Capítulo 4
The Calvinist Roots of American Optimism
Americans didn't adopt positive thinking because their geography naturally encouraged optimism. Rather, it emerged as a direct reaction against the oppressive Calvinism that early settlers brought to New England. This harsh religion imposed what could be called "socially enforced depression," with its conception of an all-powerful, hateful God who had predetermined most souls for damnation.
The faithful lived in constant anxiety, examining their "loathsome abominations" for signs of their spiritual fate, finding relief only through ceaseless labor. Elements of this punitive worldview persisted into modern American culture through workaholic tendencies and the glorification of busyness as virtue, particularly among the middle and upper classes.
For colonial Americans, Calvinism's psychological burden was often unbearable, causing terror in children and "religious melancholy" in adults that sometimes led to suicide. The harsh conditions of the New World, with its "hideous and desolate wilderness," likely intensified rather than relieved these religious anxieties.
Only in the early nineteenth century did this gloom begin to lift, as expanding frontiers, economic opportunities, and intellectual ferment allowed Americans to reimagine their spiritual condition. Out of this environment emerged figures like Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy, whose meeting in the 1860s launched what would become the positive thinking movement.
New Thought, as this philosophy was called, directly rebuked Calvinism by envisioning God not as hostile but as an all-encompassing Spirit or Mind of which humans were part. This made sin impossible and disease merely an "error" of thought. The philosophy offered the thrilling possibility that humans could access divine power to control the physical world.
New Thought proved particularly effective against "neurasthenia," a debilitating condition characterized by back problems, digestive troubles, exhaustion, headaches, and melancholy that plagued nineteenth-century America, particularly affecting middle-class women and clergymen. Conventional medicine offered no effective treatments and often made things worse through harmful interventions like bleeding patients or enforcing weeks of bed rest in darkened rooms.
By the early twentieth century, as scientific medicine began making New Thought healing seem obsolete, positive thinking advocates shifted focus to promoting success and wealth. Yet positive thinking preserved some of Calvinism's toxic features-harsh judgmentalism echoing the condemnation of sin, and relentless self-examination. The most striking continuity between Calvinism and positive thinking is their common insistence on internal self-monitoring-Calvinists watching for sin, positive thinkers vigilant against "negative thoughts."
This creates a curious self-alienation: one part of the self must work on another part, requiring endless rules, worksheets and exercises for "reprogramming." Achieving and maintaining a positive attitude demands constant, exhausting work-reading positive material daily, reciting affirmations, and obsessive self-maintenance that ironically echoes Calvinism's demands for perpetual self-examination.
Capítulo 5
Corporate America's Motivation Machine
A vast industry has emerged to promote positive thinking, selling "motivation" in various forms-books, CDs, DVDs, coaching sessions, seminars, and merchandise emblazoned with inspirational messages. While individuals buy these products, particularly those facing illness, unemployment or risky careers, the motivation industry's primary market is corporate America. Companies purchase motivational materials in bulk and pay five-figure fees to speakers, making motivation a multibillion-dollar business.
Salespeople naturally gravitate to positive thinking due to their isolated existence-cut off from headquarters, facing constant rejection, and needing to generate fresh enthusiasm for each new customer interaction. Despite their crucial role in persuading people to buy things they don't know they need, salespeople receive little respect. Norman Vincent Peale specifically ministered to this "lonely man in the motel room," seeing himself as "God's salesman."
Through most of the twentieth century, managers saw themselves as rational professionals trained in "management science," reflecting middle-class faith that problems would yield to scientific approaches. Then came the downsizing wave of the 1980s, when companies began "restructuring" and eliminating as many jobs as possible. The corporate world shifted from loyalty to workers and communities toward a singular focus on shareholder profits.
As corporations became mere "aggregations of financial assets" to be plundered at will, high-level managers realized they were as expendable as anyone else. Yet they had one advantage: stock options and golden parachutes that offered potential wealth amid the turmoil. This combination of danger and potential reward created a wave of giddiness among America's managerial class.
Rejecting thoughtful professional management, they embraced intuition, snap judgments, and hunches. Business gurus like Tom Peters celebrated this shift, declaring "Things are moving too fast for us to sort out logically what's going on." Corporate America embraced a wild array of spiritual practices-shamanic healing journeys, vision quests, Native American healing circles, Buddhist seminars, and fire walking.
