Features » November 4, 2009

The Dark Side of the Bright Side

In her new book, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the origins of contemporary optimism.

By Anis Shivani

In her new book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan/Holt, October 2009), Barbara Ehrenreich traces the origins of contemporary optimism from nineteenth-century healers to twentieth-century pushers of consumerism. She explores how that culture of optimism prevents us from holding to account both corporate heads and elected officials.

Manufactured optimism has become a method to make the poor feel guilty for their poverty, the ill for their lack of health and the victims of corporate layoffs for their inability to find worthwhile jobs. Megachurches preach the “gospel of prosperity,” exhorting poor people to visualize financial success. Corporations have abandoned rational decision-making in favor of charismatic leadership.

This mania for looking on the bright side has given us the present financial collapse; optimistic business leaders—assisted by rosy-eyed policymakers—made very bad decisions.

In These Times recently spoke with her about our penchant for foolish optimism.

Is promoting optimism a mechanism of social control to keep the system in balance?

If you want to have a compliant populace, what could be better than to say that everyone has to think positively and accept that anything that goes wrong in their lives is their own fault because they haven’t had a positive enough attitude? However, I don’t think that there is a central committee that sits there saying, “This is what we want to get people to believe.”

It took hold in the United States because in the ’80s and ’90s it became a business. You could write a book like Who Moved My Cheese?, which is a classic about accepting layoffs with a positive attitude. And then you could count on employers to buy them up and distribute them free to employees.

So this picks up more in the early ’80s and even more so in the ’90s when globalization really took off?

I was looking at the age of layoffs, which begins in the ’80s and accelerates. How do you manage a workforce when there is no job security? When there is no reward for doing a good job? When you might be laid off and it might not have anything to do with performance? As that began to happen, companies began to hire motivational speakers to come in and speak to their people.

Couldn’t this positive thinking be what corporate culture wants everyone to believe, but at the top, people are still totally rational?

That is what I was assuming when I started this research. I thought, “It’s got to be rational at the top. Someone has to keep an eye on the bottom line.” Historically, the science of management was that in a rational enterprise, we have spreadsheets, we have decision-trees and we base decisions on careful analysis.

But then all that was swept aside for a new notion of what management is about. The word they use is “leadership.” The CEO and the top people are not there so much to analyze and plan but to inspire people. They claimed to have this uncanny ability to sense opportunities. It was a shock, to find the extent to which corporate culture has been infiltrated not only by positive thinking, but by mysticism. The idea is that now things are moving so fast in this era of globalization, that there’s no time to think anymore. So you increasingly find CEOs gathering in sweat lodges or drumming circles or going on “vision quests” to get in touch with their inner-Genghis Khan or whatever they were looking for.

The same things are happening in foreign policy. We’ve abandoned a sense of realism. You had this with Bush and also with Obama, although he is more realistic. Is there a connection between optimism and the growth of empire?

In the ’80s, Reagan promoted the idea that America is special and that Americans were God’s chosen people, destined to prosper, much to the envy of everybody else in the world. Similarly, Bush thought of himself as the optimist-in-chief, as the cheerleader—which had been his job once in college. This is very similar to how CEOs are coming to think of themselves: as people whose job is to inspire others to work harder for less pay and no job security.

Would you say that Obama is our cheerleader-in-chief?

I haven’t sorted it out. He talks a lot about hope. And as a citizen I’d rather not hear about “hope,” I’d rather hear about “plans.” Yet he does strike me as a rational person, who thinks through all possibilities and alternatives.

You write about the science of positive thinking having taken root at Ivy League universities. It’s amazing to me that a course in happiness at Harvard would draw almost 900 students.

That was in 2006. And these courses have spread all over the country—courses in positive psychology where you spend time writing letters of gratitude to people in your family, letters of forgiveness (whether or not you send them doesn’t matter), getting in touch with your happy feelings, and I don’t think that’s what higher education should be about. People go to universities to learn critical thinking, and positive thinking is antithetical to critical thinking.

You have written a lot about Calvinism. Is it correct to say you have a deep problem with Calvinism?

