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Laugh or die: how "positive thinking" misled America and the world

Excellent critical wonderful book by Barbara Ehrenreich

Jenni Murray applauds a delayed demolition of the suggestion that positive thinking is the answer to our problems

by Jenni Murray

The Observer, Sunday January 10, 2010

Occasionally a book appears that rings both your own thought, and yet fly so spectacularly against the fashionable philosophy, which comes as a profound relief reassuring. After reading Barbara Ehrenreich's book "Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking has misled America and the World" feel like I could wallow in grief, sadness, disappointment or any negative emotion that comes naturally without making me worry about that stereotype terrible, grumpy, grumpy old. However, I can be merely human: someone who does not have to be convinced that every rejection or disaster is a golden opportunity to "move on" optimistically.

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Conned America and the World by Barbara Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich came to a critical industry billions of dollars of positive thinking (a tide of books, DVDs, instructors of life coaches and motivational speakers executive) unfortunate circumstances similar to what I had . She was diagnosed with breast cancer and, like me, found himself increasingly uncomfortable with the martial language and culture "rose" that has come to surround this disease. When I met with the brigade of "positive attitude will help you fight and survive this experience," my response has been protesting against the use of military vocabulary and ask how miserable the optimism of the "survivors" would make him feel the poor woman who was dying of breast cancer. I felt that an "invasion" cancer cells was a pure lottery. No one knows the cause. As Ehrenreich says, "I had no known risk factors, no breast cancer in the family, had my babies relatively young and nursed them both. Ate well, drank moderately, exercised and also my breasts were too small to imagine that one lump or two could improve my figure. "(Thanks to God, has not lost his sense of humor.)

I had long had suspected that the improved survival rates for women with cancer breast had absolutely nothing to do with the "power of positive thinking. It was expected that women diagnosed between 2001 and 2006, 82% survive five years, compared with only 52% diagnosed 30 years earlier. The figures can be directly related to the enhancement of detection, improved surgical techniques, greater understanding of the different types of breast cancer and develop personalized treatments. Ehrenreich presents evidence of numerous studies showing that positive thinking has no effect on survival rates and offers sad testimony of women who have been struck by what a researcher ha llamado “una carga adicional a un paciente ya devastado”.

Qué pena, por ejemplo, la mujer que escribió al gurú médico mente/cuerpo Deepak Chopra : "A pesar de que sigo los tratamientos, y he llegado lejos descargándome de sentimientos dañinos, he perdonado a todos, he cambiado mi estilo de vida para incluir la meditación, la oración, la dieta adecuada, el ejercicio y los suplementos, el cáncer sigue reproduciéndose. ¿Hay alguna una lección aquí que no entiendo, que hace que continúe apareciendo? I am positive and I will beat him, however, with each diagnosis is more difficult to maintain a positive attitude. "

As Ehrenreich goes on to explain, the exhortations to think positively (see the glass half full even when it is in pieces on the floor) are not limited to culture breast cancer rose. She referred to the susceptibility of the United States to the philosophy of positive thinking the country's Calvinist past and shows how, in his early days , a Puritan and ongoing effort requiring self-examination to the point of hating himself "terrified children small and shoved "previously healthy adults to a morbid condition of withdrawal, usually marked by physical illness and domestic terror."

only in the early 19 th century began to disappear and Calvinist clouds of gloom began to grow a new movement that would have an entourage as fervent as had been the last. It was the union of two thinkers, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy , in the 1860, which led to the formulation of a vision of post-Calvinist world, known as the New Thought Movement. He imagined a new kind of God was no longer hostile and indifferent, but a powerful spirit that humans were merely to accede to control the physical world.

middle-class women found it particularly beneficial to this new style of thought that became known as the "laws of attraction." Denied any chance to fight in the world, spent his days were excluded from any other role than lying in a hammock, but the focus of New Thought and "talk therapy" developed by Quimby opened up exciting new possibilities. Mary Baker Eddy, a beneficiary of the priest, founded Christian Science. Ehrenreich notes that while this new style of positive thinking helped in the apparent helplessness or neurasthenia, had no effect on diseases such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera - and not today cure cancer.

So positive thinking, the assumption that you just have to think of a thing or desiring to make it happen, he began his rapid ascent to be influential. Today, as Ehrenreich shows, has a huge impact on business, religion and the world economy. Describes visits to conferences where workers motivational speakers who just got laid off and forced to become part of the culture of short-term contracts are taught that a "good team player" is, by definition, a "positive person" that "he smiles often, does not complain, it is not overtly judgmental and gratefully submit to any requirement of the head." These are people who have less and less able to chart their own future, but thanks to the thought given positive "view of the world-a belief system, almost a religion, which assures them that would be made infinitely powerful with just being able to control their own minds."

And no one has been more vulnerable to the temptation of this philosophy that self-styled "masters of the universe," Wall Street bankers. Those of us educated to believe that saving, have an account and live with the media itself was the way to proceed, and who wonder how the hell was reduced credit and subprime disasters occurred, need not look beyond the culture that sustains positive thinking that allows anyone to fulfill their wishes. (Or, as one of the titles of the chapters of Ehrenreich's book: "God wants you rich".)

Ehrenreich's work began to explain where the cult of individualism and devastating impact it has had on the lack of collective responsibility. We must, he says, letting go of our self-absorption capacity and take action against threats that we face are climate change, conflict, feeding the hungry, the funding of scientific research or education that nurtures critical thinking. Is disturbed by stress that "do not write in a spirit of bitterness or personal disappointment, I have no romantic attachment or suffering as a source of knowledge or virtue. On the contrary, I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness ... and the first step is how to recover the mass delusion that is positive thinking. " His book, I think, is a call for the return of common sense and, I fear, in what purports to be a work of criticism, I can only find positive things to say about it. Damn!