Barbara Ehrenreich is justly famous for her writing on women's issues, as well as social and economic justice. Her best known books are "Nickled and Dimed - On Not Getting By in America" and "Bait and Switch - The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream." Her latest book, "Bright Sided - How the Positive Thinking Movement has Undermined America" is a must-read addition to your reading list.
Ms. Ehrenreich relentlessly exposes the detested (to me at least) "positive thinking" movement as the fad/cult that it is.
One could almost posit that with her two previous books, this book makes up a trilogy of the social and economic injustices to the working class of our times. Her new book reveals the religious and pseudoscientific basis of the "positive thinking" movement in the West. The roots of this cult-like groupthink go back at least as far as Christian Science, which itself was a reaction to the effects that Calvinist religion had on the general population.
This "positive thinking" meme was taken up by a diverse selection of people, including Norman Vincent Peale, Joel Osteen, Robert H. Schuller and many others. The business community picked it up from there via "consultants" that sold this meme to upper managers as a way to get more from their employees and suppress resentment/fear during layoffs. Upper management used it to "create their own realities" by using techniques not unlike Amway, "The Secret" and the movie "What the %&^&* Do We Know?" to gain more power and wealth for themselves. Essentially, it was a complete rejection of rational management in favor of magical thinking.
This pernicious meme even enveloped the Republican Party, as can be seen by their actions over the last ten years. Consider the delusional comments made about how the Iraqi people would "welcome us with flowers and candy as liberators," as one example. Another dangerous side effect is that under this spell of magical thinking, all bad news and negativity must be ruthlessly suppressed: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, anyone?
I have detested this kind of thinking ever since I first encountered it in the business world during the 1980's. We on the front lines of Customer Service used to call them "happycrap" under our breath. Saying that openly near management was a good way to get counseled for a "bad attitude" or fired. As a relatively rational and logical thinker, I was first amused, then insulted and finally alarmed at the warped thinking I was encountering. "Successories" sprung up like poisonous toadstools after a rain, the consumption of which made LSD look positively tame at times.
It is past time that the reasonable and the logical returned to the business and political world. Reading this book is a good way to start the process.