Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World

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I saw its positive effects on a woman close to me who had been depressed for many years. She was reading metaphysical books at the time and had read in one of them that it is your thoughts that depress you. She looked at her thoughts and noticed that they were all negative and set out to change that, just to see if it were true about negative thoughts. She then turned each thought into a positive one, using it as an affirmation during the day, but silently to herself. Her depression lifted, and in less than a month she was no longer depressed. I realize from talking with the medical profession that not all depression can be treated by positive thoughts, and if you tell depressed people about this method, most will ignore your opinion on this matter. The saddest fact in the book is when she points out that the great American myth, the myth that allows the obscenely wealthy to gorge and pillage and to wallow in their wealth with impunity, is somewhat worse then mere exaggeration, it is quite simply a lie. The lie is that the average Joe will one day make it to being a billionaire (as he has been promised as a reward for his hard work). The problem is that this lie is even less true in America than it is in many other first world countries, countries where there is at least some hope of social mobility. Social mobility in the USA is actually virtually impossible. Ironically, the citizens of the USA do not even get upset with the excesses of the wealthy, because they (the poor citizens) are certain one day they too will be rich, and so, in preparation for that day, no limits must ever be placed on the greed of the wealthy. Their greed is our greed in waiting.

The sad part is no matter how many kids I caught cheating, I never caught on that I was the one being cheated. (Oh, and it's not "cheating" if the kids are hiding their spoons under the table with both hands as they try to bend them. If that helps them "focus," go for it!) I really believed those teachers when they said that bending spoons using the power of your mind was doable. Which meant that if *I* wasn't doing it...well, um, guess who was kind of a loser? The cheerfulness of breast cancer culture goes beyond mere absence of anger to what looks, all too often, like a positive embrace of the disease. Writing in 2007, New York Times health columnist Jane Brody quoted bike racer and testicular cancer survivor Lance Armstrong, who said, "Cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me", and cited a woman asserting that "breast cancer has given me a new life. Breast cancer was something I needed to experience to open my eyes to the joy of living." Betty Rollin, one of the first American women to go public with her disease, was enlisted to testify that she has "realised that the source of my happiness was, of all things, cancer – that cancer had everything to do with how good the good parts of my life were".Shunning is used in these types of religions and even businesses if you don’t follow their rules of positive thinking. But I am not exempt from shunning because I will walk away from anyone who is trying to push positive thinking off on me in a negative way. For example, I was meeting with a group of people who meditated, and we talked about things beforehand. I had just read “The Sixth extension,” and it bothered me to learn that most scientists think that it is too late for fix climate change and gave us only 50 years. I was told that I was “so negative.” Every week when I came to the group, she would find some other reason to tell me that I was “negative.” I tried confronting her about it, but then I just left the group. The members would tell me to ignore what she had said. I don’t do ignore very well. You van defy the inevitable disfigurements and come out, on the survivor side, actually prettier, sexier, more femme....helps you lose weight... As for that lost breast, why not bring the other one up to speed? Of the more than 50K masectomy patients who opt for reconstruction each year, 17% go on, often at the urging of their plastic surgeons, to get additional surgery so that the remaining breast will 'match,"... without question there is a problem when positive thinking 'fails' and the cancer spreads or eludes treatment. Then the patient can only blame herself: she is not being positive enough; possibly it was her negative attitude that brought on the disease in the first place. Unlike acceptance, positive thinking is the determination to affect a particular outcome. The downside here is that if, despite your best efforts, you don’t find things going your way, you may feel devastated and even ashamed (‘I wasn’t positive enough’) and guilty that you’ve failed – failed yourself and all those who believed in you.

America has had to deal with long ignored problems busting up through the floorboards since this book was written. I know women who followed up their diagnoses with weeks or months of self-study, mastering their options, interviewing doctor after doctor, assessing the damage to be expected from the available treatments. But I could tell from a few hours of investigation that the career of a breast cancer patient had been pretty well mapped out in advance: you may get to negotiate the choice between lumpectomy and mastectomy, but lumpectomy is commonly followed by weeks of radiation, and in either case if the lymph nodes turn out, upon dissection, to be invaded – or "involved," as it's less threateningly put – you're doomed to months of chemotherapy, an intervention that is on a par with using a sledge hammer to swat mosquitoes. Later, after leaving SGI, I joined Self Realization Fellowship, and it was worse there. You could not say anything negative. I recall asking a question about a book I had read, and I was hushed up. We don’t read that book here. Yogananda, their dead guru, when alive, would not allow anyone to say anything negative when they were around him. Don’t even think of questioning the religion. Colleague Dr. John Andrews suggests that the life-positive forces express themselves most easily with relaxation, not tension and – unlike the stress-creating attitude of ‘I’m going to beat this disease’ – both relaxation and life-positive energy will best support healing.another book i wanted to like more than i did. also a book that makes me realize that i need to expand my book categories a little. anyway...i contemplated buying this book, but i saw barbara ehrenreich's interview on "the daily show" & found it really frustrating (is it absolutely necessary to be so hyperbolic & smug on national television?), so i settled for putting it on hold at the library. & i'm glad i did, because i was really disappointed. I was in a Buddhist group years ago, SGI Buddhism. I could find no other when living near Memphis. The people were really lovely, but it was believed that chanting the mantra “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo” could bring you whatever you desired. You just think of what you want while chanting the words. Some people wanted a job, some a new car. You get the picture. The sad part is, if you don’t get what you want, then you are chanting in the wrong way. The wrong way was never explained, but it put the blame on you. This happens in all positive thinking religious groups.

