Melbourne, VIC, AUS. Ever wonder why Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein thinks he’s doing God’s work, or why televangelist Pat Robertson believes the Haitian earthquake was caused by a people’s pact with the devil?

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & The World by Barbara Ehrenreich is a good start. [N1]

In a searing, and often amusing indictment of American optimism, Ehrenreich charts a cultural history of the positive thinking phenomenon in the United States.

From humble beginnings as a theological reaction to repressive Calvinist Puritanism to the modern Prosperity Gospel of televangelists such as Joel Osteen and Hillsong’s Brian Houston where God wants you to be rich.

A story of how the popularity of motivational gurus, business coaches and self-help literature such as How to win Friends and Influence People [N2] and The Secret [N3] has provided fertile conditions for an attempt to scientifically establish the links between positive affect, health and success in the form of the positive psychology movement.

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If there is one overriding message to come from this book it is that reason matters.

Scepticism, realism and critical thinking are crucial for human intellectual progress in a way that feeling good about oneself never can be.

We have to engage with the world as it really is if we are to lead meaningful lives and purposefully address the growing challenges affecting us all.Would the United States fare much worse in such surveys if it were not for the large doses of medication reinforcing the prevailing positive mood?

In light of these surveys, and other empirical evidence that fails to conform to America’s optimistic self image- Ehrenreich makes a strong case that positive thinking isn’t so much a reflection of the national mood but rather a powerful ideology.

And need we look any further for such evidence of a pervasive “positive ideology” than President Obama’s recent State of the Union address. One in ten American workers remain out of work but stimulus spending will be wound back immediately, government spending will be frozen for three years from 2011, and barely any jobs are being created directly in the public sector. But don’t worry: America has always been destined to succeed and the recession will be over pretty soon as long as we hold on to the determination and optimism that have allowed the United States to triumph in the past.

More than a year after Obama’s momentous election it is now clear Yes we can was not a message that we are going to get people back to work, get Wall Street lending again, stop the foreclosures and finally achieve healthcare reform, but rather a hollow flashback to platitudinous Reaganite optimism that plays well in Oprah land. Perhaps the secret of this slogan’s electoral success was its equal appeal among social reform hungry liberals, positive thinking evangelicals and Reagan conservatives.

Ehrenreich poignantly describes her struggle with breast cancer, and how this experience brought her face to face with positive ideology. She argues that looking on the bright side of cancer has had the effect of transforming ... 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.

During her chemotherapy web sites, books, oncology nurses and fellow sufferers all stressed to her the importance of maintain a “positive attitude” towards recovery despite there being no evidence that a positive affect can improve cancer survival prospects.

Ehrenreich reveals the “victim blaming” felt by some cancer victims that has arisen out of popular beliefs concerning the mind-body connection. Although the misperceptions are not necessarily perpetuated by physicians, there is a pervasive cultural belief that thinking positively will help you recover from cancer, and that negative emotions can make cancer grow, or even cause cancer in the first place.

In a world where having a positive attitude is deemed normal and essential to the health, prosperity and success of businesses and individuals, where does this leave the sceptical, critical, pessimistic or melancholy? Ehrenreich claims ... the penalty for non-conformity is going up, from the possibility of job loss and failure to social shunning and complete isolation.

If negative thoughts lead to poor outcomes, poor outcomes occur because people don’t believe in the inevitability of their own success. If you lost your job it’s your own goddamn own fault, and involuntary unemployment does not exist either. Alarmingly, Ehrenreich documents advice from motivational gurus and business coaches to sack “negative people” and bias in behavioural interview questions towards positive individuals.

From Ehrenreich’s perspective if the stick is social exclusion, the carrot is the promise of great things happening to you if you just think positively. You can have anything in the world as long as you focus your mind on it. At least this is the promise of best selling motivational books such as The Secret which contain claims that if you visualise or focus on what you want hard enough, be it a relationship, a car or limitless wealth, it will be attracted to you.

Ehrenreich plots the growth of the New Thought and Christian Science movements in the United States as a positive thinking, “Jesus loves you” alternative to the fire and brimstone fear-mongering of Calvinism. Although these movements may have offered a palliative to Calvinism’s relentless focus on sin, repression and relentless busyness they also “ended up preserving some of Calvinism’s more toxic features — a harsh judgmentally, echoing the old religion’s condemnation of sin, and an insistence on the constant interior labor of self-examination”. Whereas under Calvinism the believer had to be ever vigilant for signs of laziness or sin, under New Thought they must be ever vigilant against the dangers of negative thinking.

