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How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
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.
BookBrowse Review - Amy Reading
Barbara Ehrenreich is definitely onto something with Bright-Sided, a
breezy survey of positive thinking as espoused by those in psychology, business,
cancer recovery, mega-churches, and most messianically, self-help books. Her
naturally skeptical mind lances right through the heart of this doctrine to find
its central paradoxes. Positive thinkers believe that the world is only going to
get better, yet they also discipline themselves to only think positive thoughts
in order to help bring that world about, thus admitting a deep anxiety and a
need for self-deception about the state of reality. Ehrenreich is at her best
when she argues that positive thinking prevents other emotions necessary for
progress and prosperity, such as outrage, empathy, and conviction. She
personally embodies this argument in the first chapter, in which takes her
readers along for her own ride through breast cancer and its syrupy culture of
pink-ribboned optimism.
Ehrenreich goes out of her way to state that she does not write the book in "a
spirit of sourness or personal disappointment," but what she does not
acknowledge is the condescension that powers her argument against positive
thinking. For a thinker who has distinguished herself with her theory and
reporting on American class, this is an upsetting tone to take. Positive
thinking likely appeals to a very specific demographic, a less-educated one for
whom doubt and skepticism are not paramount values. Ehrenreich is very clear how
she feels about this lack of critical thinking: she feels as if whole swathes of
people have let themselves be brainwashed by the positive thinking gurus, quite
against their own best self-interests. But it never occurs to her to ask those
people how they perceive their own self-interests and why this philosophy has so
compelled them. She simply assumes her readers will agree with her that such
thinking is déclassé.
Bright-Sided began life as two essays for Harper's ("Welcome to Cancerland"
and "Pathologies of Hope" (only available to subscribers) but the book does not
thicken those essays with sympathetic analysis or substantive history. This is,
alas, Ehrenreich-lite and she leaves much more to be said on a timely and
compelling topic.
Other Reviews
"Starred Review. Building on Max Weber's insights into the relationship between Calvinism and capitalism, Ehrenreich [invesitigates] today's secular $9.6 billion self-improvement industry and positive psychology institutes." - Publishers Weekly
"Bright, incisive, provocative thinking from a top-notch nonfiction writer." - Kirkus Reviews
"Starred Review." - Booklist
This information about Bright-sided was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Barbara Ehrenreich was the author of more than 20 books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. She was a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, as well as a contributing writer to Time magazine.
She died in September 2022 aged 81. Her daughter said the cause was a stroke. She continued to write into her eighties leaving an unfinished work about the evolution of narcissism.
According to her New York Times obituary, Ms. Ehrenreich said she believed that her job as a journalist was to shed light on the unnecessary pain in the world: "The idea is not that we will win in our own lifetimes and that's the measure of us...but that we will die trying."
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