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

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Book Overview

A sharp-witted knockdown of America's love affair with positive thinking and an urgent call for a new commitment to realism Americans are a "positive" people--cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: this is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive, we are told, is the key to success and prosperity. In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude. Evangelical mega-churches preach the good news that you only have to want something to get it, because God wants to "prosper" you. The medical profession prescribes positive thinking for its presumed health benefits. Academia has made room for new departments of "positive psychology" and the "science of happiness." Nowhere, though, has bright-siding taken firmer root than within the business community, where, as Ehrenreich shows, the refusal even to consider negative outcomes--like mortgage defaults--contributed directly to the current economic crisis. With the mythbusting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of America's penchant for positive thinking: On a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out "negative" thoughts. On a national level, it's brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best--poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science, and ending with a call for existential clarity and courage.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805087494
• ISBN13: 9780805087499
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Length: 235 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.7" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

A needed book

A lot of folks either are so invested in their own personal universe where they get all the ice cream and cake they want or they heard what the book was about, read the dust-jacket and decided they knew what was in the book. This is an important book, along the same lines and for much the same reasons as Susan Jacoby's "The Age of American Unreason", Charles Pierce's "Idiot America" or Wendy Kaminer's "Sleeping with Extra-terrestials". What I found so wonderful about the book is the way she calls out the purveyor's of various misunderstood bastardizations of quantum theory for missing the whole point and for the hypocritical way they use and discard science as it is rhetorically convenient. What's more, she is spot on that this is a worldview that, no matter how fuzzy, soft, kind and gentle it tries to make itself out to be is ultimately selfish, harsh and, dare I say, callous. I say this as someone who was a practitioner, in the 80's and very early 90's, of just this kind of thinking. I read Shakti Gawain and Starhawk. I clutched my crystals and thought to 'attract to myself' all the things that I thought I deserved or wanted. What made the difference, however, was not wishing the Universe to deliver but going out and *doing* something about my life. Ultimately, that deep encounter with reality made me a more compassionate person. What's more, although my introduction to QM was through New Age books, the more I read, the more intrigued I became and then when I actually started to read some *actual* material written by people who *actually* spent their adult lifetimes studying QM I found a theory that was, in reality, far more elegant and beautiful than the people who invoke it to give their fantasies a patina of scientific legitimacy. If you have practiced 'The Secret' and wondered why, for instance, you still need your glasses, or have been bothered by the question, that none of these New Age gurus or boosters ever care to entertain, about what possible thing a little girl whose parents never came home from their jobs at the World Trade Center did to 'attract' being an orphan to herself, read this book. Even if you are deeply enmeshed in this philosophy--maybe, perhaps, particularly if you are enmeshed in it--read this book. Her exposition on people avoiding the news was particularly sobering because I know a lot of folks who avoid the news and yet what little they know of it they feel qualified to comment upon--they hated George Bush but couldn't really tell you the first thing about what was wrong with his policies. Opposed both the war in Iraq and Afghanistan for no adequately explored reason. Not a shiny, happy book but a very necessary book.

Inspiring, clear, and delightful

The first chapter alone covered the cost, coming to a powerfully concise final paragraph that kept me up later than I anticipated = ) Having many great experiences with various new-age, tantric, meditative, yogic, self-developmental, transformational, millionaire-minded social networks, and enjoyed The Secret; I also loved this book. Real problems begin to compound when positive thinking for an individual really equates to "ignoring everything that's on the table that isn't pleasant". The author doesn't blast all positive thinking, rather she comes to you as a teacher refining your journey of positivity through life. And she speaks from experience, so receives 5 stars from me It's true that individuals can become swept up into unhealthy behavior of limiting their vision, imagination, and access to truth. Positive thinking that nurtures denial and unpreparedness is a mental illness in my opinion, similar to depression, and cynicism, yet with a brighter polish. Unfortunately it's not as easy to make the distinction between healthy positive thinking that acknowledges all possibilities and chooses optimism between the bad kind of pseudo positive thinking. Over time I've seen a few bright people suffer mental breakdowns from misunderstanding positivity. And less drastic some have simply suffered a loss of depth, and intelligence. The author does a fairly good job reminding the reader that being positive isn't the problem. The problem is ignoring reality, denying considerations, because one believes that positivity cannot share the room with anything that is less than perfect. The power of the mind is great; fusion, gene-mapping, NASA, and Windows 7 have proven that already. We don't need to believe in fairy universe magic, or bury our heads in sand to live successful, happy, profound lives, and share that with others. That's what I've positively gleaned from Bright-Sided.

