"Positive thinking" doesn't achieve anything. People need to be realists, whether it is about their health or personal situation or about the country and world at large.
It's especially vicious when it is corporate America which is promoting this horseshit:
EW: You write a lot about how positive thinking is in all aspects of life. Do you think this is the most insidious about it -- this idea of a disease being your fault?
BE: I look at it with a little bit of sociological detachment. It's a brilliant system of social control. When bad things happen to people you say, "Well, it's really your attitude that has to change."
The second big place where I encountered all this was in the kind of motivational services that are offered to laid-off white-collar workers, where every networking event or seminar you get the same message about how it's really your attitude that is going to determine if you're going to get a job and probably has something to do with why you lost that last one.
You take people who have been really victimized, and I use that word advisedly, with cancer and with lay-offs from unaccountable corporations. And then you tell them, "Well, you just have to change the way you think." And that's very clever.
"Positive thinking" doesn't stop things happening because they are structural in nature.
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