Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Elements of Calvinism, without the theology, persisted and even flourished in American culture well into the late twentieth century and beyond. 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. “Multitasking” entered the vocabulary, along with the new problem of ‘workaholism.’ While earlier elites had flaunted their leisure, the comfortable classes of our own time are eager to display evidence of their exhaustion—always ‘in the loop,’ always available for a conference call, always ready to go ‘the extra mile.’ In academia, where you might expect people to have more control over their workload hour by hour, the notion of overwork as virtue reaches almost religious dimensions. Professors boast of being ‘crazed’ by their multiple responsibilities; summer break offers no vacation, only an opportunity for frantic research and writing. I once visited a successful academic couple in their Cape Cod summer home, where they proudly showed me how their living room had been divided into his-and-her work spaces. Deviations from their routine—work, lunch, work, afternoon run—provoked serious unease, as if they sensed that it would be all too easy to collapse into complete and sinful indolence.

— Barbara Ehrenreich,
Bright-Sided (chapter 3)

“[T]hose who are placed in positions which demand the surrender of personality, which insist on strict conformity to definite political policies and opinions, must deteriorate, must become mechanical, must lose all capacity to give anything really vital. The world is full of such unfortunate cripples. Their dream is to ‘arrive,’ no matter at what cost. If only we would stop to consider what it means to ‘arrive,’ we would pity the unfortunate victim. Instead of that, we look to the artist, the poet, the writer, the dramatist and thinker who have ‘arrived,’ as the final authority on all matters, whereas in reality their ‘arrival’ is synonymous with mediocrity, with the denial and betrayal of what might in the beginning have meant something real and ideal. The ‘arrived’ artists are dead souls upon the intellectual horizon. The uncompromising and daring spirits never ‘arrive.’ Their life represents an endless battle with the stupidity and the dullness of their time. They must remain what Nietzsche calls ‘untimely,’ because everything that strives for new form, new expression or new values, is always doomed to be untimely.”

— Emma Goldman,
Intellectual Proletarians

“The people who give themselves up to manual labor are never promoted to public offices, and with good reason. The greater part of them, condemned to be seated the whole day long, some even to endure the heat of the fire continually, cannot fail to be changed in body, and it is almost inevitable that the mind be affected.”

— Xenophon, Economics

“Work takes all the time and with it one has no leisure for the republic and his friends.”

— Xenophon

Knaves, who in full assemblies have the knack

Of turning truth to lies, and white to black,

Can hire large houses, and oppress the poor

By farmed excise; can cleanse the common-shore,

And rent the fishery; can bear the dead,

And teach their eyes dissembled tears to shed;

All this for gain; for gain they sell their very head.

— Juvenal, Satire III

The poor were wise, who, by the rich oppressed,

Withdrew, and sought a secret place of rest.


Once they did well, to free themselves from scorn;

But had done better, never to return.


Rarely they rise by virtue's aid, who lie

Plunged in the depth of helpless poverty.


At Rome 'tis worse, where house-rent by the year,

And servants' bellies, cost so devilish dear,

And tavern-bills run high for hungry cheer.

— Juvenal, Satire III

“Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.”

— Étienne de la Boétie,
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

But scarce observ’d, the knowing and the bold,

Fall in the gen’ral massacre of gold;

Wide-wasting pest! that rages unconfin’d,

And crowds with crimes the records of mankind;

For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws,

For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws;

Wealth heap’d on wealth, nor truth nor safety buys,

The dangers gather as the treasures rise.

— Samuel Johnson,
The Vanity of Human Wishes

Let hist’ry tell where rival kings command,

And dubious title shakes the madded land,

When statutes glean the refuse of the sword,

How much more safe the vassal than the lord:

Low sculks the hind beneath the rage of pow’r,

And leaves the wealthy traitor in the Tow’r,

Untouch’d his cottage, and his slumbers sound,

Tho’ confiscation’s vultures hover round.

— Samuel Johnson,
The Vanity of Human Wishes

“It is a great piece of folly to sacrifice the inner for the outer man, to give up the whole or the greater part of one's quiet, leisure and independence for splendor, rank, pomp, titles and honor.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer,
The Wisdom of Life (chapter 2)

“No sooner does a divine gift reveal itself in youth or maid than its market value becomes the decisive consideration, and the poor young creatures are offered for sale, as we might sell angels who had strayed among us.”

— John L. Spalding,
Aphorisms and Reflections (p. 21)

“If a state should pass laws forbidding its citizens to become wise and holy, it would be made a byword for all time. But this, in effect, is what our commercial, social, and political systems do. They compel the sacrifice of mental and moral power to money and dissipation.”

