Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

“The real conservatism of positive psychology lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power.” Barbara Ehrenreich

I’ll admit I am a bit of a crank, a ‘walking nimbus cloud’ if you will and would certainly describe myself as pessimistic about the future of the world, though not necessarily about my own future. This apparently is a sin in a country beaming, oh, just radiating with pop positive thinking that permeates every aspect of our lives. Talk show hosts, “life coaches,”, commercials, psychotherapists, friends and family (think of all those smiley faces and exclamation marks), employers and colleagues all encourage us to plaster a smile on our faces and go about our merry day.

So you can imagine my delight when I came across Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest publication Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. I have followed her since my undergraduate days and have read almost all of her books. She is a “god-sent” (we need to come up with a better word for atheists) for the independent and critical minded. Although I’ve found meaning in all of her books, this one probably resonated the most with me.

The book is on the tyranny of positive-thinking in America. We’re constantly told to look on the bright side of things, to see the glass as half full (even if lies shattered on the floor), to put a smiley face on, to radiate positivity…but as she contends this super insistence on the almighty smiley face “is a great way to brush of poverty, disease, and unemployment, to rationalize an order where all the rewards go to those on top. The people who are sick or jobless – why, they just aren’t thinking positively. They have no one to blame but themselves.” Barbara is finally sounding the alarm bells on this predominant mode of thinking in our culture. Never mind that wages have stagnated in the last couple of decades, that environmental degradation has reached an all time high, that jobs are fleeting at a faster rate than you can say ‘where is my cheese?’, that unions have been all but destroyed…no, never mind all of that..you just need to send out positive energy into the universe, and before you know it you too can have success, wealth and health.

I have always found the pervasiveness of positive thinking in America to be crippling, and a great way to avoid working for social change at a larger level. Why bother working for causes that could lead to the leveling of inequalities when you can work on yourself, right? It seems highly impractical and time-consuming to work on changes at a larger societal, political, cultural level, but what we fail to realize is that in the long term we pay a very high price on not being realistic about the root causes of our troubles, whatever those troubles may be.

We can't expect to improve our situation without "addressing the actual circumstance we find ourselves in. Positive thinking seeks to convince us that such external factors are incidental compared with one's internal state or attitude or mood."