if early capitalism was inhospitable to positive thinking, “late” capitalism, or consumer capitalism, is far more congenial, depending as it does on the individual’s hunger for more and the firm’s imperative of growth.

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

Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things “as they are,” or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions.

The middle and upper classes came to see busyness for its own sake as a mark of status in the 1980s and 1990s, which was convenient, because employers were demanding more and more of them, especially once new technologies ended the division between work and private life: the cell phone is always within reach; the laptop comes home every evening.

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.

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.

But we cannot levitate ourselves into that blessed condition by wishing it. We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.

The consumer culture encourages individuals to want more—cars, larger homes, television sets, cell phones, gadgets of all kinds—and positive thinking is ready at hand to tell them they deserve more and can have it if they really want it and are willing to make the effort to get it.

It’s in the spirit of optimism that a person blithely builds up credit card debt on optional expenditures, takes out a second mortgage, or agrees to a mortgage with an interest rate that will escalate over time. And the ideology of positive thinking eagerly fanned this optimism and the sense of entitlement that went with it.