Barbara Ehrenreich, "Bright-Sided"

[sub_divided]

Subtitle: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. I'm gonna dump some text here so I can have a "review" to link to from Goodreads (where I'm about three months behind). Text is mostly taken from this comment I left petronia way back in April. ANYWAY:

Bright-Sided: How Relentless Optimism has Undermined America

Not the pessimist's manifesto you might suppose. The author is not a gloomy or depressed person, she just doesn't think it's right that people are being told to solve their problems with positive thinking at the same time as their pay and benefits are decreasing, or that they're avoiding all news at the same time as government corruption is becoming an increasingly greater problem. The book is more about the woo-woo mysticism of "The Secret," or management theories that elevate cheeriness over level-headed thinking, than it is about us not being realistic enough about our upcoming inevitable doom.

Most "change your thinking!" stuff is aimed at women, and the author of Bright-Sided claims she was first exposed to the positive thinking movement when, as a post-menopausal woman, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The fact that this was Ehrenreich's first major exposure made me think that she must have been, not only very hardworking and organized in her previous life, but also very lucky, because you run into this movement wherever there is suffering and powerlessness.

It also reminded me of when I was working the used bookstore and all the self-help books for men were about changing your external circumstances, while all the self-help books for women were about changing your attitude. I think this has actually started to change (all our books were at least 5 years out of date) and that more self-help books for men are talking about attitude these days. But perhaps it also explains the special appeal of the positive thinking movement: by changing your attitude, you ALSO change your external circumstances! The message therefore appeals to both men and women.

Barbara Ehrenreich's historical account of how this movement came about is the real meat of the book. She has it as a 19th century "cure" for Calvinism, which was a religion that required constant internal monitoring for sinful or indulgent thoughts, with the expectation that you'd probably go to hell anyway. According to Ehrenreich, the only way out of this "religiously imposed depression" and morbid self-examination was hard work, but industrialization did away with a lot of the work that women used to do, like canning and making soap. So they became professional invalids instead, just to have something to do. In this view, positive thinking replaced the idea of a hostile universe with the idea of a welcoming universe where God wants you to prosper, but kept the idea of endless self-monitoring for the wrong kinds of thoughts (in this case negative thoughts).

I personally wonder whether she might be overstating the Calvinist angle, having had a pretty severe Calvinist upbringing herself (as described in the book). But that's is only an idle speculation, because Ehrenreich's analysis is quite convincing. It's what makes this "trend" book worth reading, I think: anyone can write an opinion piece about (what they perceive to be) a current trend, but it takes discipline and insight to actually say something about where that trend comes from and what it means historically.

About how these techniques have seeped into business (a process also traced out by Ehrenreich): this guy would probably say that only clueless people in organization subscribe to these philosophies, because unambitious losers have already accepted their place in the hierarchy, and the sociopaths who run everything are busy training and deploying the real skills - which are all "soft" people skills - necessary for them to succeed. But it's certainly tempting to think that the reason I didn't fit into a large bureaucratic organization is because I wasn't cheery enough, XD.

All in all a very good book, recommended!