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Uploaded: Friday, October 30, 2009, 11:32 AM
Overheard: Think less positively
Ehrenreich finds a dark side to always looking on the bright side
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by Sam Chapman
One of the books on a living room table in the home where I grew up was Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking. First published in 1952 and still in print today with millions of copies sold, it may be the modern era's best known prototype for generations of self-improvement books and celebrities to come. Peale parlayed his combination of religion and pop psychology into weekly columns, the Guideposts publication, a television show and many more books.
Now, along comes Barbara Ehrenreich with her latest book: Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Ehrenreich spoke Friday evening at San Rafael's Dominican University; she began by saying she doesn't want her message to sound twisted and mean. "I'm not against having a nice day or saying hello to strangers or partying." What she is saying is that she has identified an ideology in our society that says you should be positive, upbeat and cheerful, and if you're not, you need to work on it. This ideology has become enforced dogma in some places, she observes, mentioning examples in healthcare, government, religion and the workplace.
Ehrenreich talks about her experience with breast cancer and how there was an insistence on mandatory optimism to the extent of embracing the disease as a gift. She already had cancer, and now she had the additional burden of being told that if she didn't recover it would be her fault for not having a positive attitude, which boosts your immune system and helps you get better.
The author, who has a Ph.D. in cellular biology, looked at the science. She concluded that there is no evidence that your immune system fights cancer, that a positive attitude boosts your immune system or that positive people have a greater survival rate.
Ehrenreich asserts that increasingly employers don't look for skills so much as a positive attitude. Countrywide Mortgage, according to Ehrenreich, has been described as being like a cult. "You couldn't say a negative thing." Lehman Brothers fired a guy who dared point out that its business model was built on a financial "bubble."
She says you can count on one hand the number of economists who urged caution during our recent boom, and the "mortgage magic" that passed as a normal business practice can be traced to high levels of delusion at the top of corporate culture. "If you voiced negative sentiments during the past decade, you were out," according to Ehrenreich.
In her research for the book she traced what she believes is the origin for some of what we see today as a reaction to 19th-century Calvinism--religious belief based on fear, including the prospect of spending eternity burning in hell. Mary Baker Eddy (founder of Christian Science) later adopted a message of "God doesn't hate us" and tried to work on healing people.
Ehrenreich sees the mega-churches of today as based on positive thinking and attracting dollars. God is there to meet your every need, kind of like a personal assistant. She visited Joel Osteen's church in Houston, which seats thousands and has a television audience of 7 million. She didn't see any crosses (that crucifixion stuff is too negative). Osteen has described himself as a life coach who preaches positive thinking and a "prosperity gospel" in which God provides health, wealth and happiness.
In the political realm she points out that George W. Bush was a cheerleader in college and says she heard Condoleezza Rice say she had some doubts about Iraq but didn't feel she could raise them in front of the president because they weren't positive.
Ehrenreich's alternative is not negative thinking; it's realism. We need to try to understand what's going on. Social movements are driven by something that's not positive thinking. That something is determination and hard work. She mentioned the signers of the Declaration of Independence as not basing their revolution on positive thinking but on a realistic view that "this is hard and we are going to do it or die trying."
I came away thinking that Ehrenreich has performed a public service in labeling positive thinking as an ideology and in exposing the related motivational industry in its various forms. However, for me, the skill of reframing a negative situation and taking positive lessons from it or seeing a different path to a possible positive outcome seems important as well. Her biggest contribution may be not in causing people to eliminate positive thinking but to engage in examining more critically its basis and in exposing instances where it's imposed as enforced dogma.
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Posted by Audrey McNamara, a resident of the San Rafael neighborhood, on Oct 30, 2009 at 1:32 pm Barbara Ehrenreich is a bitter woman. Isn't SHE trying to gain
her fortune by trashing those who are trying in their way for hope.
I don't condone massive 'evangalist' churchs or organizations, but if it 'works'for them why not? We are an open, free society. Maybe the money 'gurus' need to look at their'worship' of money. All most people want is happiness and peace and love. We have such a complex
society, we need all we can do to live in and master it.
Ehrenreich looks no different to me than those who make money supporting 'positive' psychology, than those who fault it for money..
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Posted by Anon, a resident of another community, on Oct 30, 2009 at 5:41 pm What I got from reading the article is that Barbara Ehrenreich is promoting critical thinking, an attribute which seems to be scarce among some segments of the public. While the banks certainly played a key role in the economic collapse, there were a lot of people only too willing to hop on board the designer mortgage train -- buying property out of their reach -- because they truly believed their wealth was supposed to come to them easily. They weren't thinking critically, they weren't willing to work hard and save money to get a mortgage they could afford, they weren't realistic -- they were delusional.
I'm a Californian visiting Washington, D.C. right now, and I am so impressed with what our forefathers did in putting together this country. Freedom - or our representative democracy - requires constant vigilance and digging into what's really going on. While most people want happiness, peace & love, those goals are not attainable without a lot of hard work, determination, critical thinking and a good understanding of reality.
