Bright Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America

In order to understand Baudrillard’s conception of advertisements, we need to understand his notion of reality. Without this comprehension, the ability to determine how advertisements affect reality, or vice versa, would be lost. For to understand advertisements as it pertains to our reality necessitates we understand how the former can relate to the latter. Otherwise, we would have an understanding of advertisements as an abstract mind experiment, something to be considered separate from the world in which it finds itself.
For Baudrillard, reality as it exists in the physical world is dead, not capable of being known. What we are left with is a reality as depicted by reproducibility. That which can be reproduced in the form of images is reality for us. To better explain this, Baudrillard uses an …show more content…
The chapter chronicles how the breast cancer movement, for all the good it does in raising money for cancer research, actually works against patients’ best interests by promoting positive thinking as an element of a cure. In one particularly compelling bit, she talks about how patients are encouraged by support groups to draw pictures of immune cells battling cancer cells. Later, research showed that immune cells don’t do much against cancer. Even if they did, the idea that cheerleading could help seems peculiarly delusional. She makes a compelling case that imposing the heavy burden of constant cheerfulness (how many of us without terminal illnesses can keep that up?) on people already struggling with the pain and horror of cancer treatment is simply inhuman. It should be okay to spend time grieving and being depressed or angry. Apparently it isn’t. Complaining is not allowed (it would kill the buzz of the healthy