The left is in love with false consciousness. Ever since Karl Marx called religion an opiate, progressives have been pulling on their muckraking boots, breaking out the bullhorns, and shouting “Wake up!” at the supposedly somnolent masses. While the paranoid right tends to see its enemies as corrupt conspirators, the left prefers to assume its opponents are merely dim bulbs, just one well-argued monograph away from enlightenment.
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Without a doubt, the self-help garbage Bright-Sided pillories is pernicious. As Ehrenreich notes, many gurus argue not only that thinking happy thoughts will make you happy, but that it’ll improve your life in concrete, material ways. It’s a short hop from there to the argument that thinking negative thoughts will hurt you, and from there to the belief that if something bad happens to you—like, say, getting laid off—it’s your own fault for not smiling enough. At the extreme, victims get blamed for natural disasters: Ehrenreich quotes Rhonda Byrne, best-selling author of The Secret, claiming that people washed out to sea by a tsunami, for instance, are “on the same frequency as the event.” In superficially more sane iterations, breast-cancer sufferers are told to stay cheerful and positive because doing so will strengthen their immune systems—even though, Ehrenreich claims, there’s no solid scientific evidence that positive thinking helps the immune system. A cancer survivor herself, Ehrenreich reports that the monomaniacal insistence on cheerfulness can be a cruel burden on the ill, who should at least be allowed to be pissed off.
Ehrenreich argues, in other words, that optimism is conservative, while realism is progressive.
Indeed, Ehrenreich herself has more in common with the bright-siders than she probably wants to admit. “Once our basic material needs are met—in my utopia anyway—life becomes a perpetual celebration in which everyone has a talent to contribute,” she enthuses. She adds that to achieve this we can’t just wish or smile, but must “struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world.”
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Bright-Sided: How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined america Barbara Ehrenreich (Metropolitan)
