there is truth and compassion in this...

US author, social commentator and activist, Barbara Ehrenreich, likes to tell it as it is. In this secular sermon she calls for a new commitment to realism. Far from making us happier, she argues that undue optimism and a fear of giving bad news sowed the seeds for the banking crisis – and that an insistence on being cheerful actually leads toward a lonely focus inwards and to political apathy.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fourteen best-selling books. Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled American and the World. She lives in Virginia, USA

This secular sermon took place at Conway Hall, London on 10 January 2010.

Barbara Ehrenreich - On Optimism from The School of Life on Vimeo.

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We don’t have ideology; we don’t have theology; we dance.
-Shinto monk to Joseph Campbell

From an elite perspective, there is one inherent problem with traditional festivities and ecstatic rituals and that is their leveling effect, the way in which they dissolve rank and other forms of social difference.
-Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets

Nothing is more threatening to a hierarchical religion than the possibility of ordinary laypeople finding their own way into the presence of the gods. -Ehrenreich

To extract pleasure from lives of grinding hardship and oppression is a considerable accomplishment; to achieve ecstasy is a kind of triumph. -Ehrenreich

Festivity–like bread or freedom–can be a social good worth fighting for. -Ehrenreich, because she’s RIGHT