the positive psychology movement is barking up the wrong tree, then it can't be faulted for following what appeared as a promising path. Perhaps, then, we all need to return to Aristotle and others to seek our happiness.

Barbara Ehrenrich has a point, two good points actually. Her experience with breast cancer exposed her to the world of positive thinking wellness, where patients blame themselves for treatments not working because they had negative thoughts. This could have been a great article in a popular magazine. Her further exploration into the world of positive thinking led her (I think) to the conclusion that the current economic meltdown can be blamed on a cult of positive thinking, where the "think and grow rich" credo rules and pessimists and skeptics are excluded from decision-making circles. This second thesis would have been a great New Yorker article. As it stands, Bright-Sided is rambling and poorly organized. It was a push for me to finish even though it's not a long book. There are some shocking logical leaps, and a rather relentless insistence on the corporation's oppression of the little guy. As an entrepreneur, I can attest that it takes a leap of faith to take a company from a small, respectable enterprise to the next level. You must risk failure (and failure happens to many individuals and companies who try) in order to have a big success. Ehrenreich's book doesn't do a good job striking a balance between say, the benefits of cognitive behavioral therapy, where positive self-talk can change a depressed person's outlook, to the cultish "law of attraction" where material success at the expense of others comes to those who most strongly wish for it.

I live in a part of Northern California populated by New Agers/Positive Thinkers--self-righteous--whose sole purpose in life it seems is to run around telling the rest of us how to talk. It is TERRIBLE. (Uh oh, I'm being "negative"). It is oppressive. We cannot have real conversations here. For example, I TRIED to participate in a poverty work group only to watch it degenerate when someone who had read George Lakoff's book started telling the rest of us how to talk down to what specific words we could use. It was unbelievable. The result, of course, was a shouting match...and then it went to sht from there. (Mr. Lakoff, you have done far more damage to democracy that you even know).

The positive thinking stupidly is rooted in narcissism which is the epitome of the entire Baby Boomer generation.
They also get highest scores for being patronizing and condescending and forget admitting they do anything wrong because, well, they just never do, but gosh, they are ready and able to point out YOUR flaws (and you should be grateful).

The positive thinkers and New Agers also seem to have a problem distinguishing intellectual conversation from being "negative"--they think it is the same thing because I truly think, they are stupid and insecure people who have to feel like they are superior and in control all the time. Their egos are fragile.

I say we ship them all off (and all of George Lakoff's books) to an island and see how this goes. In the meantime, the rest of us can get on with solving the problems in our country and having real conversations about how to do this.

"Bright Sided" is a short, intense, sometimes sarcastic, but enlightening read. Ehrenreich takes well-deserved aim at the entire edifice of the "positive thinking"-industrial complex in America, in all its forms (religious, economic, scientific, and so forth), as well as providing a nice background on how positive thinking developed in America and its historic antecedents.

The most personal chapter is her best, when she talks about her own breast cancer diagnosis, and the massive amount of pink artificial cheerfulness that was thrust upon her. Here we get a true sense of both the author's anger, as well as her wit and scientific training. This chapter could be a short book all by itself.

The only negatives are that each chapter sometimes reads like an independent essay, without much narrative to tie them together, and there seems to be a certain repetition of themes from her earlier books, especially the economic stuff. However, these are minor complaints - If you enjoy iconoclastic, sarcastic, but funny essays, and you are not afraid of a bit of, well, realistic thinking, I can "positively" recommend this book.

Barbara Ehrenreich's self-appointed career is to force the populace to face reality. This is her best work so far in that task. Ehrenreich demonstrates the terrible cost to people when the results of government/economic policies that create miserable lives are camouflaged by today's positive thinking movement.

I agreed with Ehrenreich's assessment of positive thinking in our culture - I've also been struck by the Pollyannaish attitudes that seems to pervade society. But much of this book read as though Ehrenreich simply pointing at positive thinkers and saying "Look at them" without a lot of follow up research. As a skeptic (which Ehrenreich seems to encourage), I would have liked to see more empirical research to back her points. That said, I enjoyed the book, and it made me think.

The most unsettling point raised by the author is that deep level confusions of "mind" and the mind's direct impact on reality MAY have been a serius contributory factor in the implosion of the credit markets and the destruction of the real estate market. According to Ehrenreich, positive thinking mushroomed into a worldview that was first flirted with by our corporate elite, then institutionalized as policy, then practically hallucinated into a neo-Schopenhauerian opera of "the world as will and idea". Not so good, we've been down this path before, and the results were catastrophic.

The real danger came when corporate America seems to have drunk its' own Kool-Aid after poring it down the throats of a hapless workforce that was cajoled into accepting that downsizing and loss of benefits were, somehow, a "transformative", character building experience. The Doctrine of Joy first seemed to function as an emotional palliative, then morphed into harder stuff as megalomania grew unchecked.

The final stage of this Decline and Fall process resulted when "optimism" became an absolute standard for employment, thus anyone who expressed rational discomfort with a corporations high risk adventurism was quickly shown the door. Obviously, an awful lot of experience and accumulated wisdom was herded out the door ahead of a stampeded of comformity and smiling intolerance.

