aulsmith's 2013 non-fiction ramblings

My topical lists petered out last year because I kept wandering off the path, and while I knew that various books were somehow connected to each other and to my research interests, it got harder and harder to explain.

So this year I'm thought I'd try to explain book inter-connections. Maybe it'll help me get a better handle on moving forward.

The first two are Prophet's Prey by Sam Brower and Bright-sided by Barbara Ehrenreich. This was an entirely serendipitous pair. I was doing some craft work, needed audio books to listen to while working, and these two jumped off the shelves. I certainly wouldn't have expected them to have such interesting overlaps.

Ehrenreich's book is a survey of how New Thought, spawned by Mary Baker Eddy and Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, has grown up to be the positive thought movement. She starts with her own experiences with the "stay positive" people you meet while going through breast cancer. When I encountered them myself, it reminded me of my time in a religious cult when every time you had car trouble or the weather was bad it was because your faith wasn't strong enough. I could see immediately that the breast cancer positive people were walking the same path and were going to blame every side-effect and any re-occurence on not being positive enough. I ran away as fast as I could, as did Ehrenreich, and I was not surprised at the end when she started pointing out the similarities between positive thought and Stalinism.

I picked up Brower's book because, as a cult survivor, I find it very interesting to read about people who get trapped in thought systems. I'm always reading books about cult groups and restrictive minority groups. I already know a lot about Warren Jeff's group from reading Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, so I expected this to be pretty much a rehash of stuff I already knew. However, Brower was much more personally engaged in the day-to-day of how the group operates. He also was able to tell a very exciting story, so I couldn't stop listening. (Which was good because someone gave me a bag full of tangled embroidery thread and I had hours of fairly mindless untangling to do.)

The first interesting parallel between the books is the way totalitarians demands for positive attitudes are part of a package with isolation and ostracism to control people's lives and get them to live for the group instead of for themselves.

So the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) isolates their members by dress, by lack of conventional education, by controlling the assets of the community, and by frightening them about the outside world. They then demand that people "keep sweet" by obeying the directives of the regime and throw anyone out who disobeys.

Stalin et al. isolate members by border control and asset control and demand optimism about the leader and his projects. Those not concurring are sent to the gulag.

American corporations isolate people by monopolizing their time and controlling their health insurance. They demand positive thinking and preach "change is good". Those not jumping on the band wagon are laid off.

The second thing I found interesting was the similarity between Brower's and Ehrenreich's solutions to these problems are. Brower took personal responsibility. He sacrificed time and income to help a neighbor. He eventually networked with a much larger group of people trying to offer help and support to the FLDS refugees. Ehrenreich proposes facing problems squarely, trying to figure out solutions and banding together with other people to effect those solutions. Both books ending up making me quite hopeful that even small efforts to make things better can make the world better.