We
can thank the late economic
justice warrior for her
groundbreaking contribution in
showing that “positive
thinking” is part
of a whitewashing of economic
inequality.
Although
the
late Barbara Ehrenreich was best
known for her 2001 bestsellingbook
Nickel
and
Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in
America,
which chronicled the real-life
impacts of the 1996 Welfare Reform
Act, she made an equally great
contribution to economic justice
with
her subsequent book exposing the
cult of positive thinking.
Ehrenreich, who passed away on
September 1,
2022, at age 81, had started her
professional life with a PhD in
cellbiology. She didn’t relegate
her journalism to mere facts. She
delved as deep as she could—to a
microscopic level—tomake sense of
the world. We concluded from Nickel
and
Dimed
that people were not making it in
America. But we realized
throughher book Bright-Sided:
How
Positive Thinking Is
Undermining America
that the economy was proceeding
unimpeded by this fact because we
were putting a smiley face on
inequality.
The Great
Recession began in 2007. Two years
later, in 2009, Ehrenreich
published Bright-Sided.
Two years after that, in 2011, the
Occupy Wall Street (OWS)
protestsbegan in New York’s
Zuccotti Park and spread
throughout the
country. OWS participants called
damning attention to the starke
conomic split between the haves
and the have-nots, in this case
the
wealthiest “1 percent” of
Americans and the rest of us—the
“99 percent.” There was no putting
a smiley
face on the economy in that
moment.
It was during this
period that I had the honor of interviewing
Ehrenreich.
She explained that “there is a
whole industry in the United
States that got an investment in
this idea that if you just think
positively, if you expect
everything to turn out alright, if
you’re optimistic and cheerful and
upbeat, everything will
be alright.”
Ehrenreich, who survived cancer,
said
she began her investigation into
the ideology of positive thinking
when she had breast cancer,
roughly six years before Bright-Sided
was published. That’s when she
realized what a uniquely American
phenomenon it was to put a
positive spin on everything, even
cancer.
When she looked for online support
groups of other
women struggling with cancer, what
she found was,
“constant exhortations
to be positive about the disease,
to be cheerful and
optimistic.” Such an approach
obscures the central question
of,“why do we have an epidemic of
breast cancer?” she
said.
She applied that idea to how
positive thinking was
obscuring questions of economic
inequality. And she found that
therewas an entire industry built
up to assure financially
struggling
Americans that their poverty
stemmed from their own negative
thinkingand that they could turn
things around if they simply
visualized
wealth, embraced a can-do attitude
about their bleak futures
andwilled money to flow into their
lives. Central to this industry
are
“the coaches, the motivational
speakers, the inspirationalposters
to put up on the office walls,”
and more, said
Ehrenreich.
She also connected the rise of the
American
megachurch to the rising cult of
the positive-thinkers. “The
megachurches are not about
Christianity. The megachurches are
about
how you can prosper because God
wants you to be rich,” she said.
Joel Osteen, the pastor of a
Houston-based
megachurch, is perhaps one of the
best-known leaders of the
so-calledprosperity gospel. In one
of his sermons—conveniently posted
online
as a slick YouTube video
to reach a maximum audience—Osteen
claims that according to“the
scripture,” “the wealth of the
ungodly is laid
up for the righteous,” and that
“it will be transferredinto the
hands of the righteous.” His
congregants may be
tempted to imagine bank transfers
from wealthy atheists
magicallypouring into their
accounts.
Osteen has been the
beneficiary of serious wealth
transfers from his own congregants
intohis pockets, so much so that
he can afford to live in a $10
million
mansion.
There’s no conundrum here, for
Osteen is living proof to
hisfollowers that the power of
positive thinking works.
Ehrenreich
pointed out that the whole point
of these churches is to create
apositive experience for their
congregants and to project a
notion of
exciting possibilities. The
megachurch phenomenon is centered
on “the idea that the
church should not be disturbing.
You don’t want
to have a negative message at
church. So that’s why you
won’teven find a cross on the
wall.”
Perhaps this is
because the image of a bloodied,
half-naked Jesus Christ nailed
byhis hands and feet to a wooden
cross is just too painful to bear
and
might detract from dreams of
future Ferraris and private jets.
“What a downer that would be!”
exclaimed Ehrenreich.
Where
did the cult of positive thinking
originate? “American corporate
culture is saturated with this
positive thinking ideology,”
especially in the 1990s and 2000s,
said Ehrenreich. “It grew because
corporations needed a way to
manage downsizing, which really
began in the 1980s.”
Businesses that laid off masses
of employees had a message that
Ehrenreich encapsulated as,
“you’re getting eliminated… but
it’s really an opportunity for
you. It’s a great thing; you’ve
got to look at this positively.
Don’t complain, don’t be a whiner,
you’re
not a victim, etc.”
Such sentiments percolated into
the mainstream. Americans
internalized the idea that losing
one’s job has got to be a sign
that something better is coming
along and
that “everything
happens
for a reason.”
The
alternative is to blame one’s
employer, or even the designof the
U.S. economy. And that would be
dangerous to Wall Street and
corporate America.
Another purpose of fostering
positive
thinking among those who are laid
off is, as per Ehrenreich, “to
extract more work from those who
survive layoffs.” Indeed, we
have an ugly culture of overwork
in the U.S., with corporate
employees having normalized the
idea that they need to work
insanely
late hours, work on the weekends,
and take on exhaustive amounts of
responsibilities. After all, those
who remain employed, unlike their
laid-off former colleagues, ought
to feel lucky to have a job—more
positive thinking.
There may be a breaking point now,
one
that Ehrenreich thankfully lived
to see, as a newer set of
phenomenabegan emerging since the
COVID-19 pandemic began. They
include the
“great
resignation,”
a
term for masses of Americans
quitting thankless jobs. And,
morerecently, “quiet
quitting,”
which
is a new name for an older
union-led idea of “work torule” as
workers are starting to only put
in the hours they are
paid to work and no more. How
novel!
We owe Ehrenreich a
debt of gratitude for shining a
light not only on the perversity
ofthe U.S. economic system but
also on the gauzy veil of positive
thinking that obscures the
obscenity. Ehrenreich may not have
lived to see her ideas of economic
justice be fully realized. But, as
she
once
told
the New Yorker,
“The idea is not that we will win
in our own lifetimes and that’s
the measure of us but that we will
die trying.”
This
commentary
was produced by Economy
for All, a project of the
Independent Media Institute.
