Barbara Ehrenreich on The Perils of Positive Thinking - TIME

Barbara Ehrenreich on The Peril of Positive Thinking - TIME

What makes you think unsullied optimism is such a good idea? Americans have long prided themselves on being "positive" and optimistic - traits that reached a manic zenith in the early years of this millennium. Iraq would be a cakewalk! The Dow would reach 36,000! Housing prices could never decline! Optimism was not only patriotic, it was a Christian virtue, or so we learned from the proliferating preachers of the "prosperity gospel," whose God wants to "prosper" you.

In 2006, the runaway bestseller The Secret promised that you could have anything you wanted, anything at all, simply by using your mental powers to "attract" it. The poor listened to upbeat preachers like Joel Osteen and took out subprime mortgages. The rich paid for seminars led by motivational speakers like Tony Robbins and repackaged those mortgages into securities sold around the world. (Read "Yes, I Suck: Self-Help Through Negative Thinking.")

Optimism wasn't just a psycho-spiritual lifestyle option; by the mid-'00s it had become increasingly mandatory. Positive psychologists, inspired by a totally over-optimistic reading of the data, proclaimed that optimism lengthens the life span, ameliorates aging and cures cancer.

In the last few years, some breast cancer support groups have expelled members whose tumors metastasized, lest they bring the other members down. In the workplace, employers culled "negative" people, like those in the finance industry who had the temerity to suggest that their company's subprime exposure might be too high.

No one dared be the bearer of bad news. The purpose of work, at least in white-collar settings, was to flatter and reassure the boss, who had in turn probably read enough of the business self-help literature to believe that his job was to motivate others with his own relentless and radiant optimism. (Read "A Primer for Pessimists.")

Two years into the Great Recession, it's time to face the truth: Optimism feels good, really good, but it turns out to be the methamphetamine of run-amok American capitalism. Meth induces a "Superman Syndrome." Optimism fed into what Steve Eisman, a banking analyst who foresaw the crash, calls "hedge-fund disease," characterized by "megalomania, plus narcissism, plus solipsism" and the belief that "to think something is to make it happen."

The meth-head loses his teeth and his mind; the madcap optimists of Wall Street lost something like $10 trillion worth of pension funds, life savings and retirement accounts. (See five reasons for economic optimism.)

Fortunately, the alternative to optimism is not pessimism, which can be equally delusional. What we need here is some realism, or the simple admission that, to paraphrase a bumper sticker, "stuff happens," including sometimes very, very bad stuff. We don't have to dwell incessantly on the worst case scenarios ” the metastasis, the market crash or global pandemic ” but we do need to acknowledge that they could happen, and prepare in the best way we can. Some will call this "negative thinking," but the technical term is sobriety.

Besides, the constant effort of maintaining optimism in the face of considerable counterevidence is just too damn much work. Optimism training, affirmations and related forms of self-hypnosis are a burden that we can finally, in good conscience, set down. They won't make you richer or healthier, and, as we should have learned by now, they can easily put you in harm's way. The threats that we face, individually and collectively, won't be solved by wishful thinking, but by a clear-eyed commitment to taking action in the world.

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