TOW #24: Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America by Barbara Ehrenreich (IRB, written)

This week, i finished Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America. Unlike the first half of the book where she bashes out about how positive thinking is ruining the society and there is nothing positive about positive thinking, she actually talks about how negative thinking has the same effect as positive thinking. She actually claims that neither positive nor negative thinking is good. She says that one sided thinking and partial thinking is detrimental. She tries to redeem herself from her previous invective on positive thinking by arguing that realism is what people actually need. Additionally, to address her point that positive thinking is not only harmful for cancer patients but also for every individual, she uses anecdote and exemplification. She first uses anecdote when explaining how positive thinking has destructive effects to cancer patients by giving them false hopes and taking away their ability to prepare for the harsh truth.  She claims that as a former cancer patient herself, going through cancer made her realize "an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate." In addition, she uses hypothetical exemplification to address her point that thinking positively is only detrimental. She explains, "you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.” With this hypothetical example, she makes readers realize that being clinical is what people need when looking at an issue. I personally think her arguments are a bit too harsh and radical. With topics like cancer, she needs to be more careful about the reader's feelings and how they would perceive her claims but she does not hesitate to outrageously claim that positive thinking gives patients false hopes. Although she did respond to counter arguments by claiming that negative thinking is also harmful, her methods were insufficient in settling the controversy of her argument.  If she did not note positive thinking, her arguments would have been less effective. She states that "we need to heed our fears and negative thoughts, and at all times we need to be alert to the world outside ourselves, even when that includes absorbing bad news and entertaining the views of “negative” people" but this point of view is way too pessimistic for the audience to agree.