Think of it as a massive experiment in mind control. "Reality sucks," a computer scientist with a master's degree who can find only short-term, benefit-free contract jobs told me. But you can't change reality, at least not in any easy and obvious way. You could join a social movement working to create an adequate safety net or to bring about more humane corporate policies, but those efforts might take a lifetime. For now, you can only change your perception of reality, from negative and bitter to positive and accepting. This was the corporate world's great gift to it's laid-ff employees and the overworked survivors--positive thinking.

Companies brought in motivational speakers for an ever growing number of corporate meetings. Whatever else goes on at these meetings--the presentation of awards, the introduction of new executives--the "entertainment" is usually provided by motivational speakers. As Vicki Sullivan, who follows the market for such speakers, said, corporations are the "sugar daddies" of the motivational speaking industry. "At some point," she told me in an interview, employers realized it was not enough to expose people to familar positive-thinking nostrums like "Don't read newspapers or talk to negative people." Instead she said, "What they've learned is that you have to go beyond that, as change happens faster and faster. You have to use motivational speakers to help people hang in there."

...The burgeoning genre of business self-help books provided another way to get white-collar workers to adapt to downsizing. Of these, the classic of downsizing propaganda was Who Moved My Cheese?, which has sold ten million copies, in no small part due to companies that bought it in bulk for their employees. Perhaps in recognition of the fact that it would fall into the hands of many reluctant readers, it's a tiny volume, only ninety-four pages of large print, offering the kind of fable appropriate to a children's book. Two little maze-dwelling, cheese-eating people named Hem and Haw--for the human tendency to think and reflect--arrive at their "Cheese Station" one day to find that the cheese is gone. The "Littlepeople" waste time ranting and raving "at the injustice of it all," as the book's title suggests. But there are also two mice in the maze, who scurry off without hesitation to locate an alternative cheese source, because, being rodents, they "kept life simple. They didn't overanalyze or overcomplicate things."

Finally the little humans learn from the mice that they may have to adapt to a new cheese. Haw uses what amounts to the law of attraction to find it: he starts to "paint a picture in his mind... in great realistic detail, [of himself] sitting in the middle of a pile of all his favorite cheeses--from Cheddar to Brie!" Instead of resenting the loss of his old cheese, he realizes, more positively, that "change could lead to something better" and is soon snacking on a "delicious" new cheese. Lesson for victims of layoffs: the dangerous human tendencies to "overanalyze" and complian must be overcome for a more rodentlike approach to life. When you lose a job, just shut up and scamper along to the next one.

...By and large, America's white-collar corporate workforce drank the Kool-aid, as the expression goes, and accepted positive thinking as a substitute for their former affluence and security. They did not take to the streets, shift their political allegiance in large numbers, or show up at work with automatic weapons in hand. As one laid-off executive told me with quiet pride, "I've gotten over my negative feelings, which were so dysfunctional." Positive thinking promised them a sense of control in a world where the "cheese" was always moving. 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.

Bright-Sided, Ehrenreich. pg 116