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Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World

From http://www.newstatesman.com

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Reviewed by Alyssa McDonald - 21 January 2010

Pull yourself together

Tumours are a source of happiness. Accepting the laws of physics - or not - is a matter of personal choice. And getting the things you want is primarily a question of imagining what it will be like when they are yours (and perhaps berating God for not having provided them yet). This sort of patent idiocy would be disturbing enough if it lurked only on the wilder fringes of life in America, but, as Barbara Ehrenreich explains in her affronted, surprisingly cheering attack on positive thinking, mainstream culture is also riddled with its destructive tenets. Everything from health care to the global financial system has been infested.

It's not that Ehrenreich is a killjoy or curmudgeon. The last of her 20 or so books, Dancing in the Streets, was a history of collective happiness, and she begins this volume with her vision of utopia, in which "life becomes a perpetual celebration". But positive thinking, she argues, is nothing to do with happiness: it is a state of delusion.

The facts would seem to bear her out. America, the home of having a nice day, is where two-thirds of the world's antidepressants are consumed; it is a country usually found wallowing near the bottom of global happiness indices. Meanwhile its standards of education and health care remain dismal, and inequality, violence and debt are rampant. These are problems that will take more than a sunny dis¬position to sort out.

But an exhortation to look on the bright side is what America is offering - in its workplaces, in its churches and in scholarship. Particularly insidious is the "law of attraction", the quite barking notion, popularised by a self-help book called The Secret, that simply visualising what you want - perfect health, or a new necklace, or a fulfilling marriage to the woman behind you in the queue at the supermarket - will draw it to you. The author's horror at those who "manifest" new handbags with the help of their credit cards is nothing in comparison to the scorn she rains down on positive thinkers who use quantum physics - "or perhaps I should say 'quantum physics'" - to explain this theory.

But Ehrenreich is at her most withering when tackling the subject that inspired the book in the first place. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2001, she found herself trapped in a cloyingly upbeat "pink ribbon culture", in which cancer "victims" become "survivors", the dead go unmentioned in favour of celebrating those who recover, and the illness itself is no longer a deadly injustice to which a cure must be sought, but a rite of passage, imparting valuable life lessons and beautifying post-chemo effects such as tighter skin and softer hair (that is, once it grows back). Even more sinister is the insistence that a positive outlook is somehow essential to recovery - a myth, "cobbled together somewhat imaginatively" in the 1970s, that Ehrenreich, a former cellular immunologist, wearily dismantles.

In business, positive thinking can similarly, and conveniently, shift the burden of responsibility on to the individual. The self-help classic Who Moved My Cheese? offers this brand of solace to the recently laid-off: when a worker wakes up to find that his "cheese", or job, has disappeared, he should immediately "paint a picture . . . in great realistic detail, [of] sitting in the middle of a pile of all his favourite cheeses - from Cheddar to Brie". And magically, a delicious new employment opportunity will arise. Have employees swallowed this? Unlikely: but in a precarious world where failure to create "positive vibes" can be a sacking offence, few are prepared to object.

For all Ehrenreich's scepticism, no doubt shared by virtually all of her readers before they even picked up this book, millions of Americans have bought in to these ideas. A new and well-funded academic discipline, positive psychology, examines the links between happiness and desirable outcomes such as health and success. The "prosperity gospel" has a vast audience that listens to pastors such as Edwene Gaines admonish their Lord: "Now look here, God! . . . As far as I know I've done every single thing that I know to do in order to manifest this trip to Mexico City . . . So now I'm going to go right down to that travel agent and when I get there, that money had better be there!" Ehrenreich ascribes much the same sense of entitlement to the Wall Street bankers who, warned that their super-leveraged, pre-2007 banking models were unstable, fired the bearers of bad news.

This attack on banking feels like a bit of an afterthought: visualising your desires is not the same as blind greed, and, in any case, the book was conceived several years before the financial crash. But otherwise it is hard to fault the ideas in Smile or Die. The alternative that Ehrenreich offers to positive thinking's strange mixture of self-absorption, personal responsibility and blind acceptance of the status quo isn't revolutionary: all she suggests is realism, and a little critical thinking. But, coming after the circus of mindless positivity that she documents, it is as welcome as a cool drink of water.