Between 1981 and 2003, about thirty million full-time American workers lost their jobs in corporate downsizings. With minimal safety nets, many formerly middle-class people tumbled into low-wage jobs or destitution. The motivation industry couldn't repair this reality-it could only change how people thought about it, recasting corporate restructuring as "exhilarating change" and job loss as "opportunity."
Companies hired motivational speakers for an ever-growing number of corporate meetings to manage "change"-a euphemism for layoffs and the increased workload imposed on survivors. Business self-help books like "Who Moved My Cheese?" taught downsized workers to adopt a "rodentlike approach"-don't analyze or complain, just scamper along to the next job.
The actual layoff process became swift and brutal, with companies using euphemisms like "releases of resources" or "career-change opportunities." For the anxious survivors of layoffs, companies turned to "team building"-an effort to create fervent company devotion even as firms threatened to eliminate workers. The message was clear: a good "team player" is a "positive person" who smiles frequently, doesn't complain, and submits to whatever management demands.
Most white-collar workers "drank the Kool-Aid" and accepted positive thinking as a substitute for their former security. Positive thinking promised them a sense of control in a chaotic world where the "cheese" was always moving. Though they had less actual power over their futures, they embraced a worldview claiming they were infinitely powerful-if only they could master their own minds.
Capítulo 6
God Wants You to Be Rich: Prosperity Gospel's Rise
While the Christian right gained attention for its fire-and-brimstone approach in the late twentieth century, a friendlier theology was steadily gaining ground-positive thinking disguised as Christianity. By the early 21st century, this approach dominated America's most successful churches, especially the rapidly growing megachurches, which doubled to 1,210 between 2001-2006, with combined congregations of nearly 4.4 million.
Instead of sin and suffering, this new theology offers promises of wealth, success, and health in this life. A 2006 Time poll found 17 percent of American Christians considered themselves part of a "prosperity gospel" movement, with 61 percent agreeing that "God wants people to be prosperous." The key to manifesting this prosperity isn't prayer but positive thinking-sermons resembling motivational speeches focus on "how to live a successful life" with encouraging phrases like "Keep a good attitude" and "Don't get negative."
Joel Osteen exemplifies this new positive Christianity. Though lacking theological training, he inherited and dramatically expanded his father's church to 40,000 weekly attendees and $1 million in weekly income. The Osteens' Lakewood Church, housed in Houston's former Compaq Center, resembles a suburban multiplex theater with no visible Christian symbols in the main areas.
When the Osteens take the stage for Sunday service, they receive a standing ovation. The service features sophisticated production values-extremely loud Christian rock alternating with short speeches, all choreographed with changing colored lights and video screens. During one visit, the service celebrated Victoria Osteen's court victory over a flight attendant who had sued her over an incident involving a stain on her first-class seat. Both Osteens presented this as "a victory for God's kingdom," with Victoria jumping for joy and declaring she had "placed a banner of victory" over her head.
Though positive preachers retain decorative touches from Christianity, their theology traces directly to nineteenth-century New Thought rather than traditional Christian doctrine. The prosperity message particularly resonated with African Americans eager to transform civil rights gains into upward mobility. Harlem-based "Reverend Ike" discovered what he called "Mind Science" from New Thought literature and taught that poverty resulted from wrong attitudes while flaunting his fleet of mink-appointed Cadillacs.
The business-oriented approach to Christianity begins with market research rather than theological principles. Pastors discovered people didn't want traditional "church" but rather entertainment and services. They replaced hard pews with comfortable theater seats, interspersed sermons with contemporary music, and notably, removed traditional Christian symbols like crosses, steeples, and images of Jesus that might "intimidate or frighten visitors."
These megachurches are typically designed to blend seamlessly into their corporate-style environments, abandoning the distinctive architecture of traditional churches in favor of secular-looking buildings that resemble "suburban banks or school buildings." The pastors themselves increasingly function as CEOs, managing multi-million dollar enterprises with hundreds of employees. They adopt corporate management styles, complete with mission statements, management teams, and consulting arms.
The relationship between corporations and churches has become reciprocal-while churches became more corporate, corporations have become more church-like, with charismatic leaders claiming almost mystical powers. The result is a seamless world for churchgoers stretching from workplace to mall to corporate-style church, all delivering the same message: believe you can have it all, and if you don't, you have only yourself to blame.
