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How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America

A New Book By Barbara Ehrenreich

Since I stopped my involvement in the Amway Motivational Organization over 10 years ago, I’ve spent a lot of time considering how the AMO brand of “positive thinking” evolved into a sophisticated method of manipulation. Interestingly, the release of this new book coincided with my discovery that the prevailing corporate culture now includes a lot of the same elements of “positive thinking” that I knew as an Amway participant.

Ehrenreich draws a historical line from American Puritanism/Calvinism through various philosophical and religious movements, up to Norman Vincent Peale and today’s “positive thinking” movement. Despite all that positive thinking, though, she notes that Americans aren’t happy.

“Surprisingly, when psychologists undertake to measure the relative happiness of nations, they routinely find that Americans are not, even in prosperous times and despite our vaunted positivity, very happy at all. A recent meta-analysis of over a hundred studies of self-reported happiness worldwide found Americans ranking only twenty-third, surpassed by the Dutch, the Danes, the Malaysians, the Bahamians, the Austrians, and even the supposedly dour Finns. In another potential sign of relative distress, Americans account for two-thirds of the global market for antidepressants, which happen also to be the most commonly prescribed drugs in the United States.

“When economists attempt to rank nations more objectively in terms of ‘well-being,’ taking into account such factors as health, environmental sustainability, and the possibility of upward mobility, the United States does even more poorly than it does when only the subjective state of ‘happiness’ is measured. The Happy Planet Index, to give just one example, locates us at 150th among the world’s nations.”

Ehrenreich points out the logical and scientific flaws and holes in the positive thinking movement, and arrives at a bold conclusion – bold because it flies strongly in the face of accepted wisdom. Ehrenreich states that after abandoning management for mysticism, “business entered the midyears of the decade at a manic peak of delusional expectations, extending to the highest levels of leadership.” The economic meltdown was caused by business people who abandoned planning and forecasting for the “laws of attraction” and prosperity gospel thinking. Managers who questioned whether house prices would always rise were told they worried too much. The success of the companies was predicated on “naming it and claiming it” instead of sound business practices.

As the economy shed tens of thousands of jobs, positive thinkers “counseled people to work ever harder on themselves – monitoring their thoughts, adjusting their emotions, focusing more intently on their desires.” Recession was derided as a “mass outbreak of pessimism.”

Ehrenreich also points out that “In vastly different settings, positive thinking has been a tool of political repression worldwide. We tend to think that tyrants rule through fear … but some of the world’s most mercilessly authoritarian regimes have also demanded constant optimism and cheer from their subjects” and gives specific examples from Iran under the Shah’s rule and Soviet-style Communism. However, unlike in those countries, “American … people can be counted on to impose it on themselves. Stalinist regimes used the state apparatus – schools, secret police, and so on – to enforce optimism; capitalist democracies leave this job to the market.”

But while “positive thinking” has become the way of life, Psychology Today acknowledges that “according to some measures, as a nation we’ve grown sadder and more anxious during the same years that the happiness movement has flourished.”

“The effort of positive ‘thought control,’ which is always presented as such a life preserver, has become a potentially deadly weight – obscuring judgment and shielding us from vital information. … A vigilant realism does not foreclose the pursuit of happiness; in fact, it makes it possible. How can we expect to improve our situation without addressing the actual circumstances we find ourselves in?”

One aspect of the positive thinking movement that Ehrenreich does not address is the cognitive dissonance involved when an individual forces himself to adhere to the strictures of positive thinking while ignoring reality. From my own personal experience in the AMO version of positive thinking, I believe it is this cognitive dissonance which makes us more unhappy while saying, doing, and attempting to believe what the happiness gurus are preaching.

Overall, Ehrenreich does an excellent job of exposing “positive thinking” as nothing more than a belief in magic – a dangerous belief system that should be expeditiously removed from our businesses, our schools and our government.

Available from Amazon.com

Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America