Smile or Die

SMILE OR DIE: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World

By BARBARA EHRENREICH

Granta, 2009, 235 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

When Barbara Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000, she was surprised to see that not all members of the breast cancer community viewed the disease with horror and dread. As she recounts in Smile or Die, many sufferers embraced the disease for allowing a re-ordering of life’s priorities, they viewed mastectomy favourably as a ‘makeover opportunity’, and the thinking of positive thoughts in the battle against the cancer was believed to increase the chances of survival.

As an experiment, Ehrenreich posted a critical statement on a cancer survivor website, complaining about the debilitating effects of chemotherapy and radical surgery, rebuking health insurance companies who saw a diagnostic biopsy as an optional indulgence, and blamed environmental carcinogens in plastics and pesticides as the major, preventable cause of breast cancer. She also provocatively fired a serve at the ‘sappy pink ribbons’ and other breast cancer products (clothing, cosmetics, jewellery, teddy bears) whose prettiness and pinkness were infantilising (men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not receive gifts of toy cars, she noted).

The cheerfulness vigilantes, however, took umbrage, and criticised Ehrenreich for being ‘negative’, for not trying hard enough to accept her breast cancer. This experience was Ehrenreich’s first exposure to an ideological force in American culture that she had not been aware of before – ‘positive thinking’ – a belief system that “encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate”.

Oprah Winfrey routinely trumpets the “triumph of attitude over circumstance” whilst the ‘positive thinking’ industry of life coaches, book authors and motivational speakers (including celebrities like Colin Powell, Bill Cosby and Rudolph Guliani) also rake in the dough. People facing major illnesses, laid-off white-collar workers, those who want to lose weight, find a mate or strike it rich are the most vulnerable segments targeted in this multi-billion dollar market.

A big purchaser of the industry’s books, DVDs and team-building hi-jinks is American big business which uses these products as tools to discipline the down-sized and demoralised white collar proletariat, turning them from complainant to compliant. The CEOs, too, believe in the power of their new Kool-Aid. Ehrenreich traces the evolution of the American managerial class from the “dreary rationalism” involved in producing real things like canals or railroads to the ‘finance capitalism’ of the 1980s when the flamboyant, charismatic motivator-CEO took to positive thinking nostrums as the route to instant profit gratification.

Dissenters from the new upbeat thinking within the corporate hierarchy were not tolerated. Those who warned that lending on sub-prime interest rates to low-income people was reckless, that housing prices were not resistant to gravity, that the bursting of the speculative property bubble would trigger off a global credit meltdown and recession were scorned for not getting with the program.

The flip-side of positive thinking, of course, was its “harsh insistence on personal responsibility”. Failure in life meant you weren’t positive enough. Real-world problems such as long hours, low wages, unemployment and unaffordable medical bills were all mere excuses for a failure of mind.

Reality, it was asserted, could be bent to your mental willpower. The “law of attraction”, a piece of stale, New Age, pseudo-scientific bilge pedalled by the prophets of positive thinking, claims that the mind acts as a magnet attracting whatever it visualises whilst the ‘prosperity gospel’ movement offers a motivational message about getting ahead through positive thinking (oh, and tithing 10% of your income to the Church and its millionaire evangelists). 17% of all American Christians consider themselves part of this new corporate Christianity and 61% agree that ‘God wants people to be prosperous’.

For the more secular who prefer not to invoke a deity or occultism to explain the connection between positive thoughts and positive outcomes, there is the ‘science’ of ‘positive psychology’, a new discipline spreading like a weed through academia. At Harvard, the introductory ‘positive psychology’ course had 855 students in 2006, making it the most popular course on campus. The shift away from ‘negative’, pathology-oriented psychology with its depressives and neurotics butting up against the hard edges of reality has opened up a huckstering, profitable line of “coaching the well”.

The psychometrics of positive psychology gives this new ‘profession’ an affinity with conservative values, measuring personal contentment with the status quo as its indicator of happiness. Business executives, too, like positive thinking for its conservative cachet - a happy worker is a hard worker. The grandfather of positive thinking, Norman Vincent Peal, whose 1952 book, The Power of Positive Thinking, still occupies the printing presses, was an outspoken conservative.

‘Positive thinking’ promises happiness but doesn’t deliver. A meta-analysis of a hundred self-reported ‘happiness’ studies ranked the US, the mother-ship of ‘positive thinking’, at a lowly 23^rd, surpassed by even the “supposedly dour Finns” whilst anti-depressants are the most prescribed drug in the happy land.

Ehrenreich’s latest book has her usual high quota of anecdotally-rich, theoretically-robust, humour-spiced, class-conscious sympathy for the underdog and antipathy for the overlord and their latest snake-oil of ‘positive thinking’. Ehrenreich’s message is simple. Whiners Unite - you have nothing to lose but an unjust social structure.