In exploring why America became the birthplace of positive thinking, I come up with an explanation that is quite sympathetic to the early positive thinkers. Positive thinking initially represented a revolt against the dominant Calvinist stream of Protestantism in America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. That kind of Calvinism was driving people crazy, literally. To think that you were a sinner, that your entire existence for all eternity would be one of torment in hell. It caused depression. It caused physical ailments. It was a nightmare. So you got some people in the early- and mid- 19th century that said, “Wait a minute, things aren’t so bad.” Ralph Waldo Emerson would probably be the best known example.

Couldn’t you go back farther to the Enlightenment—the ultimate optimistic philosophy? Our founding fathers were very informed by that. Is that a kind of optimism that you endorse? And ultimately what’s different between the pursuit of happiness as a manifestation of optimism and the current optimism that you’re talking about?

When the founding fathers undertook the Revolutionary War, they didn’t say, “We are going to win because we are visualizing victory.” They knew perfectly well that they could lose and be hanged as traitors. It took existential courage to say: “We are going to undertake this struggle without knowing whether we will win, but we’re just going to damn well die trying.”

So, where does this shift come from?

The shift had a lot to do with down-sizing, when corporations grabbed onto it as a means of soothing their disgruntled workforce. The alternative is realism. Let’s think about what’s actually going on: let’s get all the data we can; see what our options are; and figure out how to solve this problem. It sounds so trite and simple-minded, but that’s not how the thinking has been.

Is the progressive movement infected by bright-sidedness?

Progressives are not immune to this. I remember Mike Harrington [a founder of the Democratic Socialists of America] as a public speaker and he always, always ended on an upbeat note. No matter what was going on, he would end by saying there was a huge opening for the left. Today, I don’t know if we can do it. But we have no choice but to try.

You mean we need to have optimism, but grounded in reality?

I don’t call it optimism. I call it determination. One of the things I’ve devoted so much time to has had to do with poverty, class and inequality. Those things are not going to go away in my lifetime, but it won’t be for my lack of trying. And that’s a different kind of spirit than optimism.

Some will say your approach is rational, incremental and just not exciting. How would you respond to that?

I don’t think mine is an arid, overly intellectual approach. Consider what we’re up against on the economic and environmental front. Huge numbers of people are not getting by. There are the ecological threats to the human species. Let’s do something about it. What could be more irresponsible than to say, “If we just think it’s going to be alright, it’s going to be alright.” 

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• Reader Comments

  There is something incredibly anti-thinking going on in the West - for example, with New Age adherents often believing that we even choose our parents. So, once again, it’s all our responsibility. There is nothing we’re not responsible for.

  “Just think positively” is one part of this.

  So is, “everyone is where they are meant to be” - even those being slaughtered, of course.

  The astounding thing about all this is that we are supposed to have freedom of thought - but there often seems to be a ban on thinking.

  Posted by Elsa on Nov 6, 2009 at 5:54 PM

  This mania for looking on the bright side has given us the present financial collapse; optimistic business leaders—assisted by rosy-eyed policymakers—made very bad decisions.

  Damn!  I could have sworn it was the Democrats who did that.

  Wasn’t it LBJ and Democrats in congress that gave us the War on Poverty?  $6.6 trillion dollars was utterly wasted over a thirty-year period, there was substantial destruction of poor, mostly Black, family life in the USA, and there was a legacy of crime and drugs among displaced males when women were paid only if there were no males in their households.  The whole scheme collapsed from taxpayer outrage at the fraud and corruption.  The money wasted during those thirty years went straight to the bottom line of the federal accounts and to the national debt.  A modest 3% interest rate applied to the money wasted on the War on Poverty accounts for the entire national debt just two years ago, when the mortgage follies began to collapse. 

  Ah, yes.  The mortgage follies.  President Carter and Democrats in congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act REQUIRING “optimistic business leaders—assisted by rosy-eyed policymakers” to make mortgage loans to people who could not afford to make the monthly payments.  A young community organizer in Chicago taught his community how to agitate most effectively for and to demand, in banks and in congressional offices, “affordable housing”.  One of the results was the Federal Reserve Bank Boston 1998 pamphlet “Closing the Gap: A Guide to Equal Opportunity Lending.”  This remarkable document gave detailed instructions on how to fake the mortgage legal documentation and “qualify” people for loans for which they were not qualified, in defiance of the law, common sense, Econ 101, and fiscal responsibility.  The Clinton Administration adopted the FRB Boston “Closing the Gap” position as national mortgage policy.  This pamphlet contains a summary of all the stupid laws passed by Democrats that led to the recent financial crash, in case anyone is interested in what really happened. 

