Bright Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich (the copy I reviewed was provided to me by the publisher) is a well needed anti-dote to the happy, happy bullshit that has infected our country. That last sentence only sounds harsh to someone who has not read the book. In it, Ehrenreich details how Americans, in a desperate attempt to escape the debilitating Calvinism of its founding, created a kind of magical thinking where everyone is a king — if they just wanted to be a king hard enough. Ehrenreich details how that nonsense has infected our culture, undermining our economy, our sense of legitimate grievance, and our cancer patients.
Yes, our cancer patients. One of the most horrifying sections of the book is the description of how the positive thinking movement has swamped the breast cancer support movements. It is bad enough to see how the actual victims of breast cancer are shunted aside, barely a presence in the runs and the memorials. That, at least, is partially understandable for organizations whose focus is helping people recover form a terrible disease. What is not understandable is the fact that patients are pressured to never admit that it is a terrible disease. The stories where women are pressured to put on a happy face all the time even to the extent of being frozen out of their supports groups when it became clear that they were not going to be survivors are heartbreaking. They deny patients the ability to express the normal and healthy human feelings of grief, anger, and betrayal that comes with such a devastating event. All for the false notion that a positive attitude helps you live longer and be healthier.
And it is a false notion — the science for the worst aspects of positive thinking, the notions that your thoughts can attract what you desire is, of course, laughably incorrect. But the lesser claim — that a positive attitude helps you in numerous ways -- is just as weak. They rely on outdated studies, odd formulations, and contentions that simply don't stand up to serious scientific scrutiny. The sections of the book dealing with the weird intersection of the "science" of positive thinking and the commercial world are eye opening and depressing. The researchers in the small world of positive thinking studies all but come out and admit that their conclusions are bunk, but that those conclusions pay.
And why wouldn’t they pay? They fit the world view of conservative executives exactly: those executives deserve what they have gotten even when they have obtained their gains through pure luck because their thoughts have brought them their luck. The credence that the "thoughts attract success" has in the corridors of business is more than a little frightening. Worse, though, is the affect these companies wholesale investment in this nonsense has on those employees and our country. Not only is their evidence that legitimate warnings – especially on Wall Street — are dismissed as pessimism but companies make a deliberate attempt to neuter employee anger. Companies spend a lot of money trying to convince people that their well being is tied to their positive attitude and that their circumstances have almost no affect on their happiness. If that is true — and there is zero evidence that it is — then why bother to agitate for better trade, or form a union, or anything else that might be construed as civic action? It is all in your head. Today’s positive thinkers and their allies in business would have told Martin Luther King that if he just thought happier thoughts, Jim Crow would have melted away.
The remarkable thing about this book is that Ehrenreich manages to write about these charlatans and the damage that they do with good humor and generosity to all she encounters. This book just tells you the facts in an accessible, convincing way and lets your basic decency drive you to anger. It is a lie that positive thoughts will make everything better, that everything wrong with the world is in our heads, that actually doing something about the conditions in which you live is not as useful as repeating a happy mantra to yourself every night before going to bed. What Bright Sided is against is not real happiness but a fake happiness sold to us by charlatans and used as an excuse for denigrating attempts to make people actually happy.