— John L. Spalding,
Aphorisms and Reflections (p. 62)

“Mercenary is whoever thinks less of his work than of the money he receives for doing it; and social conditions which impose tasks that make this inevitable are barbarous.”

— John L. Spalding,
Aphorisms and Reflections (p. 168)

“No pure delight cheers the farmer whose mind is intent on the price he shall get for his crops rather than on the joy there is in tilling them and seeing them grow and ripen: for such an one does not love the land nor his home nor any of the most beautiful and sacred things, but tends to become like the brute that eats and sleeps and dies. His thoughts are with what feeds the animal, and that which nourishes the human is hidden from him.”

— John L. Spalding,
Aphorisms and Reflections (p. 168)

“If between the slaves and slave-owners of today it is difficult to draw as sharp a dividing line as that which separated the former slaves from their masters, and if among the slaves of today there are some who are only temporarily slaves and then become slave-owners, or some who, at one and the same time, are slaves and slave-owners, this blending of the two classes at their points of contact does not upset the fact that the people of our time are divided into slaves and slave-owners as definitely as, in spite of the twilight, each twenty-four hours is divided into day and night.…

The slaves of our times are not all those factory and workshop hands only who must sell themselves completely into the power of the factory and foundry-owners in order to exist, but nearly all the agricultural labourers are slaves, working, as they do, unceasingly to grow another's corn on another's field, and gathering it into another's barn; or tilling their own fields only in order to pay to bankers the interest on debts they cannot get rid of. And slaves also are all the innumerable footmen, cooks, porters, housemaids, coachmen, bathmen, waiters, etc., who all their life long perform duties most unnatural to a human being, and which they themselves dislike.”

— Leo Tolstoy,
The Slavery of Our Times (chapter 8)

“Slavery exists in full vigor, but we do not perceive it, just as in Europe at the end of the Eighteenth Century the slavery of serfdom was not perceived.

People of that day thought that the position of men obliged to till the land for their lords, and to obey them, was a natural, inevitable, economic condition of life, and they did not call it slavery.

It is the same among us: people of our day consider the position of the labourer to be a natural, inevitable economic condition, and they do not call it slavery. And as, at the end of the Eighteenth Century, the people of Europe began little by little to understand that what formerly seemed a natural and inevitable form of economic life -- namely, the position of peasants who were completely in the power of their lords -- was wrong, unjust and immoral, and demanded alteration, so now people today are beginning to understand that the position of hired workmen, and of the working classes in general, which formerly seemed quite right and quite normal, is not what it should be, and demands alteration.”

— Leo Tolstoy,
The Slavery of Our Times (chapter 8)

“Man is a slave in so far as, between action and its effect, between effort and the finished work, there is the interference of alien wills.

This is the case both with the slave and the master today. Never can man deal directly with the conditions of his own action. Society forms a screen between nature and man.”

— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (XXXV)

“The chattel slave of the past—the wage slave of today; what is the difference? The master selected under chattel slavery his own slaves. Under the wage slavery system the wage slave selects his master.

Formerly the master selected the slave; today the slave selects his master, and he has got to find one or else he is carried down here to my friend, the gaoler and occupies a cell alongside of myself. He is compelled to find one.”

— Albert Parsons,
Statement to the Court (1886)

The proletarian is helpless; left to himself, he cannot live a single day. The bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence in the broadest sense of the word. What the proletarian needs, he can obtain only from this bourgeoisie, which is protected in its monopoly by the power of the state. The proletarian is, therefore, in law and in fact, the slave of the bourgeoisie, which can decree his life or death. It offers him the means of living, but only for an "equivalent", for his work. It even lets him have the appearance of acting from a free choice, of making a contract with free, unconstrained consent, as a responsible agent who has attained his majority.

Fine freedom, where the proletarian has no other choice than that of either accepting the conditions which the bourgeoisie offers him, or of starving, of freezing to death, of sleeping naked among the beasts of the forests! A fine "equivalent" valued at pleasure by the bourgeoisie! And if one proletarian is such a fool as to starve rather than agree to the "equitable" propositions of the bourgeoisie, his "natural superiors",* another is easily found in his place; there are proletarians enough in the world, and not all so insane as to prefer dying to living.

* A favourite expression of the English manufacturers.

— Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (§3)

The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class. For him the matter is unchanged at bottom, and if this semblance of liberty necessarily gives him some real freedom on the one hand, it entails on the other the disadvantage that no one guarantees him a subsistence, he is in danger of being repudiated at any moment by his master, the bourgeoisie, and left to die of starvation, if the bourgeoisie ceases to have an interest in his employment, his existence.

— Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (§3)