They may have had less and less power to chart their own futures, but they had been given a worldview—a belief system, almost a religion—that claimed they were in fact infinitely powerful, if only they could master their own minds.

If there was a deity at the center of corporate America’s new “business spirituality,” it was Shiva, the dancing god of destruction.

For the individual believer, the weight of Calvinism, with its demand for perpetual effort and self-examination to the point of self-loathing, could be unbearable.

Everywhere you go, you are likely to encounter the same corporate jargon of “incentivizing,” “value added,” and “going forward”; the same chains of command; the same arrays of desks and cubicles; the same neutral, functionalist disregard for aesthetics; the same reliance on motivation and manufactured team spirit.

For centuries, or at least since the Protestant Reformation, Western economic elites have flattered themselves with the idea that poverty is a voluntary condition. The Calvinist saw it as a result of sloth and other bad habits; the positive thinker blamed it on a willful failure to embrace abundance.

if early capitalism was inhospitable to positive thinking, “late” capitalism, or consumer capitalism, is far more congenial, depending as it does on the individual’s hunger for more and the firm’s imperative of growth.

No longer did they need to invoke the deity or occult notions like the law of attraction to explain the connection between positive thoughts and positive outcomes; they could fall back on that touchstone phrase of rational, secular discourse—“studies show . . .”

There seems to be an evolutionary paradox at work here: human survival in the face of multiple threats depended on our ability to live in groups, but the imperative of maintaining group cohesion can sometimes override realism and common sense, making us hesitate to challenge the consensus or be the bearer of bad news.

Like pop positive thinking, positive psychology attends almost solely to the changes a person can make internally by adjusting his or her own outlook.