Ehrenreich also draws attention to today’s positive or prosperity theology that developed from New Thought and promotes a belief system where “God stands ready to give you anything you want”. A world of churches without crosses, stained glass windows or images of Jesus — a more secular and corporatised church in both management and appearance. Essentially a church without church. The emerging picture is one of a self-enclosed, mutually reinforcing lifeworld linking church, office and mall that has been comprehensively colonised by positive ideology:

“Everywhere, he or she hears the same message — that you can have all that stuff in the mall, as well as the beautiful house and car, if only you believe that you can. But always, in a hissed undertone, there is the darker message that if you don’t have all that you want, if you feel sick, discouraged, or defeated, you have only yourself to blame.”

Ehrenreich then sets her sights on the positive psychology movement founded by Martin Seligman. The central claim of this movement is that positive affect is not only a desirable state in its own right, but may actually lead to better health and success regardless of an individual’s life circumstances.

According to this school of thought happy people seem to be more successful at work, more likely to get a second interview when job hunting, get positive evaluations from superiors, resist work fatigue and advance through the corporate ranks. Ehrenreich contention is that “this probably reflects little more than corporate bias in favor of positive attitude and against ‘negative’ people” than it does in favour of positive affect.

As for the scores of studies that purport to show that positive thinkers are healthier than pessimists, we have a classic correlation versus causation scenario: are happy people happy because they are well, or well because they are happy? While it seems that further longitudinal studies will be necessary to sort out this quandary, there is already ample evidence that suggests that positive affect has no bearing on cancer survival or immune system functioning.

Indeed there is evidence that pessimism may inhibit the risk taking behaviour that leads to higher levels of premature morbidity. And people with a pessimistic affect are less likely to succumb to depression following a negative life event. Despite the palpable uncertainty, and quite frankly lack of results, positive psychology has lent an aura of scientific respectability to self help snake oil and New Thought mysticism.

Perhaps Ehrenreich’s coup de grace is her analysis of how positive thinking “turned toxic on Wall Street”. Ehrenreich provides a compelling cultural backdrop to a period where many borrowers, at the behest of wealth gurus, mortgage salesmen, motivational speakers and prosperity gospel hucksters, felt entitled to homes they couldn’t afford; of how they entered into mortgages in the optimistic belief that prices always went up, that they would be earning much more in the future, and that if things went badly they could always refinance their mortgage anyway.

It was an era where financial institutions didn’t mind lending excessively to borrowers with low documentation and poor credit histories because housing prices either always went up or at least didn’t go down nationwide all at once; and over-confident investment bankers created financial instruments they didn’t understand and systematically mismanaged risk because they thought they were the smartest people in town.

It was a time where share traders and banking executives were fired because they placed a sell order on a stock or questioned their banks sub-prime business model and bank regulators like Alan Greenspan believed banking regulation was unnecessary in a free market where the self interest of lending institutions could be relied on to protect equity holders’ interests.

While economists continue to debate the causes of the crisis, be they easy credit, excessive leverage, a structurally flawed US housing finance market, financial complexity, declining labor productivity levels, inadequate regulation, international imbalances, simple fraud and the list goes on, Ehrenreich provides a stunning hint at the collective cognitive bias that fuelled the bubble, and contributed to the great crash of 2008.

There are many avenues one could take to criticise Ehrenreich’s book, but I will leave that to others. Smile or Die does not pretend to be an academic work and as a journalistic thought piece it more than meets its mark. Perhaps in more academically rigorous hands this book could have been a modern sequel to Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In spirit or essence at least I think it is worthy of comparison.

I am undeniably sympathetic to Ehrenreich’s cause:

• I want to see a world where the likes of John Curtin, Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln would be considered serious leadership prospects once more rather than dour, melancholic burnouts.
  
  
• I worry about how we encourage people with depressive illnesses to seek appropriate support and thrive in an environment that treats them as losers who will only ever drag down everyone else.
  
  
• I want to work and study in an environment free from bullying and intimidation as much as any positive psychologist, but
  
  
• I also worry that positive psychology pays insufficient regard to the circumstances in which individuals will inevitably suffer.

If there is one overriding message to come from this book it is that reason matters. Scepticism, realism and critical thinking are crucial for human intellectual progress in a way that feeling good about oneself never can be. We have to engage with the world as it really is if we are to lead meaningful lives and purposefully address the growing challenges affecting us all.

As Noel Pearson might say, the central question of our times will not be whether we are positive enough to overcome these challenges, but whether we are a “serious people”. [N6] Addressing issues such as mass unemployment, global warming, and rising and persistent inequality demands realism and seriousness above all other dispositions.

Barbara Ehrenreich should be congratulated for taking the time to make this case.

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