mainly for the reaction to positive thinking being used against you, but don’t click the link too rigidly focused on this topic because it’s a brilliant song in it’s own right.

But to change the subject a bit. BS is offensive in large part because it used by the more fortunate against the less. The Left has a lot of tools for picking that kind of thing apart. It seems to me the Right has fewer.

This bothers me. It suggests that pain etc. requires the more fortunate among us to treat the less fortunate like children rather than equal adults. My anti-paternalism instincts scream… I see no closure on this.

Farhat: re: MLM, Amway is also treated to a skewering in the book

Xianhang: you seem to be describing quality of basic existence/survival conditions. I think this conversation is largely at higher levels of the Maslow pyramid where relative deprivation operates rather than absolute well-being variables. I have some posts cued up that explore what you are bringing up, in greater detail.

When I was first confronted with the load of crap called multi-level-marketing, my first thought was how does the cash flow work out in the system. Amazingly when I asked the guy about it he said I was engaging in ‘stinking thinking’ and that reduces the likelihood of making things work. I should just have faith that things will work and give them a try. Since my mind doesn’t work that way I suggested he find other victims and we part ways.

IMO, to claim otherwise is to have a blinkered view of history.

Now on more qualitative issues like happiness, there’s more room to quibble.

Re: your second point about affluence, I’d say it is partially correct. The ‘spectacular success’ has been less about success per se, and more about nicely isolating the people who enjoy the benefits from those who must pay the costs (direct economic as well as social costs/externalities). It used to be slavery/mercantilism and colonialism. Now it is a more basic out-of-sight-out-of-mind impact on hidden third world economies, the poor etc.

I think where I part ways with Ehrenreich in reacting to these realities is that I don’t think the left-liberal approach to solving these problems will work. Corporations have to be part of the solution, not blackballed as the ‘problem.’ Corporatism is actually value-agnostic, and if you can bring hidden costs into the cash economy, the market will accommodate those costs. After all, industry did move away from slave labor and reorganize around new models once the social costs were put into the equations.

The junk food analogy and the mental/physical obesity idea… you read my mind. I’ve thought of that exact metaphor as well.

Ben: I guess I am not always happy about people knowingly playing fast and loose with truths to gain the rhetorical upper hand and influence those who can’t be influenced by honest arguments.

But I suppose there are people who won’t get it without the ‘activist’ mode of influence. On both sides of the political fence.
Venkat

Until modern times, nobody but the upper class was ever really overweight. The structure of society made it so that you got sufficient strenuous labor to keep the pounds off. In the same way, your brain also had sufficient exposure to the viciousness of nature not to ever be allowed to not think unpleasant thoughts.

Nowadays, society has become comfortable enough that, if you want to, you can become flabby in both mind & body. For most people, the structure of their lives is such that if they want exercise, they have to consciously choose to do it.

What I’ve also noticed is that different people seem to have different preternatural comfort levels with thinking unpleasant thoughts. One one extreme of the spectrum is people for which it was almost a compulsion to seek to think the most unpleasantest thoughts possible to work that muscle as much as they can. For these people, it’s sometimes hard to imagine that the vast majority of the world doesn’t operate in this fashion.

tldr: positive thinking is mental junk food that makes you fat & happy. We can only afford to indulge in it because of the spectacular success of modern society.

“literature leaves the naturally skeptical among us doubtful” – i love that!

Ehrenreich is an activist. Pretty good at that craft actually. Knowledge work is a different trade. It’s a fair critique that it’s hard getting at the K when the author is practicing A.

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