maven&meddler

I know that I’ve had a gutful of it (she said, sitting there at the keyboard with a freshly made martini. Natacha’s first attempt at making one…and with my gentle guidance, it’s superb).

Maybe you’re one of the few out there harboring some suspicions - but dare not express them openly - that perhaps the deluge of motivation that we’ve been subjected to over the last few decades is just horseshit.

My brilliant and perceptive step-daughter tuned me into the new book by Barbara Ehrenreich - ‘Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America’ - that deconstructs the lie of positive thinking as it has been practiced … no, actually marketed to America in the last 50 years or so.

Positive thinking may not be the only reason we’re in the mess we’re in, but it probably did a dandy job at lubing the ‘tool’.  If that’s the ‘picture’ you’re getting, good for you. You get it.

Some years back in another life, a good friend (who I’ve since forgiven for it ) tried to get me involved in the EST movement. That was just another horseshit get rich quick scheme by Werner H. (for horseshit) Ehrhard, built on the idea that we’re all sinners/losers and should jettison our negative friends, spouses, neighbors and employers for other true believers. It was hard to see this sort of thing being wildly successful in success driven, Mormon culture of Utah. After all that where Stephen Covey cut his teeth.

Think of it as Calvinism, Scientology and Norman Vincent Peale repackaged for a new hip generation.

The Scientologists still haven’t forgiven Werner, but I digress.

Like so many other big movements of the sort, it flamed out with a lot of divorces (got to jettison the old negative wife), disillusionment and some seriously screwed up people. A few got out with their grip on reality intact.

“Ehrenreich convinced me completely… I hesitate to say anything so positive as that this book will change the way you see absolutely everything; but it just might.”—Nora Ephron, The Daily Beast

“We’re always being told that looking on the bright side is good for us, but now we see that it’s a great way to brush off poverty, disease, and unemployment, to rationalize an order where all the rewards go to those on top. The people who are sick or jobless—why, they just aren’t thinking positively. They have no one to blame but themselves. Barbara Ehrenreich has put the menace of positive thinking under the microscope. Anyone who’s ever been told to brighten up needs to read this book.”—Thomas Frank, author of The Wrecking Crew and What’s the Matter with Kansas?

“Barbara Ehrenreich scores again for the independent-minded in resisting this drool and all those who wallow in it.”—Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

 

Over the succeeding years, I’ve had other ‘friends’ try to introduce me to the panopoly of motivational demi-gods from Tom Avery to Zig Ziglar. It’s like somebody trying to convince you to join their religion, which is probably why I’m so resistant to it. I’m an apostate Mormon. I’ve heard the best and walked away.

For the life of me, I can’t point to anything of enduring value that any of these assholes has actually created besides a fortune for themselves.

They market. They market to their followers, to each other, to you, to corporate America. They offer posters, books, tapes, tschotkes and hope, but not much else. They flourish when times are most difficult. The real classics, like Napoleon Hill, flourished during the last Great Depression.

They don’t do the hard work. They don’t research cancer cures. They don’t get Nobel Prizes for settling difficult international conflicts. They don’t feed the hungry. They do sell you crap telling you how to get rich and have good self-esteem.

Positive thinking and the workplace

Positive thinking and motivational speaking has supplanted actual leadership and innovation in America, particularly in corporate America. Tell your employees that they aren’t living up to ‘their goals’ because they don’t believe in ‘themselves’. Isn’t that rich?

Not only does it turn your employee into a victim, it absolves management of any responsibility for failure.

Positive thinking and breast cancer

But Ehrenreich had me hooked from the first with her first person account of being bright-sided as a breast cancer patient. You have to know, if you read this blog regularly, that I was all over that.

I felt really guilty for not going to the breast cancer support group meetings anymore. And I felt even worse for not attending ‘Moms on the Run’ ( a local big breast cancer event) and the Komen events. Something just felt wrong about it all.

Wrong as in equating a friend who succumbed to her breast cancer to an arts and crafts project - a white paper sack, decorated with glitter and glue gun. Gee, light that up during a breast cancer event and sense the what … urge to urp?

The overwhelming sense of misplaced ‘positive thinking’ became more than I could stand at these events, and the whole breast cancer ‘industry’ of more cute little books, stuffed animals, pink ribbons, rhinestones and PINK!!!!

Good intentions became more about marketing than about saving lives.

If each and every day is relentlessly wonderful, how do I deal with the really bad things? Things like death or a cancer diagnosis. There’s no real way to put a happy face on that, unless you’re fucking delusional.

Perhaps we can only truly appreciate the great or even just good days, but having some good old crappy ones. Wallowing in some good old fashioned negativity. That’s what I told the EST lady way back in the day.

Anyway, if you, too, have had your little niggling doubts about all this ‘postive thinking’, you’ll want to read this book.

Maybe then we can also take America back from the motivational hucksters, and get back to the doing.

Tell Oprah, Phil, Deepak and Weil to go fuck themselves.

maven