Capítulo 7
The Science of Happiness: Positive Psychology's Promise
In 1997, Martin Seligman, self-described "dyed-in-the-wool pessimist" and "grouch," was elected president of the American Psychological Association. Shortly after taking office, he proposed "positive psychology" as the theme of his presidency-the scientific study of optimism, happiness, fulfillment, and "flow."
Until then, positive thinking had gained little academic credibility, with intellectuals mocking Norman Vincent Peale and academics dismissing his successors' ideas as pop cultural ephemera. But Seligman's position and his ability to attract foundation funding changed everything. Suddenly, respected psychologists began producing academic papers linking optimism and happiness to desirable outcomes like health and career success, publishing in the new Journal of Happiness Studies.
The media embraced this "science of happiness," giving it magazine cover stories and regular newspaper coverage. For motivational speakers and self-help entrepreneurs, this academic validation was a godsend, allowing them to replace appeals to God or the law of attraction with the authoritative phrase "studies show..."
Positive psychology's central claim mirrors that of positive thinking generally: happiness isn't just desirable but useful, leading to better health and greater success. Happy people do seem more successful at work, getting more interviews, positive evaluations, and career advancement. But this likely reflects corporate bias favoring positive attitudes rather than any intrinsic advantage of happiness.
The health benefits claim stands on shakier ground. While many studies show correlations between happiness and health, they don't establish causality. Several studies even suggest pessimism can be healthier than optimism. One found mildly depressed women live longer; another showed optimistic children died earlier in middle age; and a study co-authored by Seligman himself found older pessimists were less likely to fall into depression after negative life events.
The Templeton Foundation has been a major financial supporter of positive psychology, contributing $2.2 million to Seligman's Positive Psychology Center and about $1.3 million to various research projects. Founded by billionaire investor Sir John Templeton, the foundation is best known for trying to place religion on equal intellectual footing with science. Templeton himself was a devotee of Norman Vincent Peale and a minor positive-thinking guru, writing several self-help books.
By 2007, positive psychology was thriving academically, with over 200 colleges offering courses (sometimes called "Happiness 101"), including Harvard's wildly popular introductory course that drew 855 students. Yet beneath this success lay growing anxiety about the field's scientific foundations. At the Sixth International Positive Psychology Summit, British academic Ilona Boniwell admitted that "a lot of results are presented as stronger than they are" and "the science of positive psychology has not necessarily caught up with the promise."
These concerns erupted when Seligman himself announced to the summit that his theory of positive psychology was "completely wrong" because happiness is "scientifically unwieldy." This created consternation among attendees, with some questioning how to balance empirical research with applications like coaching. The discussion ultimately veered from scientific concerns to branding and career opportunities, with one attendee suggesting renaming the field "applied behavioral economics" because "it's popular in business schools and goes with high salaries."
Capítulo 8
How Positive Thinking Crashed the Economy
As the first decade of the twenty-first century progressed, positive thinking reached unprecedented levels in America, with millions visualizing wealth, success, and material abundance. Yet in defiance of the "law of attraction," economic conditions were worsening for most Americans.
The poor remained poor and even increased in numbers, with "low-wage" families rising to 25% of all families with children between 2002-2006, despite economic growth. The working class saw wages decline and decent manufacturing jobs disappear, while the white-collar middle class faced elimination of pensions and health benefits, job insecurity, and increasing "income volatility" from layoffs and downsizing.
Meanwhile, wealth concentrated dramatically at the top, making America the most economically polarized First World society, even more divided than during the 1920s. The share of pretax income going to the top 1% rose by 7 percentage points from 1979 to 2007, reaching 16%, while the bottom 80% saw their share fall by the same amount-essentially transferring $7,000 from each household in the bottom 80% to the top 1%.
While economic experts maintained nearly unanimous optimism about ever-rising housing prices and stock markets, ordinary Americans embraced a similar outlook that led to reckless debt accumulation. Robert Reich observed that American optimism explains "why we spend so much and save so little" and our "willingness to go deep into debt."
The ideology of positive thinking encouraged this behavior. The Secret taught followers they could "manifest" material desires, while prosperity preachers like Joel Osteen insisted God wanted believers to have beautiful homes. Some religious scholars even suggested prosperity theology contributed to the subprime mortgage crisis by convincing low-income people that "God caused the bank to ignore my credit score."
