Happiness for sale!

And worth every penny because of the good health and prosperity that will surely come, especially when your happiness is achieved through positive thinking.

Ugh . . . no, says cancer survivor Barbara Ehrenreich, author of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America," and, more recently, "Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America."

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Last week Ehrenreich appeared on "The Daily Show," where host Jon Stewart asked if positive thinking is all right as long as intentions are good and it works for some people.

"I never think delusion is OK," Ehrenreich replied.

Pow! She brought the house down.

Since there is little to no proof that positive thinking moves molehills or mountains, why is it so popular? I suspect one reason is it offers iron-clad plausible deniability to people trying to make money off the concept of positive thinking.

If the book or diet or retreat or fad doesn't make you happy, the fault is not with the product. The fault is with you. You were too negative. After all, who but a truly miserable person would even think of "trying" to be happy anyway?

What a brilliant con. And it's been enriching con men for decades, if not centuries.

Some would say religion works on the same principle – you have the wrong faith, or you've got the right faith, but the wrong sect. Or you're supposed to pray for God's will, not your will . . . and He works in mysterious ways, doesn't He?

And so on. But for now I'll limit the discussion to the search for happiness.

In ancient times the question was more philosophical than political or economic. Once people figured out there's gold in them thar hills, they've been stampeding ever since. The self-help sections of bookstores are bigger than history, biography and science combined.

And then there are the cults. Remember Jonestown? The search for happiness ended badly for those folks. When I first heard about the 1978 massacre, I assumed the participants were crazy or stupid to have followed this loony tyrant into the jungle. But last year I saw a documentary on the subject. The followers were neither stupid nor crazy. Most were just idealistic. (And so now the tragedy haunts me all the more.)

"The Secret" sells the appealing "universal truth" that wishing will make it so. The Law of Attraction, they call it, and the book and the 2006 DVD have been endorsed by no less a soothsayer than Oprah. ("The Secret" gets ruthlessly mocked in a sendup on the Austrailian show, "The Chaser's War on Everything.")

In the last ten years there's been a pushback by some very smart people.

In 2000, comedian and social satirist Bill Maher toured with his show, "Be More Cynical," and in 2008, he followed up with his movie, "Religulous."

Filmmaker Michael Moore built a whole career on skewering popular beliefs, mostly economic myths that were used to enrich the few at the expense of the many.

They have their reasons. Michael Moore watched his hometown of Flint, Mich., deteriorate into slums because of the choices of the corporate elite of the auto industry. Bill Maher is a natural born iconoclast, but it may be relevant that he was raised Catholic.

Barbara Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2001. She then turned her gaze on the positive-thinking industry, first popularized by preacher Norman Vincent Peale in his 1952 book, "The Power of Positive Thinking."

Over the years, this quasi-religious movement has mutated and modernized into a catch-all belief that the universe "loves" you, and if you behave yourself and practice random acts of kindness, good things will flow your way and bad things will make a detour.

Ehrenreich encountered this line of thinking firsthand as she battled cancer. In her Harper's essay, "Welcome to Cancerland: A Mammogram Leads to a Cult of Pink Kitsch," she recalls reading a classified ad for a "breast cancer teddy bear."

Suddenly she finds herself longing for "a clean and honorable death by shark bite, lightning strike, sniper fire, car crash. Let me be hacked to death by a madman, is my silent supplication -- anything but suffocation by the pink sticky sentiment embodied in that bear."

If you really want to make people mad, slay their unicorns. Just read some of the hate mail Maher, Moore and Ehrenreich have gotten.

But I stand with Ehrenreich: Delusion is not OK. Many small investors, amid the ruins of their retirement accounts, devalued homes, lost jobs and disappearing health insurance, would agree. Sometimes outrage is the appropriate – and only effective – response.

Three decades ago, I lived in a cheap urban apartment. This was before VCRs and cable TV, so there was at least a chance that if you were watching a program on television, your friends were watching, too. One night, as the movie "Network" played on our tiny black-and-white TV, we heard a neighbor throw open his window and yell into the night, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

Our elected representatives would prefer that we instead give thanks for our blessings. I suggest we pretend to go along. They'll never know what hit them when the back door slams.

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Barbara Ehrenreich
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