Savvy Women

I’ve long been a fan of Barbara Ehrenreich, author, progressive political activist, and contrarian extraordinaire. In this clip—excerpted from a much longer Fora.TV video–Ehrenreich discusses her views on the American tendency to always see the glass half full. Such “bright-sided” thinking, a kind of delusion that requires those who employ it to walk around with a smile plastered on their faces all the time, is a theme she fully explores in her 2010 book, Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America.

Actually, now that I think about it, this argument—that overly optimistic thinking is causing us to misdiagnose the causes of many of our most pressing problems and is then misdirecting us when we attempt to solve them—is one she makes time and again in an earlier bestseller, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, a work that looks at the results of “welfare reform” during the Clinton presidency. To understand how these reforms have impacted low-income Americans, Ehrenreich conducted an experiment and went undercover to live and work with those on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. (She accomplished this by spending a period of time employed as a minimum-wage waitress in a diner in small-town Florida.)

What she learned during this experience is that welfare reform was enacted by those who were under the influence of bright-sided thinking. Those legislators reasoned (completely incorrectly) that individuals receiving state assistance simply had to make their minds up to get a job, no matter how menial, and then their lives would miraculously improve as a result of them thinking more positively about their situation and then acting on it.

Ehrenreich has mentioned elsewhere that many in the public have been resistant to her critiques of what she sees as optimism run amuck in American culture. I’m not surprised to hear this either. I know that the promotion of the power of positive thinking has become a veritable industry in the states to the point that the idea has become a kind of sacred cow.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I really need to get my hands on a copy of Bright-Sided and to have a look at Ehrenreich’s full argument. I’m sure it will give me lots and lots to think about.