The recklessness of borrowers was exceeded by that of lenders, as American corporate culture had abandoned rational management for emotional thrills, mysticism, and sudden intuitions. At Lehman Brothers, Mike Gelband was fired in 2006 for warning CEO Richard Fuld that "the world is changing" and they needed to "rethink our business model." Two years later, Lehman went bankrupt, with Fuld still wandering through his five houses wondering how it all went "disastrously wrong."
Corporate leaders had ascended into a bubble of extreme wealth and isolation. Between 1965 and 2000, the ratio of CEO pay to that of typical workers soared from 24:1 to 300:1. This lifestyle created what crisis manager Dezenhall calls "bubble-itis"-extreme isolation where subordinates only bring good news, not honest reports.
Steve Eisman describes the executive mindset as "hedge fund disease"-a combination of "megalomania, plus narcissism, plus solipsism." When you're worth $500 million, "how could you be wrong about anything? To think something is to make it happen. You're God." This is precisely the state of mind promoted by positive thinking gurus from Mary Baker Eddy to Joel Osteen. Corporate chiefs had cynically recommended positive thinking to their underlings but eventually came to believe it themselves, with the result that about $3 trillion in savings evaporated.
Market fundamentalism was itself a form of runaway positive thinking-the belief that markets are self-correcting and need no regulation. Even Alan Greenspan eventually admitted his shocked disbelief that lending institutions failed to protect shareholders' equity. The market had achieved deity status, related to Mary Baker Eddy's benevolent, all-supplying universe.
Capítulo 9
Beyond Positive Thinking: The Case for Realism
We've gone so far down the "positive" path that it now seems normative-the way one should be. We use "positive" and "good" almost interchangeably, creating a moral system where either you look on the bright side or "go over to the dark side."
Yet the alternative to positive thinking isn't despair. Negative thinking can be equally delusional-depressed people project misery onto the world and imagine worst outcomes. In both cases, emotion distorts perception. The real alternative is trying to see things "as they are," understanding that the world contains both danger and opportunity.
Human survival has always depended on empiricism. Prehistoric humans couldn't rely on omens or supernatural reassurance that arrowheads would pierce bison hide or rafts would float-they had to be sure through careful study and experimentation. Though humans have been guided by superstitions and mystical visions, we advanced through practical knowledge-the strength of knots, sturdiness of shelters, sharpness of spearheads.
The Enlightenment represents our tenuous understanding that the world unfolds according to its own algorithms of cause and effect, without regard for human feelings. Despite decades of positive thinking, realism persists. When stakes are high, we still turn to people who prepare for worst-case scenarios. Even optimistic Ronald Reagan invoked realism when dealing with the Soviets: "Trust, but verify."
In our daily lives, we all rely on "defensive pessimism" to get through the day. Drivers anticipate others cutting them off. We prefer doctors who investigate dire possibilities rather than settling on optimistic diagnoses. Even in relationships, vigilance is recommended-you may project positivity to attract someone, but you're advised to Google them too. Child-rearing demands constant anxious vigilance-visualizing potential dangers is how we've successfully reproduced our genomes.
Critical thinking, inherently skeptical, remains the goal of higher education. Good students raise sharp questions and challenge authority, precisely what positive thinking gurus warn against. As surgeon Atul Gawande notes, whether fighting cancer or workplace problems, "the key is actually negative thinking: looking for, and sometimes expecting, failure."
Positive thinking has served as a tool of political repression worldwide. In Iran under the Shah, Soviet-style communism, and other authoritarian regimes, forced optimism became a means of social control. American positive thinking differs mainly in being self-imposed rather than state-enforced.
This burden can finally be put down. Vigilant realism doesn't foreclose happiness; it makes it possible. How can we improve our situation without addressing actual circumstances? Positive thinking dismisses real-world problems as "excuses," but mind doesn't automatically prevail over matter.
Poverty remains the most routine obstacle to human happiness globally. Happiness surveys consistently show the world's happiest countries tend to be among the richest. The economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind.
Happiness isn't guaranteed even to the affluent and successful. But that doesn't mean we find it by journeying inward to revise our thoughts. The threats we face are real and can be vanquished only by shaking off self-absorption and taking action. Build levees, feed the hungry, find cures! We won't succeed at everything, but we can have a good time trying.