  Barbara Ehrenreich and Peter Beinart are two of the more rational voices among the insane descendants of Karl Marx.  But this effort by Ehrenreich is almost new world spiritual in its treatment of our fiscal problems, not at all like the purported hard rational “scientific socialism” of Marx.  Additionally, Ehrenreich’s position is both (self?) deceptive and irrelevant.  Her quote above would be more accurately rendered as:

  This mania for mindless do-goodism has given us the present financial collapse; Democratic Party poliiticians required rosy-eyed policymakers (FRB Boston) and optimistic business leaders (mortgage lenders) to make very bad decisions.

  Why cannot Ehrenreich acknowledge the obvious,and admit that the Democrats’ attempts to help the poor consistently make the poor worse off, and are now doing severe damage to the entire Republic?  Then she would not need esoteric explanations for simple stupidity.

  Posted by scorp on Nov 7, 2009 at 11:11 PM

  Hi
  When the author says ‘positive thinking is antithetical to critical thinking.’ I immediately think about the balance between faith and reason.
  I’m Buddhist, so I simply translate these terms into those more familiar.

  I don’t think there’s a contradiction here. For example, my faith in the car starting in the morning doesn’t contradict any understanding I have about how it works, or any lack thereof. And when one fails my experience, it doesn’t affect the other. They exist side by side as polar perspectives. Just difference views.

  There are times when I doubt the car will start in the morning, and there are times when it simply doesn’t, but that doesn’t warrant sweeping generalizations like, ‘the car will never start in the morning’ - ‘faith is out, reason is everything’ -‘positive thinking…’ etc.

  Look at the scope of the situation. America was the new world with plenty of resources to abuse, little in the way of stifling bureaucracy like in the EU or India. The people are careless now and overspend, and now have to start paying back the national debt. No surprises. The hollywood honeymoon is over. China is much like America was. They’ve destroyed their bureaucracy and the future is set for massive growth, spending, abuse. Positive thinking will work very well for Chinese now. I hope they can find a balance, for their sake and ours.

  I would like the author to make a clearer distinction between the principle of optimism and its use in the context of a corporate America.
  I don’t think discussion around the subject will be helpful unless this is done.

  A note on the megachurches comment - The charismatic movements have sacrificed their context and their objectivity in appealing to the mundane desires of the people.
  They should stick to being optimistic about the afterlife based on the merit you accumulate through generosity, patience etc. Heaven has nothing to do with the stock exchange or political anything, but I guess this is another example of the perennial hurdle of spiritual traditions - where faith becomes divorced from reason.

  Posted by ducky on Dec 5, 2009 at 5:55 AM

  My knowlegde in the so-called aftrelife is not based on religion , it is based on physics….One of the basic facts in physics , is that energy can neither be created or destroyed…Now , to this ’ Horse, the fact that human life is based on the our animated state , in other words , energy propells us through life , the phenomenon known as death cannot exist….The visual physique will give out , but the essences of who we are as individuals cannot , regardless of what you think or believe…That energy is called the soul , now what happens after that is of course anybodies guess , I don’t claim to know all the answers , but I do know that what is referred to as death , is just terminology for what the ol’ folks called ” passing on “...It is just like anythink else in this physical world ; if I drop a brick on your foot , it will hurt , might break your toe , no amount of praying or belief in Jesus will change that….This is not supersition or beleif in positve thinking it is just fact…............

  Posted by blackhorse on Jan 29, 2010 at 3:51 PM

  Excellent excellent. But how well do you know this truth - Is it merely a conceptual understanding you take comfort and pride in, like a collection of dead books on a dead bookshelf? If someone is completely disillusioned about death, then in theory they would have no fear, not so? But where does one find such a person.

  So I agree that death is only a perception, a view we choose to take, but I think there’s still something to be done past getting it intellectually down pat. And maybe that extra depth involves someone who has gone the distance? After all, nothing beats direct experience. Who better to learn from and be devoted to than one with said experience.

  Posted by ducky on Feb 2, 2010 at 5:07 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 8 posts.

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