Book Review: Bright-Sided

A recent study performed by the University of South Wales found that people that were sad or negative were better able to differentiate fact from fiction, less likely to believe urban myths, less prone to making snap decisions, and better able to articulate more persuasive messages.

Joseph Forgas, author of the study, noted that "Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation, and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking paying greater attention to the external world.”

A timely study in light of my current reading of Bright-Sided, by Barbara Ehrenreich. Subtitled How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Undermined America, you know you are in for a long, depressing, and surprisingly cathartic ride.

Ehrenreich argues that the relentless requirement of being positive all the time has weakened our ability to analyze issues and come to productive solutions. Positive thinking, she says, requires the thinker to abandon all negative ideas, regardless of how valid they might be. Negativity, like the Devil, is to be banished from the heart and soul and replaced with nothing but happy thoughts.

Unfortunately, as she addresses in her opening chapter while discussing her personal battle with breast cancer, this type of thinking completely ignores the psychological coping mechanisms humans use to deal with everything from mundane stress to life-threatening illnesses. During her descent into what she sees as an independent breast cancer sub-culture, complete with its own language, products, and styles, she laments that displays of anger are not only discouraged, but outright condemned. The breast cancer patient is not allowed to be angry about the barbaric treatments modern medicine still uses to treat the disease. She isn’t allowed to be anxious about the risks of chemotherapy. Instead, she should throw on a wig and spend her time learning how to apply make-up to make herself feel beautiful. And don’t forget your pink teddy bear to keep you company.

Ehrenreich sees the obsession with positive-thinking as a uniquely American concept, and traces the roots of it back to Calvinist teachings. Her discussion regarding how the work ethic of Calvinism evolved into a secular “positive” movement and then morphed into a positive-thinking monster is enlightening. Negativity has replaced Satan as the great evil. Just as prayer and meditation was seen as a means of stopping Satan from seeping into the soul, the relentless pursuit of positive-thinking is mean to stop negativity from interfering with common sense.

Her chapters on the business of positive-thinking and the impact positive-thinking has had on modern religion are scathing and insightful. She looks at how businesses use motivational tools to keep employees compliant and artificially boost morale even has important issues like job security and healthcare become threatened. Encouraging “team building” is meant to develop employee loyalty even as management shows less loyalty to workers. Her first person accounts of attending motivational conferences prove the majority of motivational speakers to be complete hypocrites. Few of them believe their own hype, but like good positive thinkers, they ignore their own negative feelings and force themselves to stay positive.

The author saves her most critical condemnations of positive-thinking for those she claims allowed positive-thinking to collapse the economy. She makes the point that bankers, home buyers, politicians, and investors made a host of key bad decisions not based on bad information or even malice. No, she plants the blame on positive-thinking that failed to acknowledge the huge risks involved in many of these actions. When you have convinced yourself that there is no place to go but up so long as you believe, you never plan for what happens when everything comes crashing down. She points out the one obvious point that everyone seemed to forget. The economy has a finite amount of resources, and positive thinking can’t create money that does not exist.

There are areas of the book when the author stretches her point too thin, and others that are somewhat redundant. But overall, Bright-Sided is a welcome reprieve from the constant, draining demands of positive-thinking, and a reminder that sometimes, its perfectly fine to be pissed off.