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Book: Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
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  1. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Bright-Sided: How the

    Just as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective purpose at the microlevel of the "team". And the less teamlike the overall organization became with the threat of continuous downsizing, the more management insisted on individual devotion to these largely fictional units.
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  2. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Bright-Sided: How the

    We don't usually talk about American nationalism, but it is a mark of how deep it runs that we apply the word "nationalism" to Serbs, Russians, and others, while believing ourselves to possess a uniquely superior version called "patriotism.
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  3. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Bright-Sided: How the

    Yes, atheists pray in their foxholes-in this case, with a yearning new to me and sharp as lust, for a clean and honorable death by shark bite, lightning strike, sniper fire, car crash. Let me be hacked to death by a madman, was my silent supplication-anything but suffocation by the pink sticky sentiment embodied in that bear and oozing from the walls of the changing room. I didn't mind dying, but the idea that I should do so while clutching a teddy and with a sweet little smile on my face-well, no amount of philosophy had prepared me for that.
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  4. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Bright-Sided: How the

    As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: "What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid out own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self.
    book-quotepsychologycancerpositive-thinking

  5. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Bright-Sided: How the

    Purge everyone who "brings you down," and you risk being very lonely or, what is worse, cut off from reality.
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  6. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Bright-Sided: How the

    At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: 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.
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  7. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Bright-Sided: How the

    Sometimes 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.
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  8. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Bright-Sided: How the

    I couldn't help noticing that the existential space in which a friend had earnestly advised me to 'confront {my} mortality' bore a striking resemblance to the mall.
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  9. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Bright-Sided: How the

    Happiness, after all, is generally measured as reported satisfaction with one's life - a state of mind perhaps more accessible to those who are affluent, who conform to social norms, who suppress judgment in the service of faith, and who are not overly bothered by societal injustice...The real conservatism of positive psychology lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power. Positive psychologists' tests of happiness and well-being, for example, rest heavily on measures of personal contentment with things as they are.
    book-quotehappinesspsychologypositive-thinking

  10. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Bright-Sided: How the

    What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life {as demanded by motivational speaker J.P. Maroney}? It might be a good idea to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager.
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  11. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Bright-Sided: How the

    When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where despite the recent proliferation of courses on 'happiness' and 'positive psychology,' the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of *critical* thinking, and critical thinking is inherently skeptical. The best students -- and in good colleges, also the most successful -- are the ones who raise sharp questions, even at the risk of making a professor momentarily uncomfortable. Whether the subject is literature or engineering, graduates should be capable of challenging authority figures, going against the views of their classmates, and defending novel points of view.
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  12. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Bright-Sided: How the

    Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.
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