Clicking your heels together will not get you back to Kansas!

There may be evidence that Ehrenreich's thesis is true, i.e. there really are those out there who choose to believe in the veracity of the Law of Attraction; visualize a book review and it will manifest itself, no matter whether you've read the book or not. There are some problems with trusting in this "power,' however. There is a clear distinction between having a positive outlook on life and belonging to, or buying into the "positive thinking movement" or "positive psychology" movement. This distinction is made by Ehrenreich on page 12 of the Introduction and is important because without knowing it, you will not understand her premise: "I do not write this in a spirit of sourness or personal disappointment of any kind, nor do I have any romantic attachment to suffering as a source of insight or virtue. On the contrary, I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, ...more happiness...But, we cannot levitate ourselves into that blessed condition by wishing it..." Only twelve pages into the book and we have the distinction mentioned above elicited. This book is about the cult of positive thinking, as it developed out of the New Thought movement in the 19th century made popular by Mary Eddy Baker (Christian Science). "Bright-sided" discusses all the ways this line of thinking has infiltrated many parts of American society, from prosperity theology to corporations to medicine. Against popular misconception this is not a book about cancer! Ehrenreich's fight with breast cancer is periphery to what her main contention is and that's the onslaught of vacuous platitudes and nostrums that are forced on the sufferer who, against all tides of peer pressure, does not see his or her cancer as a "gift" or as the best thing that ever happened to them, such as can be understood from this quote: "If I had to do it over, would I want breast cancer? Absolutely." (p. 28) Is this a healthy attitude to take concerning a horrible condition that everybody would rather see eradicated from human experience forever? Does having an unrealistic, and some may say, perverse view of your condition really going to help cure it? The science says no, despite the vague and unsubstantiated claims made by the think-it-manifest-it crowd. Interestingly, Ehrenreich wonders why there is not a similar hyped movement for men and prostate cancer (p. 24). This is just an example of the issues addressed in this book. I would not say this is Barbara Ehrenreich's best work to date, however, the slew of kneejerk, wholly and ironically negative reviews are unwarranted and mostly unsubstantiated. This is a book that gives some food for thought and deserves to be considered as an antidote to the plethora of feel good literature being currently published.

an important book

Ehrenreich makes the point (and it can't be made too often) that the Law of Attraction, as promulgated via such works of irrationalist pseudoscience as The Secret and the books of Esther and Jerry Hicks, has the down-side effect of making out-of-work, poor, sick, and otherwise "unlucky" people responsible for their own condition. She tells how Rhonda Byrne (The Secret) opined that tsunami victims had attracted their own misfortune. Ehrenreich also spells out how convenient this "philosophy" is to the greed heads that have lately been so busy raping America and the global economy. Don't revolt, don't complain, it's all your own fault. She covers how Emerson and the Transcendentalists attempted to break free from the toxic effects of Calvinism on early American life, but how that attempt got sidetracked into New Thought (Phineas Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy, etc), with its increasingly laser-like focus on "prosperity" and get-rich-quick schemes. The scholarship that went into this intellectual/cultural history is impressive. Closer to present time, she unpacks how many evangelical mega-churches have leveraged this new, and very un-Christian, gospel in the style of huckster marketeers and predatory CEOs. But my favorite is the number she does on Martin Seligman and his "Positive Psychology" boondoggle. This isn't just a good book, it's an important one and much needed. I hope it will shape attitudes and change minds.

The dark side of positive thinking

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!