Barbara Ehrenreich wants us to stop smiling and spend more time on the dark side.

She has dedicated her new book, “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America” (Metropolitan Books) to “complainers everywhere” with an order to “turn up the volume!”

You're not going to get rich because God wants to “prosper” you. You don't need to smile through a cancer operation. Or those other modern-day trials like losing your job and your house.

It's time to stop the forced optimism and bring back a little hard-nosed empiricism.

We spoke in New York at a midtown hotel.

Lundborg: When did the business world adopt positive thinking?

Ehrenreich: It came into the corporations beginning in the late 1980s as a way of calming people down during layoffs.

You send the laid-off people to the out-placement firm, where they get pep talks on changing their attitude. The survivors need motivational speakers so they can do the work of two people.

Lundborg: But it didn't stop there?

Ehrenreich: No. I thought it was something brought in cynically, but I was surprised to learn it came to be believed by the higher-up managers themselves.

There was an amazing change away from rational analysis, and toward an idea that leadership meant having brilliant intuitions, charisma and almost mystical powers.

Lundborg: How did it turn toxic?

Fire negative people

Ehrenreich: Positive thinking became the ideology of the business world in America. You could not raise criticisms or doubts because there were policies to fire negative people, those who brought other people down with their skeptical thoughts.

Lundborg: Give me an example.

Ehrenreich: At Lehman Brothers, an executive named Michael Gelband went to the CEO, Richard Fuld, and said, “I think this housing thing is a bubble and we're in big trouble if we don't get out,” and the CEO essentially forced him to quit.

All the insiders I managed to talk to said that's universal—you can't be the bearer of bad news. So, everybody was in this cocoon of happy thoughts.

Lundborg: You say in your book the job of managers is to “soothe and flatter” those on top. That's not new, is it?

Most lied-to man

Ehrenreich: One corporate crisis manager told me a billionaire CEO said to him, “I'm the most lied-to man in America. Nobody will tell me the truth.” And then you're heading for big trouble.

Lundborg: When did the corporate shamanic vision-quest, fire-walking weekends start?

Ehrenreich: I would place the embrace of mysticism by top-level managers in the late '90s into the 2000s. You don't go for a weekend to learn more about your product. Instead, you go to a sweat lodge like the people in Sedona.

A lot of those people were probably paid by their companies to go. James Arthur Ray is a big name in the motivational business and a vigorous proponent of the law of attraction.

Lundborg: If God wants us to be rich, why aren't we?

Ehrenreich: Maybe you're standing in the way of the wealth He wants for you. You might be resisting the wealth. You have to open yourself to that, and also make your requests very clearly, how much you want and when you expect to get it.

Lundborg: God is not a mind-reader, I take it.

Ehrenreich: No, God doesn't respond well to vague suggestions.