In your new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, you talk about optimism as if it’s a bad thing. Haven’t we been taught that a positive attitude is the key to success and happiness?
I know, I know. It does sound a little crazy, like I’m taking on world peace or motherhood. But what I’m talking about is the ideology of positive thinking, the idea that you have to work on yourself to be more optimistic.
I first encountered this eight years ago when I was being treated for breast cancer: I went looking for support, but what I found instead, to my horror, was this constant exhortation to be positive, to make lemonade out of lemons, to embrace your cancer as a gift.
Isn’t it a natural human instinct to want to feel good when times are bad?
Not when it completely denies what you are feeling. I felt angry and I don’t see anything wrong with acknowledging that feeling. But when you’re told to change how you think about cancer, that it’s up to you to be positive, then essentially you’re being told to be passive in the face of the status quo.
Cancer is your starting point, but much of your book focuses on the tyranny of the positive-thinking ideology in the modern workplace. How did this attitude take hold?
In the 1980s, big companies began bringing in motivational speakers and buying up motivational books to distribute to their workers.
This was the beginning of the age of layoffs, and so you needed these motivational speakers and all their products for two reasons. First, to stop discontent among those being laid off: Just as with cancer, you tell them, “Hey, this is a wonderful opportunity, embrace your transition, it’s a gift to you.” And second, to squeeze more and more work out of the employees who survive the layoffs by providing the message that we can’t have whiners around who are dragging everybody down with their questions and their doubts.
How does an upbeat workplace serve the interests of the corporate world?
Well, I don’t think that it has served them too well! Nobody wanted to be the person who came to the boss and said, “I’m really worried about our subprime exposure with the mortgage company or bank.” And so the culture of self-delusion that permeated corporate America fed into the financial meltdown in 2008.
American capitalism of the last 25 years has been increasingly permeated by the belief that leadership is all about gut intuitions. And these right intuitions are possessed by particularly positive people who happen to be the CEOs who emanate a mystical quality that inspires other people.
Were you surprised that an ideology like positive thinking has persisted in the face of massive layoffs and corporate downsizing? Instead of rioting in the streets, all those eternally optimistic people went out and bought houses they couldn’t afford with money they didn’t have.
Yeah, that really puzzled me. I was doing a project on white-collar unemployment, and I was seeing people being churned out of their jobs. Here’s a constituency that should be furious. And yet you’d go to these networking meetings that unemployed white-collar people go to, and all you’d get is this positive-thinking message: It’s your attitude that determines everything that happens to you.
Do you see parallels at the level of political leadership?
Absolutely. I don’t think you could say you were a pessimist and win the American presidency any more than you could say you’re an atheist. Ronald Reagan was the first exemplar of idea that the purpose of the presidency was to lift everybody’s mood. And George W. Bush – well, he’d actually been a cheerleader at school.
Barack Obama has a reputation for being more open to critical thinking, so how does he fit himself to a positive-thinking world?