The Upshot being that when the system began to teeter, there wasn't anyone left to confront reality, and the edifice began to sway without internal stabilizing structures, not unlike the images of controlled demolition,
where the explosive charges were placed with the best of intentions... they just happened to detonate before the employees could leave the building.

I have always enjoyed Barbara Ehrenreich's writing and would recommend "Bright-Sided" to her fans, but those not familiar with her may want to choose another of her titles, especially "Nickel and Dimed." The material in this book may have been stretched a bit to reach book length and might have been more suitable for a "New Yorker" style magazine article.

Recommended with reservations.

Barbara Ehrenreich makes the bold claim that positive thinking, in its many varieties, is responsible for most everything that ails America. She never comes out directly and says this, but her message is clear.

She describes the essential similarities involved in faith healing, Christian Science, populist economic positive thinking, Horatio Alger stories, cancer patient groups, prosperity churches, motivational speakers, politicians, positive psychology, salesmen, speculators, senior executives and self-help authors. They all succumb to an irrational belief that positive thinking can control the physical universe for the benefit of the thinker.

This results in the exploitation of the believers by their manipulators. Religious believers give their money, invest their time and miss the potential benefits of a more realistic and impactful faith. Workers are controlled by corporations to work harder, accept risks and ignore the disappearance of loyalty. Voters and contributors support politicians who do not represent their true interests. Investors are swindled by confidence men. Greater scope is provided for meta-confidence schemes, aka bubbles. Senior executives drink the Kool-aid and believe that positive thinking will protect them from the marketplace. Cancer patients are distracted from the real end of life choices they should be making.

Ehrenreich has taken on a large and important topic. She has connected the dots between activities that appeared to be independent. She has documented the growth of positive thinking and its impact. She has highlighted the exaggerated claims, outlined the economic interests involved and debunked some of the scientific claims. She has outlined some of the potential negative impacts of the uncritical embrace of positive thinking by many Americans.

However, this is a disappointing book. Her claims are often unsupported. Her evidence is one-sided. The scope of the impact is not measured except through anecdotes. Cause and effect logic is replaced with guilt by association. The real benefits of positive thinking (health, cognitive therapy, self-confidence, self-awareness, responsibility, better relationships, recovery) are dismissed out of hand. Irrelevant political claims are sprinkled throughout the book. The author has no understanding of how businesses, markets and the economy actually work. She provides no alternative worldview other than a passing reference to the benefits of critical, rational thinking or deeper, transformative religion.

The whole book is written in the context of a grand conspiracy of corporations, executives, ministers and charlatans to use the magic of positive thinking to hex the people. This leap of faith is even more unlikely than the leap from thought to controlling god, the future, physical activities or the beliefs of other people.

In the end, I think that the author was rightfully offended by the cult of positivity associated with cancer survivor/patient groups. She noted that this excessive positivity is widespread and that it is associated with any number of social results which she resents. It provides a tool that can help the powerful to manipulate others. It distracts individuals from taking a critical, self-interested, societal view of social conditions. Instead of suggesting practical ways to limit those abuses, she has created a black and white world of good and evil, just as out of touch with reality as the positive worlds which she criticizes.

Positive thinking, far from being a support for happy and healthy life, is a delusional way of thinking. Journalist and biology Ph.D. Barbara Ehrenreich first came to this conclusion while fighting the deluge of joy and positivity among her fellow breast cancer patients. Her book examines the history of positive thinking as a doctrine of ever-similing America and its current manifestations in the corporate world, megachurches, positive psychology, and the 2008 financial meltdown.

The good parts of her book: Ehrenreich's long career as a journalist and past career as a scientist came together in this book. She is best known for her experience living poverty in Nickled and Dimed, and she resurrects that when writing about how the motivational speaker market indirectly shames the poor and unemployed for simply not trying hard enough. Her background as a scientist strengthens her critique of positive psychology as a science and a pseudoscience.

I too feel some of her pain. I disdain self-help books and self-proclaimed gurus . So much of it seems like narcissism and magical thinking. Take The Secret, which flew off the shelves yet was not worth the paper it was printed on. It seems like an easy target for ridicule, but if so, why did millions of Americans buy this book? Same goes for the bestsellers of plastic-smiled Joel Osteen. Ehrenreich does not mention this, but I suspect much of the mantra of positive thinking comes from a desire to avoid confronting the suffering of oneself or others. If a friend is feeling down, don't listen to their problems: just tell them to cheer up! Positive thinking can be quite hardass.

Despite this points, Ehrenreich's book fails to deliver. It was hard to draw the line between her anger and lucid logic. Joel Osteen is an easy target, but her attacks on Martin Seligman and positive psychology seemed too ad hominem and not well-balanced. My mom pointed out to me that if she were to get breast cancer, she would not want to wallow in negativity and anger as Ehrenreich seems to want to do. She (the author) has fallen into the trap of overstating her good points, so much that they become bad points.

This is too bad. Perhaps Ehrenreich should have written a book about "delusional thinking" rather than "positive thinking." Delusions of grandeur and perfection are the shadow, the evil twin, of positive thinking. These delusions were certainly one of the fuels of the 2008 meltdown. These delusions turn into the kind of positive thinking dogma and ideology - shun the nonbeliever! - that so frustrates this author. But these are not positive thinking per se. Ehrenreich's book would have been stronger had she made this point.