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World

Barbara Ehrenreich

Granta Books, 235pp, £10.99

Alyssa McDonald is assistant editor of the New Statesman

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This article was originally published on 21 January 2010 in the issue Afghanistan: Why we cannot win this war
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2 comments from readers
Belief Doctor
21 January 2010 at 21:55
It is ironic that mention was made of quantum physics in your critique, and that it was dismissed when helping to make sense of our lives. The quantum metaphor serves us well. It basically highlights and validates the conjunctive 'and': possible and actual, real and imaginary, wave and particle.

The criticism of positive thinking is well founded, largely due to that field missing the most important, and somewhat obvious fact that what we each experience is co-determined by the system in which we live. That is, the momentum of crowds (of particles, forces, people or planets) constrains or limits what we can achieve (e.g. pushing against a crowd at a rock concert, as some have tried to do, and subsequently died). In other words, we are free within constraints to achieve what we ‘imagine’ or wish to attract.

The field of positive thinking also ignores one other simple fact, based on that belief-system – if we create our reality, we are responsible for all of it, including the fate of those less fortunate. It’s an inconvenient truth for many in the positive-thinking business, but we’re all in this together, so attracting, say, a much desired phone call (e.g. for a date, or job) requires someone to take action to call you. The law of attraction has some validity, but it’s centred on a selfish ‘me’ getting what we want, without any complimentary giving back, or complimentary law of action.

All this has been said quite elegantly and adroitly by others, since time immemorial. A wonderful example being Goethe, who explained the law of action and attraction succinctly: "the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too" ...

Steaphen Pirie
Director
Belief Institute
rayner
22 January 2010 at 12:52
It also does not think about what will happen if all workers in less than desirable jobs, say cleaning the screens in sewage works or plumbers, start to positively think their way into unearned wealth.
Where would all the sewage workers, plumbers, and those who clean our houses come from? We would be totally lost without these sons and sisters of toil. Someone please hide that "book" before the workers of the world read it.
Rayner

Dick Amateur's post:

Sure we have got to think positive. When we are thinking positive we have a far greater chance of improving our lives and that of others.

But for some it has become close to getting out of touch with reality. I've seen some who claim there is no victims and no villains in this world. They are "completely" out of touch with reality.

There is still something I admire about these people though, because if enough of us think like that we WILL CHANGE REALITY.

But it is a philosophy that villains LOVE, and the poor victims, well it just rubs their faces into the concrete even more.

I have suffered at the hands of villains who justify their cruel self-centred actions, with this philosophy. Also it tends to be a convent belief for people born into luck or wealth, people with no understanding how the poor have no hope and no future, no matter how positive they think.

The wrong aspects of positive thinking, taken to an extream can really be a cop-out, an excuse to blame the poor for their woe's, an excuse to not assist, an excuse to be a villain.

They can say... Well the poor in India, this is what they want. (Yea right, they really WANTED to pour battery acid on themselves so they can beg for food for their family)

I've known an extremely intelligent American Negro, claim that when their race were slaves, well, this is what they all wanted. OMG!!! COMMON!!!

When I was in my late 20's, I had asshole undercover Govt. agents, virtually fucking my ass with a red hot iron bar, in order to steal my land and make it part of the adjoining National Park (And they are STILL trying). And while I screamed in pain and misery, for years; for mercy, they would say shit like "Ohhh your playing a little victim now aren't you!"

The only way for me to eventually slow down those CUNTS of people was to fight back, to threaten them with exposure to the press, to virtually "punch their fucken noses", and then reply. "oh your playing little victims now are you?"

YES, tyrants and villains are real... And, for example, the 3 quarters of a million, plus, innocent non-combatant civilians murdered in Iraq; common, how can you not feel for them? Of course they are VICTIMS.

Yes peace is what we all should want, but some aggressors, just will not back off, till we at least "try" to "bop em" back.

It's amazing how some bully / villain types can be complete cowards, when challenged.

Then again some villains are too strong, some will kill us. But it's better to die on our feet than to live on our knees.

And as for the poor, some will be forever poor, unless we have some heart and help them out.

We have to remember, if our brothers and sisters are suffering on the other side of the world; well, in some way, shape or form we will suffer too. We are ALL interconnected.

Cheers,

Dick

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