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Posted by Leo, a resident of the San Rafael neighborhood, on Oct 31, 2009 at 7:04 pm Reminds me of a conversation I had with my sister, who told me she wished she had listened to me when I told her not to buy a house a couple years ago. Now it's lost more than half its value and she's thinking of defaulting and getting a new one at a low price. I told her I wouldn't be anxious to buy a house right now, they might fall further. She got angry and said it's bad attitudes like that that hurt the economy.
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Posted by Gina, a resident of the San Anselmo neighborhood, on Nov 1, 2009 at 8:46 am
She's kind of a bitter, know-it-all, whose critical thinking isn't that critical.
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Posted by Rae, a resident of the Novato neighborhood, on Nov 1, 2009 at 4:36 pm I attended the talk. It was good, but I was surprised that she didn't name the research for her book "Bait and Switch" as being part of the inspiration for the new one. "Bait and Switch" was largely about making it in today's white collar job market ("today" beinga approx 2005, when the book was published). She posed as a job seeker, and kept running into all of these super peppy career coaches and networking seminar operators and improve-your-resume counselors. Almost nobody was telling the truth about the job market -- she couldn't land a job, and neither could the people she kept meeting at the networking events -- but lots of salesman were out there selling optimism and positive attitudes. You know, it's YOUR fault if you don't get a job. Smile!
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Posted by anon, a resident of the Mill Valley neighborhood, on Nov 2, 2009 at 2:36 pm
I think that what she's really trying to suggest is that we simply think for ourselves and not get taken in with what we hear in the news, or the mainstream media.
I think it's important to stay optimistic. But it's also important to think for ourselves and not be suckered into believing everything Obama and Pelosi say because Obama and Pelosi don't even believe what they tell us.
Of course most of Marin will argue with me. That's because Marin is a liberal hotbed. I've noticed that a lot of people here feel they are "owed" a certain degree of riches in their lives even if they don't work for them or deserve them in the first place.
The midwestern work ethic is lost on people out here. Now, if someone is lucky enough to be a trust fund baby, then more power to them. But even trust fund babies run out of trust over time.
It's a tricky situation because the best things in life really are free, but most of us out here are more satisfied with the best things in life that cost money. And in order to obtain the best things in life that do cost money, you have to learn to wise up. And in order to wise up, we have to learn to be less naive. In order to be less naive, we have to learn to think more practically. I think that's all Barbara Ehrenreich was saying.
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Posted by Richard Stark, a resident of the Corte Madera neighborhood, on Nov 3, 2009 at 7:58 am I was there for the b. Ehrenreich talk, and I handed her the following quotation from Raymond Lotta. She nodded in agreement.
I don't think she's "'bitter", but rather a scientist who wants people to embrace material reality as it unfolds = monopoly capitalism/imperialism now.
Please go to REVCOM.US TO SEE THE SCHEDULE FOR THE THREE-DAY SYMPOSIUM ON THE GREAT PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION IN CHINA AT UC BERK 11/6-8/09. THE AUTHOR OF THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT WILL BE SPEAKING.
The fundamental contradiction of capitalist society is between socialized production and private appropriation. The means of production are produced by socialized labor and can only be made use of by socialized labor. But capitalism, owing to the monopolization of wealth and of the means of producing wealth by the capitalist class which controls labor power, stands in the way of the direct social organization of production -- and of distribution, which depends on production -- of the material requirements of life...(pg. 34). America in Decline, Raymond Lotta with Frank Shannon, Banner Press, Chicago, 1984.
The greater the development of socialized production, the more it undermines the basis of capitalism's existence and brings into sharper and sharper antagonism the basic contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation. In its historical development, this contradiction has shaped the entire capitalst epoch -- and this is so in an intensified and more all-encompassing way in the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolution.
Capitalism has laid the foundations for the world as a whole to advance to an entirely new stage of human history, to overcome the scarcity which is the ultimate source of antagonistic social conflict. But is has done so through exploitation, plunder, and by greatly distorting distribution and rational allocation of the world's resources. Only when worldwide proletarian revolution puts an end to all the social relations of capital will the era of communism begin. It is this revolution that strikes at and rips up the roots of exploitation, oppression, and social inequality; only with the achievement of communism can society rationally confront and transform nature -- and itself. ( ibid. pg 35.)
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Posted by MarinResident, a resident of the Mill Valley neighborhood, on Nov 3, 2009 at 8:44 pm "I think it's important to stay optimistic. But it's also important to think for ourselves and not be suckered into believing everything Obama and Pelosi say because Obama and Pelosi don't even believe what they tell us."
And how is it that you have direct knowledge that "Obama and Pelosi don't even believe what they tell us."
Inquiring minds are waiting to hear!
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Posted by Sam Chapman, a resident of the San Rafael neighborhood, on Nov 16, 2009 at 9:23 am An article in Circulation, a journal affiliated with the American Heart Association, recently published the results of a study by a number of university researchers that produces a conclusion different from Ehrenreich's.
In a study of almost 100,000 women, researchers studied the effects of optimistic women (those with positive future expectations) and women with cynical, hostile attitudes toward others and their effect on incidents of coronary heart disease and mortality. They found that optimistic women were less likely to develop heart disease and more likely to live longer.
Here's a link to the abstract of the article:
Web Link
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