Barbara Ehrenreich: The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
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When Barbara Ehrenreich went to be treated for breast cancer, she was exhorted to think positively; and when she expressed feelings of fear and anger, she was chided for being negative.
Ehrenreich, the author of 16 books, including Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, which examine the blue- and white-collar job markets, took on what she sees as an epidemic of positive thinking in her new book: Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.
Positive thinking is different, she says, from being cheerful or good-natured -- it's believing that the world is shaped by our wants and desires and that by focusing on the good, the bad ceases to exist.
Ehrenreich believes this has permeated our culture and that the refusal to acknowledge that bad things could happen is in some way responsible for the current financial crisis.
In her new book, Ehrenreich examines how the positive-thinking movement was started by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and an amateur metaphysician named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby in response to Calvinism; how being positive became mandatory in corporate culture; and how she thinks prosperity preachers, such as Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church in Houston encouraged a culture of debt by telling their congregations that God wants them to have a big house and a nice car.
Emily Wilson: At the beginning of the book, you talk about going to be treated for breast cancer and being told to think positively. Was that what started you thinking about this?
Barbara Ehrenreich: That was my first exposure to positive thinking as an ideology. I was just astounded and dismayed by it. Here I was in a real crisis in my life, and people were trying to market pink ribbon teddy bears to me, and where I thought I would find sort of sisterly support on the Internet, I found instead the constant exhortations to be cheerful and to embrace my disease [she laughs].
EW: What is the difference between being told to try and stay upbeat and to have a good attitude and positive thinking?
BE: I think it's a slippery slope. Once you start on how you have to face your problem with a good attitude, they start looking for justifications for that, and it became you actually get better only if you are upbeat, only if you visualize your recovery and so on.
EW: Were the doctors telling you that?
BE: The doctors don't say much, but there are books they have written, or psychologists have, trying to get in on the breast cancer business, but to my chagrin I was often encountering it from fellow sufferers. Individual women have written books, too, like my favorite, The Gift of Cancer, and it seems to be pretty ubiquitous. I wasn't finding any dissent, and when I tried to dissent on a message board, I was told to run, not walk, to therapy.
EW: You write a lot about how positive thinking is in all aspects of life. Do you think this is the most insidious about it -- this idea of a disease being your fault?
BE: I look at it with a little bit of sociological detachment. It's a brilliant system of social control. When bad things happen to people you say, "Well, it's really your attitude that has to change."
The second big place where I encountered all this was in the kind of motivational services that are offered to laid-off white-collar workers, where every networking event or seminar you get the same message about how it's really your attitude that is going to determine if you're going to get a job and probably has something to do with why you lost that last one.
You take people who have been really victimized, and I use that word advisedly, with cancer and with lay-offs from unaccountable corporations. And then you tell them, "Well, you just have to change the way you think." And that's very clever.
EW: You write about how positive thinking started with Mary Baker Eddy and Phineas Quimby and how it was a response to Calvinism.
BE: I was actually kind of a fan of Quimby. Here was a blue-collar guy, basically a skilled craftsman living in Portland, Maine, and who had a sideline of being a metaphysician. What it's all about is he was rejecting a Calvinist worldview -- that people are damned, that we're wretched sinners and that we should spend all of our time examining our souls for sins and flaws.
And he said "Hey!" [She laughs.] He understood that that worldview was making people sick. It was kind of brilliant, I thought. He was part of a larger populist health movement arising against the regular medical profession.
EW: When does this idea of positive thinking change into being what you're saying it is now?
BE: It had ceased to be seen as a healing method, although that comes back. By the time I encounter it, breast cancer has come back into the health area. But in the early 20th century there was, for the first time, scientific medicine and the beginnings of some sorts of effective treatments. That kind of closed a door for the positive-thinking movement, which then increasingly in the 20th century addressed itself to prosperity and wealth and success.
See more stories tagged with: cancer, barbara ehrenreich, brighsided, positive thinking
Emily Wilson is a freelance writer and teaches basic skills at City College of San Francisco.
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