Thank goodness for The Great Recession. It came exactly at the right time. And global warming too! For the last 40 years or so (but especially since the 1980s) Americans have absorbed the opiate of positive thinking. It's a happiness movement run amok across our culture. And we hope--the author and I--that the global financial meltdown has stopped it in its course. Character cannot be developed in peace and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved."-- Hellen Keller In other words, such an ideology promotes the idea that anyone can do anything as long as they try hard enough.This marked the beginning of what we now call positive thinking, or the idea that every person is in charge of his or her fate. This mind-set went on to transform America into a place of boundless optimism and opportunity. The positive thinking cult can display a peculiarly corrosive mix of mysticism and mammon. One of the most successful motivational texts, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, claims to expose the suppressed wisdom of the ages: the so-called “law of attraction”. This “law” claims that the power of the mind is such that if one asks “the universe” for something with enough sincerity and effort, then you will “attract it”. And what does this solemn ancient lore allow you to “attract”? The answer is hilariously prosaic – “stuff”. One example that Byrne quotes is of a ten-year-old boy who wanted to be first in the queues at Disneyland and whose wish was granted by “the universe” when his family were randomly chosen by Disney to get free passes. She pleads a case for realism, for not being distracted by fluffy, feel-good vibes from actual problems that need actual solutions. Not to be so relentlessly positive - or be required by your workplace, church or family to be so - that you refuse to see the wolves at the door. One of the consequences of a belief in positive thinking is that patients may even start believing that feeling sad or angry will cause their condition to worsen or that, through some underlying attitude, they caused their own disease in the first place. At much the same time Ehrenreich points out popular business writers stressed the value of overwhelming positivity in helping to sell coals to Newcastle, sand to the Saudis and so on. It is not so much that a single line can be drawn from positive thinking to public policy disasters , the '08 financial crash with named persons plainly culpable for distinct crises, rather Ehrenreich describes the growth and metastasis through, primarily US culture, of the impact of positive thinking.

There had been a lead-up to that incident Chintan recounted that re-enforces the difference between ‘positive thinking’ and connecting to ‘pure positive energy.’ In subsequent chapters, Ehrenreich shows how variations of the same belief, which is essentially little more than magical thinking, have taken hold in different aspects of American life, and different sectors of U.S. society. The popularity of books like "The Secret", the practice of advising people who have been laid off to "take control" of their situation through positive visualization, the explosive growth of the "motivational seminar" business, the rise of evangelical churches peddling the message that "God wants you to be rich" -- all are manifestations of the same fundamental belief, not just in the importance of a positive attitude, but in its ability to bring about change. Not individual Americans, individuals are always just that - individuals. I mean Americans taken as a conglomerate. Choiceless awareness’ is about taking no attitude but being open to what is, whatever that is – the ultimate in acceptance. Osho points out that ‘equilibrium is when you don’t choose, when you see the fact as it is. Life is not an either/or question, there is nothing to choose. It is all together.’ [5] But rather than provided emotional sustenance, the sugarcoating of cancer can exact a dreadful cost. First, it requires the denial of understandable feelings of anger and fear, all of which must be buried under a cosmetic layer of cheer...It's just got to make your blood boil, reading a book like this and to think it's only getting worse. And the worse things get, the further people fall, the more people fall, the more 'positivity' is drummed into a servile population's heads. There's a hundred billion dollar epidemic in America of the relentless promotion of positive thinking. We've inhaled the seminars, swallowed the team building camps, and metabolized all the sugar peddled at the entrepreneurial mega rallies. All this to motivate you. All this to make you a better worker. All this to make you post-modern parents. All this to cure you of sins, and evil, and poison. America is deluded. How did we become so wrapped up in our crystal healing and our political correctness and our business casual Hawaiian T-shirt Fridays?