Excellent critical Barbara Ehrenreich's book . Jenni Murray applauds a delayed demolition of the suggestion that positive thinking is the answer to our problems 
" Smile or die, the trap of positive thinking ( Smile or Die, How Positive Thinking Fooled America and The World, 2009)
Barbara Ehrenreich is a renowned essayist and social activist born in the United States in 1941. He has a doctorate in biology and has published several books on the fighting line.
Once in a while a book that rings both your own thought, and yet fly so spectacularly against the fashionable philosophy , which comes as a relief deeply reassuring.
After reading the book feel like I could wallow in the pain, sadness, disappointment or any negative emotion that comes naturally without worrying about having become that stereotype terrible, grumpy, grumpy old.
is, I can be merely human, someone who does not have to be convinced that every rejection or disaster is a golden opportunity to "move on" optimistically.
Ehrenreich came to critical industry billions of dollars of positive thinking ( a flood of books, DVDs, life instructors, coaches, executives and speakers motivation) unfortunate circumstances similar to those I had.
was diagnosed with breast cancer and, like me, found himself increasingly uncomfortable with the martial language and culture "rose" that has come to surround this disease.
When I found l a brigade of "positive attitude will help the uchar and survive this experience," my answer was protest against the use of military vocabulary and ask how miserable the optimism of the "survivors " would make felt the poor woman who was dying.
Ehrenreich presents evidence of numerous studies showing that positive thinking has no effect on survival rates and offers sad testimony from women who have been devastated by what one researcher has called "an additional burden to an already devastated patient."
What a shame, for example, the woman who wrote the medical guru mind / body Deepak Chopra: "Although I follow the treatments, and have come away discharging harmful feelings, I have forgiven everyone, I changed my lifestyle to include meditation, prayer, diet, exercise and supplements, cancer is playing. Is there a lesson here that I do not understand, which continue to appear? 'm positive and I will beat him, however, with each diagnosis is more difficult to maintain a positive attitude. "
As Ehrenreich goes on to explain, the exhortations to think positively (see the glass half full even when you're smashed on the floor) are not limited to culture breast cancer pink. She referred to the susceptibility of the United States to the philosophy of positive thinking Calvinist past of the country and shows how, in its early days, a Puritan requiring constant effort and self-examination to the point of hating himself " terrorizing small children and pushing a" previously healthy adults to a morbid condition of withdrawal, usually marked by physical illness and domestic terror. "
only in the early 19 th century began to disappear and Calvinist clouds of gloom began to grow a new movement that would have an entourage as fervent as had been the last.
was the union of two thinkers, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy, in the 1860, which led to the formulation of a vision of post-Calvinist world, known as the New Thought Movement.
He imagined a new kind of God was no longer hostile and indifferent, but a omnipotent spirit that humans were merely that access to control the physical world.
middle-class women found it particularly beneficial to this new style of thought that became known as the "laws of attraction." Denied any chance to fight in the world, spent his days were excluded from any other role than to lie in a hammock, but the focus of New Thought and "talk therapy" developed by Quimby opened up exciting new possibilities.
Mary Baker Eddy, a beneficiary of the priest, founded Christian Science. Ehrenreich notes that while this new style of positive thinking helped in the apparent helplessness or neurasthenia, had no effect on diseases such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera - and not today cure cancer.
Thus
positive thinking, the assumption that there is only one thing to think or want it to happen, began its rapid ascent to be influential.
Today, as Ehrenreich shows, has a huge impact on business, religion and the world economy. Describes visits to conferences where workers motivational speakers who just got laid off and forced to become part of the culture of short-term contracts are taught that a "good team player" is, by definition, "a person positive "to" smile often does not complain is not overtly judgmental and gratefully submit to any requirement of the head .
These are people who are increasingly less able to chart their own future , but thanks to positive thinking gives them "a world view-a belief system, almost a religion, which assures them that would be made infinitely powerful with just being able to control their own minds ."
And no one has been more vulnerable the temptation of this philosophy that self-styled "masters of the universe " Wall Street bankers .
Those of us educated to believe that saving, have an account and live with the media itself was the way to proceed, and who wonder how the hell was reduced credit and subprime disasters occurred, need not look beyond the culture that says that positive thinking allows anyone to fulfill their wishes. (Or, as one of the titles of the chapters of Ehrenreich's book: "God wants you rich".)
Ehrenreich's work began explains where the cult of individualism and the devastating impact it has had on the lack of collective responsibility .
We must, he says, letting go of our self-absorption capacity and take action against the threats we face, whether conflict, feeding the hungry, the funding of scientific research or education to nurture critical thinking.
is disturbed by emphasizing that "not written in a spirit of bitterness or personal disappointment, and I have no romantic attachment to suffering as a source of knowledge or virtue.
On the contrary, I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness ... and the first step is how to recover the mass delusion that is positive thinking. " His book, I think, is a call for the return of common sense and, I fear, in what purports to be a work of critical I can only find positive things to say about it. Damn!
For English we are a relatively new phenomenon, although many years ago and gave lectures on "Dale Carnegie" but
nothing like what is happening with few years ago.
The author demonstrates the intrinsic evil of this kind of thinking when applied in a dogmatic way by companies and as an excuse to cut staff or to maintain a state of constant vigilance on the state of employee morale or to divert the frustration of people did not conclictivas areas (unemployment as an opportunity ).
Centered United States but with global implications. This is a comprehensive text that covers various areas, businesses, a historical look, the megaigleias, positive psychology, the current crisis as a result of overconfidence perhaps motivated by positive thinking, etc.
Like everything that has a great success, the theory of positive thinking is a part that is true. always better to have an optimistic attitude to ashes, but without losing the sense of perspective about our chances and the need for efforts to achieve our goals.
