Barbara Ehrenreich - Smile or Die: How Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Undermined America

[99th_Monkey]

13. This is an awesomely important piece of work. Thanks Barbara!

It also dovetails nicely with an interview with a recent interview of Chris Hedges, from which
I've excerpted a few paragraphs:

"We stand on the cusp of one of the most seismic and disturbing dislocations in human history, one that is radically reconfiguring our economy as it is the environment, and our national obsessions, because of these electronic hallucinations, revolve around the trivial and the absurd. The illusionists who shape our culture, and who profit from our incredulity, hold up the gilded cult of Us. Popular expressions of religious belief, personal empowerment, corporatism, political participation and self-definition argue that all of us are special, entitled and unique. All of us, by tapping into our inner reserves of personal will and undiscovered talent, by visualizing what we want, can achieve, and deserve to achieve, happiness, fame and success. It is, of course, magical thinking. ....

All we have, as Vaclav Havel wrote, is our own powerlessness. And that powerlessness is our strength. The survival of the movement depends on embracing this powerlessness. It depends on two of our most important assets - utter and complete transparency and a rigid adherence to nonviolence, including respect for private property. This permits us, as Havel puts it in his 1978 essay "The Power of the Powerless," to live in truth. And by living in truth we expose a corrupt corporate state that perpetrates lies and lives in deceit."

Whole Interview here: http://www.alternet.org/books/why-chris-hedges-believes-serious-revolt-only-option-people-have-left?akid=9330.35035.FyollR&rd=1&src=newsletter703564&t=12&paging=off