Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America

So the seeker who embraces positive theology finds him- or herself in a seamless, self-enclosed world, stretching from workplace to mall to corporate-style church. Everywhere, he or she hears the same message—that you can have all that stuff in the mall, as well as the beautiful house and car, if only you believe that you can. But always, in a hiss

We’ve gone so far down this yellow brick road that “positive” seems to us not only normal but normative—the way you should be.

The Calvinism brought by white settlers to New England could be described as a system of socially imposed depression.

America has historically offered space for all sorts of sects, cults, faith healers, and purveyors of snake oil, and those that are profitable, like positive thinking, tend to flourish.

The advice that you must change your environment—for example, by eliminating negative people and news—is an admission that there may in fact be a “real world” out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes. In the face of this terrifying possibility, the only “positive” response is to withdraw into one’s own carefully constructed world of const