One can only speculate on the desperation leaders must wallow in to try and solve what may be serious management issues with such trivia and balderdash. What’s even worse is to go on one of these management seminar retreats, have everyone do some serious thinking and develop proposals, and then have senior management ignore all the recommendations. In ‘ To Fight or to Flow’ we looked at three different attitudes we might take on receiving the diagnosis of a serious illness or learning that it is terminal: to fight it, to resign ourselves to it, or to accept it. At the conclusion of her introduction to Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich states that the first step towards making substantial changes for the better in our world is to “recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking” (13). I agree. This is a very perceptive and interesting book. I regret not writing this review after finishing the book (which I did a month ago) because some of the details have faded from my memory. Thus this review will not do the book justice.

Since then, a cult of positive thinking has spread and grown to become a national ideology: the idea that every American has the opportunity to succeed.One thing I will never forget about SRF is this: One of their members was dying of cancer. She tried everything, but when nothing worked, some of the members told her that she must want to die because she is not curing herself with positive thoughts. She died. Rather than providing emotional sustenance, the sugar-coating of cancer can exact a dreadful cost. First it requires the denial of understandable feelings of fear and anger, all of which must be buried under a cosmetic layer of cheer. This is a great convenience for health workers and even friends of the afflicted, who might prefer the fake cheer to complaining, but it is not so easy on the afflicted.’ [3] There is little point writing a review of a book once Lena has written one - http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... - not, of course, that that will stop me. Okay, I wasn't old enough to be thinking in that kind of language yet. But the sentiment was there. Zigor was born in the 80's in a small town in the Basque Country, in a convulsive social and cultural time. With a curious and imaginative nature, since he was a child he felt the need to express himself through his creations. He experimented with plastic arts and noble materials until he found in digital art his true way of expression.

Just like Calvinism, New Thought stressed self-analysis, but through a different lens. Positive thinking encourages a person to believe that things can always get better, an assumption that makes one think she can influence fate.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". It's this happy-clappy, "Great God America" attitude, its origins and effects, that Barbara Ehrenreich examines in her book "Bright-Sided". She shows how the unshakeable optimism much of the American character is based on originated as a rebellious reaction to that super-downer of all faiths, Calvinism. The book looks at a few of the places where New Thought made the most in-roads. Some reviewers found this somewhat repetitive, but it was interesting to me to see how New Thought was interpreted in medicine, finance, business, the media, the workplace, churches, schools and social services. 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. As one cancer patient put it: ‘Friends and relatives only want to know that you are being positive, so there’s no space for voicing the insecurities that I have, or the doubt, or the fear and anger that surface from time to time.’ Others agreed with her : ‘I feel like I’m living with two faces,’ said another. ‘ There’s the optimistic one I present to others, and then the other, who I really am, feeling what I really feel.’ One of the pluses of seeing a counselor said a third was that ‘ She is someone I can talk freely to about how I am really feeling, knowing I won’t be judged.’

Americans are a "positive" people—cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: this is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive, we are told, is the key to success and prosperity. I always feel slightly guilty about my reaction to Barbara Ehrenreich's writing. I do admire her - she is ideologically committed, writes with passion, is on what I consider the "correct" side of the various social issues that concern her. And yet ... somehow I always end up with these niggling reservations that prevent me from endorsing her books wholeheartedly. The American Dream has been a con-job from the start but those forever optimistic Americans are made to see layoffs, poverty, bowls of watery gruel and anal lice as challenge. Lying in a pool of your own piss and faeces in a Harlem gutter? Stop whining! All you have to do is visualise that tuberculosis away, and you’re cured! :) :) :) :) :) The effect of all this positive thinking is to transform breast cancer into a rite of passage - not an injustice or a tragedy to rail against but a normal marker in the life cycle, like menopause or grandmotherhood. Everything in mainstream breast cancer culture serves, no doubt inadvertently, to tame and normalize the disease... Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise."-- George OrwellObviously, there is something to the idea that Positive Thinking has something going for it. Like anybody else, I also like being around positive people and find negative people a strain. All the same, I would take a realist over someone who reads self-help books any day. There is something vacant in the eyes of those who have become obsessed with ‘positive thinking’. The most depressing fact is that the ‘positive thinking’ lobotomy needs to be self-administered. I’m not saying you should develop the personality of Melvin the Paranoid Android from Hitchhiker’s Guide, but any idea that requires you to smile UNTIL you are happy, rather than BECAUSE you are happy, just can’t be a good.

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. As in the Aids movement, upon which breast cancer activism is partly modelled, the words "patient" and "victim," with their aura of self-pity and passivity, have been ruled un-PC. Instead, we get verbs: those who are in the midst of their treatments are described as "battling" or "fighting", sometimes intensified with "bravely" or "fiercely" – language suggestive of Katharine Hepburn with her face to the wind. Once the treatments are over, one achieves the status of "survivor", which is how the women in my local support group identified themselves, AA-style. For those who cease to be survivors, again, no noun applies. They are said to have "lost their battle" – our lost brave sisters, our fallen soldiers.

Positive thinking

Every so often a book appears that so chimes with your own thinking, yet flies so spectacularly in the face of fashionable philosophy, that it comes as a profoundly reassuring relief. After reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, I feel as if I can wallow in grief, gloom, disappointment or whatever negative emotion comes naturally without worrying that I've become that frightful stereotype, the curmudgeonly, grumpy old woman. Instead, I can be merely human: someone who doesn't have to convince herself that every rejection or disaster is a golden opportunity to "move on" in an upbeat manner. Middle-class women found this new style of thinking, which came to be known as the "laws of attraction", particularly beneficial. They had spent their days shut out from any role other than reclining on a chaise longue, denied any opportunity to strive in the world, but the New Thought approach and its "talking therapy" developed by Quimby opened up exciting new possibilities. Mary Baker Eddy, a beneficiary of the cure, went on to found Christian Science. Ehrenreich notes that although this new style of positive thinking did apparently help invalidism or neurasthenia, it had no effect whatsoever on diseases such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhus, tuberculosis and cholera – just as, today, it will not cure cancer. In the end, Ehrenreich says there is nothing wrong with moderate positivity and optimism. It's the overdone, semi-religious one Americans so exemplify and so believe in that's the problem.